CCTV Security monitoring student in classroom at school.Security camera surveillance for watching … [+]
One of the current trends in education is the increasing surveillance of students.
The idea is not new. For several years now companies have sold versions of student monitoring as an educational tool. There were pitches for software that would read facial expressions and eye movement to determine if students were learning. Companies are lining up sales pitches for software that will measure the social and emotional well-being of students. Testing company NWEA is prepared to measure student engagement based on the speed with which they answer multiple choice questions. A Dutch company believes they can accomplish amazing things with audio surveillance of students.
These ed tech wonder-programs overpromise and underdeliver, but while they’ve been struggling to establish their education bona fides, surveillance companies have found another sales pitch for extending their reach into schools.
Florida has been on the cutting edge of this development. After the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School murders, the legislature passed the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas School Public Safety Act. The part of the act that got attention at the time was the raising of the buying age for guns in Florida. But it is perhaps more notable that legislators declared that what was really needed to make schools safer was complete surveillance of all students, 24/7. The new data base is to include every single school record for a student, plus anything from social and legal programs run by the state. The program is also supposed to monitor student social media accounts and collects “thousands of hours of video footage.” Security cameras were already ubiquitous, but now facial recognition software in schools is a growing reality. Florida’s entire data-crunching program is kept secret; some unknown algorithm will decide if a student is a threat. Many, many people have voiced objections, including the observation that there is no evidence that any such monitoring works. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about this massive level of data mining, but so far, things are barreling forward.
To keep you safe, we just need to watch you and everything you do, all day, every day.
Are there companies out there ready to take on this kind of work? Absolutely. They’re called Safety Management Programs (SMPs) and they are all over the place.
Meet Bark, a company that offers 24 hour ”account monitoring” of G Suite and Office 365 in the school’s system. In one example, a student wrote an email to another student “talking about self-harm.” The principal was alerted at home. Bark claims that it discovered 1,494.438 issues in the spring 2018 semester (that’s an average of 0.85 issues per student, which suggests either a hugely troubled student population or a fairly low bar for “issues.”) There’s also Securly (’the student safety company”) and GoGuardian (”gain a view into student activity”). Everything that runs through the school’s ed tech resources can be monitored, right down to every single keystroke on every school-issued computer.
Gaggle is another company working the same type of service. Their website claims to have prevented 722 suicides last year. That’s no small thing, even if it’s only partly true. This is, of course, the advantage of this kind of student surveillance business. If a company promises their tech will raise grades, that’s a measurable outcome. But a “proactive” predictive software can’t really be measured. If I promise you that my surveillance software will prevent all future rhinoceros attacks, next year I can point with pride to zero attacks and take credit.
But Gaggle is also an example of mission creep in the surveillance business. Cory Doctorow at Buzzfeed reports that in a now-deleted blog post, Gaggle promised that it can help school district administration “detect unrest among teachers.” Quotes Doctorow from the post, “Think about the recent teacher work stoppage in West Virginia. Could the story have been different if school leaders there requested search results for ‘health insurance’ or ‘strike’ months earlier? Occasional searches for ‘salary’ or ‘layoffs’ could stave off staff concerns that lead to adverse press for your school district.”
This “safety through surveillance” approach is going national. Last week, U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced the Restoring, Enhancing, Strengthening, and Promoting Our Nation’s Safety Efforts (RESPONSE) Act. Billed as a response to school shootings, it has, as critics noted, almost nothing to do with guns, and a great deal to do with increasing surveillance (as well as targeting those with mental health issues). Its one firearm element is the creation of a task force to crack down on illegal firearms dealers.
But for schools, it incentivizes the sort of surveillance that Florida has launched with an emphasis on following those students on social media.
Not everyone will find this troubling (in fact, if you have money to burn and you want to put your own family under 24/7 surveillance, there’s a company for that). Some may say, “Well, at least we aren’t as far gone as China.” But if you want to erode civil liberties and traditions of privacy, it’s best to start with people who don’t have the political power to fight back. Children are ideal–not only can’t they fight back, but they will grow up thinking it’s perfectly normal to live under constant surveillance. For their own safety, of course.
