A 120-degree camera in a classroom at the Mildred Avenue K-8 School in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 9, 2020.Students in the United States are being watched. With dubious promises of greater security and enhanced learning, tech companies have outfitted classrooms across the U.S. with devices and technologies that allow for constant surveillance and data gathering. Firms such as Gaggle, Securly and Bark now collect data from tens of thousands of K-12 students.
Tools like Bark allow schools to keep an eye on students even after they’ve gone home … instructors are being tracked and monitored, too.Surveillance technologies in education are incredibly pervasive. Any classroom, any school, that makes use of any digital technology — so, all of them — are being surveilled in some way or another. This surveillance is conducted by giant, multibillion-dollar corporations.
You write that students of color are far more likely to be surveilled than their white counterparts. Talk about that.Students of color have always faced more scrutiny compared to their white peers — it’s just another challenge they have to deal with. The ed-tech industry has done a good job of marketing their products as objective and bias-free, even labeling them as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion-compliant. But in reality, these tools are only as unbiased as the people who create them.
I don’t blame individual teachers; they are often sold a message, particularly one about convenience and time-saving, that makes use of these technologies tempting. The pressure of trying to come up with creative, impactful course workgetting that graded in a timely manner is real.