It's sorta the opposite. It's not that privacy and security are afterthoughts, it's that oversight and monitoring are baked into everything. They lean into lockdown browsers, mandatory on cameras for assessments, and a whole bunch of anti-cheat tech. Privacy and security are on the mind, they just want none of it.

Worse than that though, it's a carefully crafted economy where vendors knowingly supply incomplete and broken systems so that they have a continuous need to also sell professional services, training, and technical support. It's just like textbooks and curricula; crooked AF because they know that nobody is paying attention, and the entire system operates with an expectation of profound inefficiency.

I don't work for a school, but I apply default policies to stop tracking/telemetry on all the company computers. I wasn't asked to, nor do my coworkers seem to care nearly as much. So the answer is probably that it will entirely depend on the IT admin they hired and how much they care

Well, I unfortunately failed.

Do they install DNS filters locally on the machines at all?

No, the kids are allowed to bring their own laptops, because some rich parents insisted on their kids using MacBooks. I tried pushing Linux for the kiddo, but turns out whatever CISCO wifi system the school is using actively blocks Linux (including, for some reason, black listing the arch repos). A lot of stuff is blocked — though easily bypassed by VPNs or the wireguard router proxy I set up — by wifi black lists, including random stuff like duckduckgo and dict.cc

Actually, I did get an ad for a vibrator on dict.cc once, so maybe that makes sense after all. I, a man. Not sure what I'd use it for.

I'm unfortunately not a parent, just a relative, so there is only so much I can do to harass the school about it. I also live abroad, so 🤷 — I try though.