Security cameras have become more common in schools in response to fears over school shootings (Pic: … [+]
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Decades of mass shootings have prompted schools to adopt increasing levels of surveillance under the umbrella of trying to protect their students.
But rather than being used to stop school shootings, cameras and other surveillance measures are being used to identify students committing minor infractions of school rules.
And greater use of punishments mean that students get worse grades and are less likely to go to college as a result.
It’s no surprise that the long and tragic roll-call of school shootings has prompted schools to make security a priority.
Many have installed metal detectors and security cameras, deployed security guards and sniffer dogs, and restricted cultural expression through strict dress codes.
This creates a divide between high-surveillance and low-surveillance schools, but rather than making schools safer, they have led to poorer outcomes for students at high-surveillance schools.
“Instead of being used to thwart the uncommon school shooting,” according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Washington University in St Louis, “these surveillance measures may increase the capacity for schools to identify and punish students for more common and less serious offenses.”
The result is that high-surveillance schools also became high-suspension schools, said the researchers, who presented as a working paper on their findings at this week’s annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
Students at high-surveillance schools are more likely to be on the receiving end of an in-school suspension – where a student is put in isolation within the school, separated from their classmates.
This link holds even when researchers controlled for levels of school disorder and student misbehavior.
“High-surveillance schools create the capacity for high-suspension schools to exist,” said Odis Johnson, professor at Johns Hopkins and lead author of the study.
“Greater detection leads to greater punishment, regardless of the students who attend these schools.”
But the effects don’t end there. Students at high-surveillance schools end up with significantly lower levels of math achievement and are also less likely to go on to college. At least some of this relationship a result of in-school suspensions.
They are also four times more likely to be Black, and disproportionately likely to be poor, from a single parent home and to have repeated a grade, the researchers found, after analyzing data on approximately 6,000 students across the U.S.
Along with co-author Jason Jabbari, data analyst at Washington University in St Louis, Johnson describes the disadvantages suffered by students in schools with greater surveillance as a “social control setback”.
The higher level of suspensions and its effect on math scores is almost enough on its own to account for the differences in college attendance.
Once suspensions and lower math scores are accounted for, Black females are more likely to attend college and Black males are no longer significantly less likely to attend college than other students.
“If we were able to reform schools to lesson the influence of social control through surveillance, disproportionate suspensions, and their impact on math test scores, young Black adolescents of both genders would be more likely to enter college,” Johnson said.
Where schools opted to retain surveillance systems, more effort should be made to reduce in-school suspensions, he added.
“When considering the costs of these apparatuses of surveillance, efforts should be made to make schools feel less like prisons,” Johnson said.
“Not only are these measures not the reasons why schools are safer today than they were in the past, but they may be placing more students on the discipline track.”
