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Giving Compass' Take:
• A report at Othering & Belonging Institute focuses on the implications of digital policing in schools on racialized policing towards students in BIPOC communities.
• What are other examples of how COVID-19 has disproportionately affected students in BIPOC communities? What can we do to support research on equity and justice for all students throughout the pandemic?
• Read about how we can take advantage of COVID-19 to embrace a shift in educational thinking.
School closures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic created yet another opportunity for the surveillance industry to profit off of a national crisis and exacerbate harm to already marginalized students. As many school districts transitioned to online learning, technology companies benefited from a surge in sales of surveillance systems designed specifically to spy on K–12 students’ online activities as they learned from home. While tech companies and school administrators claim that such products will protect student safety, students, parents, and civil rights groups have raised concerns that they actually cause serious harm,
posing significant threats to students’ privacy and free speech rights and upholding a long legacy of racist policing in public schools. Similar to other forms of surveillance, marginalized students—particularly students of color and LGBTQ students—will continue to bear the brunt of these rights violations and adverse impacts. This article examines this troubling yet increasingly prevalent technology, highlighting the significant harms perpetuated by these surveillance systems and the ways in which they function as a covert form of policing; identifies the ways in which deployment of K–12 surveillance systems conflict with California privacy rights and equity interests; and recommends next steps to make sure that the rights of California’s K–12 students are respected, and that policing in the form of digital surveillance are eliminated from public schools.
Surveillance encompasses policies, practices, and tools that allow the government or a third party to monitor a person’s conduct in any space. Notably, communities of color have long suffered the harsh consequences of government surveillance and policing disproportionately, particularly in response to tragic events. Historically, crises have often been exploited as a pretext for the implementation of overbroad surveillance measures that ostensibly promote public health and safety, with communities of color bearing the brunt of such political choices and being disproportionately harmed by them.
Read the full document about digital policing in schools at the Othering & Belonging Institute.
While schools may assert that their acquisition of online surveillance systems are intended to protect student safety, the social and political context in which they have become entrenched as an inevitable feature of K–12 public education cannot be ignored. More than eight decades after police were first installed on school campuses to quell movements for equality and integration in public education, the United States is in the midst of the largest racial justice movement in its history, with calls to defund and abolish police gaining wider traction.