How'd You Do In School Today?

The question the culture should be asking about monitoring technologies, Turkle says, is: "Is this just making children feel surveillance in a way that is uncomfortable for everybody?" The Internet, she says, can be used as a "blunt instrument."

In the old, pre-Internet days, parents who attended back-to-school nights and knew the names of their child's teachers were considered involved. Edline, and other monitoring technologies, take involvement to a whole other level.

"Parent involvement is known to be the key factor in positive student behavior and achievement," says Edline Vice President Marge Abrams. "How parents use the information is a parenting decision. Hopefully, if parents use the information to work with their child in a positive caring way, this parental involvement will lead to good achievement. Edline does not change the way a parent parents. If a parent uses the information in a punishing way, the same parent probably punishes at report card time."

Love it or hate it, Edline is expanding.

Abrams says the service was created in the late 1990s and today is being used in every state and in other countries. The privately owned company won't release its earnings or a complete list of its customers; schools pay about $2 per student for Edline. Edline, she says, has "many thousands of clients," including schools in Harford County, Md., and Chesterfield County, Va.

There are 38 middle schools and about 25 high schools -- 75,000 students -- in Montgomery County, according to schools spokeswoman Kate Harrison. All but three of the high schools began using Edline this year.

Next year, all the schools will use the service.

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Many American parents don't think that keeping close tabs on their children's school activities is so dumb. They think it's smart.

Countless American success stories revolve around a caring teacher, a challenging class, a top-drawer education. A whole subset of the entertainment industry is built around the glorification of pedagogy. Think "Dangerous Minds" and "Finding Forrester."

In this country, "the middle class -- and anyone wishing to become middle class -- believe that education is the escalator to higher social status and financial well-being," says Larry Cuban, a former district superintendent of Arlington Public Schools and professor emeritus of education at Stanford University.

"The early-20th-century progressives saw schooling as the engine of democracy and the instrument by which immigrants would become Americans and middle class," he says. "Both business and civic elites have sold public schooling, getting a diploma, and now going to college as ways of entering the labor market and succeeding."

The same people, Cuban says, "particularly at the beginning of the 20th century and in the past three decades, have linked better schooling and getting credentials to better jobs, a strong economy and higher lifetime earnings."

With so much riding on success in school, watchdog technology such as Edline and its immediate techno-feedback have an obvious appeal. For hovering "helicopter" parents, it's a high-beam searchlight. No bad grade escapes its harsh glare.

Chris Barclay is a member of the Montgomery County Board of Education whose daughter goes to Einstein High School in Kensington. Although the students at Einstein call it "Dreadline," he says that the grade-tracking service "helps hold your child and your child's teacher accountable." The software allows working parents to stay connected.

Laura Hajdukiewicz, a biology teacher at Andover High School in Massachusetts, loves the software. She liked it so much at her old place of employment, the Bromfield School outside of Boston, that she persuaded Andover to try it. She tells of parents who found out through Edline that their son was reading the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," giving them something to talk about at dinnertime. She says a parent who is a cardiologist volunteered to come into her class and speak when he learned through Edline that the class was studying the heart. "It's opening lines of communication," Hajdukiewicz says. "Students like it when they are doing well."

Hajdukiewicz asked more than 100 students in several grades for their opinion of Edline. She says the response was overwhelmingly favorable, although they felt their parents were now micromanaging their grades. "They like it for their own use but would rather keep things 'quiet' which is a fairly typical teenage response," she writes in an e-mail. "They also feel that their parents check it more often than they do!"

Carol Blum, Montgomery's director of high school instruction and achievement, says that Edline has helped to cut down on the number of e-mails and phone calls that parents make to teachers.

In the past, she says, "it wasn't as easy to be in touch with parents." A teacher would send out an interim report if the student was in danger of failing and by the time the parent received it, "it was almost too late," she says. "This way if a student is in trouble in a course, a parent can see it in a timely manner."

And students can know where they stand. "The biggest pro, coming from the high school perspective," says Christopher S. Garran, principal of Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, "is that Edline gives the students more information about their grades and where they stand in class."

A student can go online, Garran says, "and quickly see the impact that a zero might have. He can more easily see the effect of not having worked very hard." At the same time, "when they get an A, it immediately shows them how powerful that is."

Garran tells parents: "How closely you monitor your child's progress is a personal decision.

"Parents have to remember what it was like when they were in school . . . remember when you didn't get that homework assignment in on time."

A lot can happen, he says, "between that first quiz and the final grade."