The American High School Surveillance State

​Earlier this year, students in a high school art class were called to a meeting of administrators to defend the contents of their art portfolio.
 
This happened after Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Kansas, signed a $162,000 contract with Gaggle safety software to review all student messages and files for issues of concern. Gaggle had flagged the digital files of the students’ art portfolio for containing nudity. The students vehemently protested that there was no nudity at all in their work. But it was a hard case to make considering that the files had already been removed from the students accounts so the student artists themselves couldn’t refer to it.
 
Max McCoy, a writer with the nonprofit news organization The Kansas Reflector, wrote that if you’re a Lawrence High student, “every homework assignment, email, photo, and chat on your school-supplied device is being monitored by artificial intelligence for indicators of drug and alcohol use, anti-social behavior, and suicidal inclinations.” The same is true of many American high schools from coast-to-coast.
 
Gaggle claims to have saved an estimated 5,790 student lives from suicide between 2018 and 2023 by analyzing 28 billion student items and flagging 162 million for reviews. McCoy took a hard look this incredibly specific number of lives saved, finding it hard to validate. Simply put, Gaggle counts each incident of flagged material that meets all safety criteria as a saved life. Still, it is understandable that school administrators would want to use any tool they could to reduce the potential for student suicide (the second-leading cause of death among Americans 15-19), as well as reduce the threat of school violence that has plagued the American psyche for decades now.
 
But is an artificial surveillance regime like Gaggle the way to do it?
 
McCoy likens Gaggle to the science-fictional “precrime” technology in the Philip K. Dick novel and Stephen Spielberg movie Minority Report. But could Gaggle technology in its actual use be more like the utterly dysfunctional totalitarian regime depicted in the classic movie Brazil?
 
McCoy reports that a cry for help from one student to a trusted teacher was intercepted and rerouted to an administrator with whom the student has no relationship. The editors of the Lawrence student paper, The Budget, are concerned about Gaggle’s intrusion into their newsgathering, notes, and other First Amendment-protected activities. McCoy quotes Rand researchers who recently wrote, “we found that AI based monitoring, far from being a solution to the persistent and growing problem of youth suicide, might well give rise to more problems than it seeks to solve.”
 
It is one thing to keep tabs on student attitudes and behavior. Spyware technology over all student messages and content looks pointlessly excessive. Worse, it trains the next generation of Americans to be inured to a total surveillance state.