Over the previous few decades, surveillance tools have been interwoven into the education system. These technologies have been sold to K-12 schools across the US with promises of greater safety and improved academic outcomes. Overworked teachers, frustrated administrators, and frightened parents welcomed programs such as Gaggle, Securly, Bark, and others into the classroom. But these technologies have failed to deliver on their promises. Worse, what they have delivered is a blow to some of the most basic requirements of quality education and an unprecedented violation of student privacy. The impact is particularly acute on communities of color, who are far more likely to attend high-surveillance high schools than white students.
In our new book Surveillance Education: Navigating the Conspicuous Absence of Privacy in Schools, we document the history of these tools and the problems associated with them. We also offer actionable strategies to push back against spying in schools for students, parents, schools, teachers, community members, and elected officials.
As long-time educators, we are particularly concerned about how this all-pervasive and intrusive technology compromises the ability of teachers and students to speak freely in the classroom. Education requires open discussion, debate, and the freedom to make mistakes. Trust is vital to this process and it is that very trust that surveillance undermines. Students who know they are being watched are much less likely to take the kind intellectual risks that are essential to learning and honing critical thinking skills.
While we have no illusions about the enormity of the challenges that surveillance in schools poses, we wholeheartedly believe that informed students and communities can mount an effective resistance to it. It starts with understanding just how these technologies are transforming the classroom and robbing students of their right to learn in a supportive and vital setting. As surveillance tools continue to quietly spy on students, it’s time to make some noise about them.
The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from Routledge, copyright © 2024.
There is strong evidence that surveillance comes at the expense of the learning process. Researchers have warned that ed-tech surveillance undermines students’ autonomy by nudging, directing, and socializing their behaviors and attitudes. An effective education results in students becoming autonomous and free individuals, yet studies show that students lose autonomy and self-efficacy when they are under strict surveillance. For example, studies show that rather than act independently, surveillance pressures students to change their behavior such as their responses in discussion forms to appease whoever it is they think is surveilling them.
Learning requires students to take risks and make mistakes, but when there is fear that those mistakes and risks can be utilized for harm, it creates a chilling effect where students resist the urge to participate fully, if at all in the learning process. Early childhood educator Kate, introduced in Chapter 2, notes that she works to foster trust both with the toddlers in her classroom as well as their families, all of whom live with high poverty and high crime as part of their daily lives. For these families, Kate’s classroom may be the most stable part of their lives, thereby making that trust relationship incredibly important. In her space, Kate is required to document every behavioral infraction of her students. She refuses to do this because she sees it as a violation of her ability to bond with the children and help them see that adults can be reliable. If she sees a child misbehaving in a way that can be managed through conversation, or may be reflective of larger, more pressing issues – such as becoming unhoused, or moving in with a new foster family – she does not record the behavior A lot of times, a kid will say a bad word, and they know they said it. They said it by accident. So we’ll have a quick conversation where I’ll say “We don’t use those words here,” but it’s not something I record or bring up with the parent because we’ve just dealt with it.
Hannah, a white female executive director of a national non-profit that develops social justice curriculum argues that one reason her organization is able to ignore offers made by surveillance technologies is because of the trust built with teachers, “Our mission is about having an impact on students, via their teachers. We are laser focused on our work with teachers.” Nearly half a million teachers have used the curricula built by her organization and part of the reason why it is successful is because of the pedagogical value placed on the relationship between teachers and students. Lisa, the school psychologist in Northern California, works with a highly vulnerable population and her top priority is to foster a connection where the students will recognize that the resources she is offering are to be trusted
Some of these things are not necessarily surprising because we know our students. We’ve got a relationship with our students. We already see this stuff before the technology sees it because we are working with the student in a different capacity.
When students are afraid of making mistakes, they may participate less, which undermines the learning process. A 2021 survey revealed that almost 60% of students reported censoring things they were writing, and 80% censored their web searches due to an awareness of monitoring. This puts educators in quite the conundrum as they need to procure student participation, but must be cognizant of the fact that by centering student participation, they simultaneously encourage students to compromise their privacy. Research reveals that students react to surveillance by behaving in an inauthentic and docile way to appease their instructor. Educators know that trust is essential for fostering a successful learning environment. However, studies show that rather than develop an inclusive environment, when schools surveil students, students feel as though they are not trusted and reciprocate with waning trust toward the school. Indeed, rather than feel safe when surveilled, students may feel villainized by the school and their teachers, leading to a breakdown in trust.
Surveillance tools that purport to enhance education are actually replacing learning with vapid forms of engagement, and in the process normalizing ignorance. The widespread use of digital tools has come at a cost: They change the ways young people’s brains develop, and as a result, students increasingly have a shorter attention span, weaker memory, and underdeveloped critical thinking skills. Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell argue that the utilization of these tools contributes to a narcissism epidemic, where students feel that they are smarter than they actually are, and are unable to accept feedback that could improve their skills. Many families and teachers make the mistake of thinking that technology use is, in and of itself, a learning process that is good for the student, when in fact not all technology use is the same. Studies show social media can be good for promoting a school’s image, professional development for educators, but beyond engaging students it is not clear how it is improving learning. Media literacy education scholar David Buckingham notes that too much attention to technology as technology obfuscates how technology manipulates – and is manipulated by – users. What we do with technology influences technology as much as technology influences humans and yet, for the most part, technology is bestowed with a fascination and power that, on its own, cannot be upheld. The technology itself is not the problem, it is the way it is utilized to undermine human autonomy in the classroom.
Surveillance at the Expense of Student Autonomy
This loss of human autonomy is a feature, not a bug, of surveillance capitalism. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which communicated the philosophy of early Silicon Valley, argued that the goal of tech was to change civilization. Companies such as Google interpreted this to mean that the human brain would be made irrelevant as technology grew more efficient. This line of thinking is repeated in industry rhetoric that falsely claims that technology is “smart” and humans are not, and inventions such as driverless cars which claim that the human driver needs to be replaced for the objective machine. However, lost in this line of thinking is that humans will have less autonomy as technology makes more determinations about human behaviors and actions. Maria, the middle-school science teacher in New York City, feels a degree of discomfort in monitoring her students, even though, as shown in Chapter 1, she also knows it is an effective tool for classroom management
Sometime I get weirded out when they’re on their free time and I have to look at [GoGuardian] because I’m like, “Ugh, this makes me feel like a little spy and I don’t like it,” but it’s like, they have certain websites they can’t go on.
Joni, the pre-service teacher in North Carolina, is uncomfortable with the monitoring that happens on school-issued laptops.
“Every kid has a laptop that I’ve worked with. They’re given laptops, but it’s a big thing that sometimes the kids use those laptops at home to play games or while in school, when they should be on task. A lot of times teachers would have to access their screens to make sure they are staying on task.”
Western critics have warned that the potential for algorithms to undermine human autonomy on a national scale has occurred with China’s social credit system. Announced in 2007, China’s social credit system utilizes data to determine a citizen’s trustworthiness and behavior. Data from digital applications, unpaid bills, and minor infractions such as jaywalking or playing music too loud are cataloged and analyzed by algorithms that determine whether or not a citizen is eligible to participate in the economy. Some argue that the utilization of nations such as the United Kingdom and the United States have used a lighter and economic focused version of the social credit system since the 1980s. During the 1980s, the internet entered the commercial sphere, promulgating great hope in its transformative potential to deliver boundless information to users. It also brought about new opportunities to track and surveil users. In the 1980s, the hegemony of consumer reporting agencies, which had existed previously, was expanded thanks to computing. Computing enabled these agencies to perform large-scale data collection and analysis to determine consumers’ fiscal responsibility in the form of a credit score. This necessitated documenting consumers’ financial behavior and providing it to lending institutions. It remains to be seen if a social credit system will expand beyond China, but what is taking place in schools is eerily similar. The privileging of market value over education in the neoliberal era, has resulted in the creation of surveillance technologies such as ”digital wallets,” a digital repository for credentials and employment history, that act as a form of social currently where students can document their market value.
Ed-tech surveillance acts as an exploitative force that profits from unpaid user labor and industry practices that reduces users to commodities that can be mined for a precious resource: Data. Critics warn that current practices of ed-tech surveillance threaten to reduce users who are digital serfs who must give up their privacy to participate in necessary and required platforms.
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