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I have a friend in a high school computer science course in Texas. This is a course required for graduation and is not a volunteer thing. Apparently, the teacher is having the students develop an official app that the school intends to eventually use. This app deals with collecting and maintaining personal information about students in this particular school, as well as information about what classes they are enrolled in. They are not paying the students to do this. My friend says his entire course grade will be based on this app.

I'm an industry professional programmer, and this sounds extremely illegal to me, for a number of reasons, the first being that inexperienced programmers (kids) are not only being given access to protected information about minors (and thus is extremely likely to be exploitable/leakable), but also that they are being asked to work for the school without pay via threat of not graduating.

I looked briefly at the Texas child labor laws but they only seem to cover willful paid employment, which this is clearly not.

Is this legal?

Mary
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ShardFenix
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2 Answers2

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Various elements could be legal, or not. For example, it is legal to require students to do things in order to pass a class. It is legal to require a student to write a program for a course (entirely, or in part). It is legal for a teacher to give a "group grade".

It is not clear whether it is legal to require the student to assign copyright or license to the teacher / school – it may be legal to require a student to pay for their class, and copyright transfer might be valuable consideration for such a contract (assuming that there is a contractual relation at all as opposed to a statutory mandate – e.g. "high school"). If this is a public school, you can't make students pay for a mandatory class, therefore you cannot require assignment of copyright. It is very probably illegal for the student to access the educational records of other students, but the app could be developed with dummy data.

user6726
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No.

"Forced Labor" is typically a term used to refer to countries that have prison or internment camps where there is no choice in doing the work and trying to choose not to means starvation and beatings.

Where as "paid employment" is a term that can then be compared to "unpaid employment" and in a school setting as "education".

You may wish to study North Korea and China to gain more insight into these practices.

Michael Durrant
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