The technology running your child's school day was not chosen by their teacher. It was chosen by a district technology committee working through a procurement process that probably took twelve to eighteen months, involved a formal RFP, included vendor demonstrations and reference checks, and ended with a board vote. The teacher found out which platform they were getting roughly the same way your child did: it appeared in their inbox before school started. Understanding this is worth the effort before evaluating any specific platform, because it explains why the tools that appear in classrooms often do not feel like they were chosen with classroom realities in mind. They were chosen through an institutional process that optimizes for different things.
Three platforms account for the substantial majority of K-12 schools in the United States, and they are different in ways that matter for how your child's schoolwork operates, what data the platforms collect, and what questions are worth asking.
What the platforms have in common
All three are subject to FERPA, which means schools using them must have data privacy agreements in place before sharing student information. All three have education-specific tiers that are different (often meaningfully different) from their consumer products in terms of data handling and advertising. What those education tiers actually do depends heavily on which tier the school purchased and how the administrator configured it, which is why the questions in the comparison above are worth asking rather than assuming.
The distinction that matters most is between what the platform is technically permitted to do and what your school has actually configured. Google Workspace for Education, for instance, comes in four tiers with substantially different analytics and data retention settings. A school on the free Fundamentals tier is operating under different conditions than one that has purchased Teaching and Learning Upgrade. Most parents cannot tell which tier their district is on without asking.
What to do with this information
The most useful action is usually not opting out. For most families, the platforms are simply the environment their child's school runs on, and opting out means opting out of class. The more useful action is getting specific: which tier, what is the retention policy for student accounts, and what happens to your child's Google Drive or Teams content when they graduate or transfer. These are questions the district technology coordinator can answer, and the fact that most parents never ask them is not because they are unknowable.
One more thing worth knowing: the platform your district uses for core productivity tools is often different from the platforms teachers bring in for specific activities, including reading apps, math games, formative assessment tools, and classroom management software. Those additions operate under their own privacy policies and their own data collection practices, separate from whatever agreements the district has with Google or Microsoft. The core platform is the visible piece. The accumulation of third-party apps on top of it is the part that is harder to track.