Let's get less comfortable with surveillance in schools

I like to joke that Elf on the Shelf is a psyop to get kids comfortable with the surveillance state. While I do find Elf on the Shelf baffling I don’t actually believe there’s anything more insidious behind it than capitalism. But I do think that the ubiquity of surveillance cameras and “random” searches has made being surveilled feel a lot more normal than it used to. It’s gotten so normalized, in fact, that the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that law enforcement can film your house for over two months without a warrant; the ubiquity of cameras in public places has diminished our expectations of privacy. 

Social media has also made us accustomed to sharing more of our lives for public (however defined) consumption. We know that we’re giving up some (a lot) of our privacy in exchange for staying connected. Our data is used in ways that ostensibly benefit us – and also in ways that we never would have anticipated when we quickly scrolled through the Terms of Service before hitting ‘Agree’.

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Schools have been far from immune to the kinds of surveillance creep we see in other places. Cameras that may have originally been installed to guard against intruders are often used to review students’ (mis)behavior. Turnitin markets itself as helping students avoid plagiarism and submit their best work, but it’s built on a database of student papers (yes, I know courts have ruled that this falls under Fair Use; I disagree), functionally requiring students to submit to surveillance from an outside company, and also to have their writing used to surveil other students. Learning management systems provide access to a wealth of information about students: when they opened an assignment, how long they may have spent on it, what course materials they accessed, when exactly it was turned in, etc. Opening grade books for parents means that parents sometimes have access to students’ grades before their student has the opportunity to share it themselves. Software used to track student laptops can make it less likely that students will search for information related to mental health, sexuality/gender identity, or reproductive health. 

There are companies that argue that the surveillance and monitoring tools they offer increase student safety and well-being, but they require schools and students to hand over an overwhelming amount of data without providing transparency about how their models are trained. There’s also not much evidence that they’re effective; in 2021 researchers at the University of Louisville looked at 850 schools and found no difference in school crime outcomes between schools with security cameras and those without. The money spent on cameras, monitoring software, and other surveillance tech is money that is not spent on providing mental health support or other interventions that actually increase student safety and well-being.

Most schools I know of have rules or policies around recording people without their explicit permission, but we ask students to implicitly agree to being surveilled as part of attending school. For those of us in older generations the increase in surveillance technology has happened over time and we’ve slowly become accustomed to it; I wonder how young people growing up in a world that is already saturated in surveillance will think about privacy protection in years to come. How are we modeling decision-making around privacy and data sharing with students? How many edtech tools do we ask students to use without discussing privacy policies (or even reading them ourselves)? 

How do we feel about privacy?

Americans have a lot of concerns about the privacy of their personal data. According to a 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center, 81% of adults are concerned with how companies may use data collected about them; 71% are concerned with how the government will use their data. Fifty-nine percent of respondents in the same survey say that tech companies have “a great deal” of responsibility for protecting young people’s online privacy, though over 70% of respondents indicated that they had little or no trust in how social media CEOs would handle personal data. Existing in a connected world means giving control of our data to institutions we don’t really trust, and while 56% of adults say they always or almost always read privacy policies before agreeing to them 61% say they don’t think they’re an effective way for companies to explain their data privacy practices. Pew did a great deep dive into privacy practices and beliefs of individuals, but my top level takeaway from their findings is that while many people are aware of privacy concerns and steps they can take to protect their data they can also find it overwhelming and are skeptical about how effective those things are.

I know there is a perception that younger people are less concerned with privacy, but recent research by professors in the University of California system provides evidence that teens approach to privacy is much more nuanced than you might expect. Young people are balancing the types of information sharing that helps them build social connections and networks, while also trying to protect their information from being accessible to corporations or potential predators. Race, of course, is a factor in how teens approach privacy; white youth reported taking fewer actions to protect their privacy than their non-white peers. This aligns with findings from the ACLU that 18% of students have concerns that school surveillance could be used against immigrant students in particular. The presence of surveillance technology also helps feed the school to prison pipeline; approximately a quarter of students polled by the ACLU reported concerns about how surveillance information could be shared with law enforcement.

Surveillance creep is… creepy

I remember seeing a demo, several years ago, of “brainwave readers” that would let teachers track if students were paying attention and being absolutely baffled by colleagues who were on board with the idea. I know that getting students to engage can be a challenge, but I don’t think surveiling students’ brain waves is the solution. Inside HigherEd recently reported on a facial recognition system (still in development) designed to “ take attendance, monitor whether students are paying attention and detect their emotional states, including whether they are bored, distracted or confused.” Aside from questions about when and how teachers would actually be able to review and make use of this information (and the numerous ways it could be abused), a system like this is, inherently, built on assumptions about the “right” way to engage in class; neurodivergent students, non-traditional students, first generation students and a number of other groups are likely to be disproportionately targeted by systems like this. And given that facial recognition is still not that good at identifying people with darker skin it seems a stretch to believe that cameras that monitor engagement in class will be effective at… anything. These tools are also based on bad faith assumptions about students, and undermining trust in this way will lose us far more than we gain by knowing how often a student checks their phone in class.  

Fresno Unified School District has taken the monitoring of what’s happening inside a student’s body one step further, requiring use of an app that regulates their trips outside of the classroom during class and allowing them only two seven-minute bathroom breaks a day. The article says that exceptions are possible, but students should not be required to disclose a medical condition, or just the fact that they’re menstruating, in order to use the bathroom. I understand that students’ leaving class “to go to the bathroom” and then wandering the halls for 20 minutes is a problem, but timing everyone’s bathroom breaks is not the solution. This kind of collective monitoring is the equivalent of a passive-aggressive note posted on a shared fridge; it does bring attention to the issue, but it does very little to actually solve it. 

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