Drones In Schools

School surveillance continues to be a growth industry, maybe because students don't have a lobby and some adults curl up every time someone says, "But it's for the safety of the children!" Nevertheless, it just keeps getting creepier.

Back in January of 2020, I predicted that one of the big stories of the coming year would be a growth in the student surveillance industry. I'd been following the story as it popped up, because it was everywhere. 

Florida (you know--the Freedom State) was implementing a huge student surveillance system. Colleges were using student phones for all manner of tracking. Public schools were experimenting with all sorts of creepy facial recognition and surveillance software. Audio surveillance was another great frontier. In 2019, California enacted the Cradle-to-Career Data Systems Act, intended to data mine the hell out of California's minor citizens. And that was on top of the old stuff like Pearson's crazy student surveillance to protect its tests (a story I can't fully relate because a piece about it was one of the few posts that Google ever took down on my blog).

That prediction was looking pretty good in January of 2020. Then March of 2020 kind of pushed it to the back burner, as far as coverage went. But the fact that we were all kind of distracted did not stop the march of ed tech's surveillance industry. 

Now we're getting a new trend in this kind of surveillance. Drones.

Drone security is growing in many sectors, with companies like Titan promising "24/7 aerial protection, lightning-fast response, and real-time visibility." Also, of course, it's cheaper than hiring live humans.

The website Dangerous Schools last year touted drones as a "transformative tool in bolstering school safety." They can provide "real-time aerial surveillance" and "monitor large areas efficiently." They can "swiftly assess emergency situations," because, as with some other surveillance tools, the promise is that AI will be able to judge the situation. And always, the advantage of being "cost-effective."

And, of course, the drones will be armed.

Campus Guardian Angel is a Texas-based firm offering "an elite, on-site safety response capability that teams with law enforcement, confronting any active shooter threat in seconds to save lives."

The start-up is a fine fit for Texas, where a 2023 law requires an armed person on every campus (the state's half-assed response to the Uvalde murders). But many Texas districts asked to opt out of the law because armed guards were too pricey. Voila! Just get a patrol drone for enhanced "situational awareness." In a Texas demo, CEO Justin Marston promised that once as teacher hit a panic button, the drones could find the shooter in 15 seconds and incapacitate them in 60. 

A set of six drones is a mere $15,000, plus a per-pupil monthly prescription.

And it's not just Texas. A few months ago, Newsweek ran a story about Florida school districts considering CGA. 

Campus Guardian Angel CEO Justin Marston told Newsweek that the drones were equipped with pepper rounds plus a glass breaker, allowing them to quickly navigate inside and outside classrooms.

"We feed live video to police, show exactly what's happening, where the suspect is, and even smash through windows with a glass punch to create distractions. This tactic, like during the SAS's famous hostage rescue [at the Iranian Embassy in London], can give officers a huge advantage," Marston said.

As with all surveillance products, this is being pitched in the context of the worst possible events, while the question that really needs to be asked is, "Once this is in place, what other uses will district administrators find for it?"  Pepper rounds to break up fights on the playground? Pepper rounds to break up what the AI thinks is about to be a fight in the hall? Assign a drone to hover over your most challenging problem students all day?

We've already got surveillance tools that are aimed at calculating students who might be considering suicide or acts of violence, so why not tie that kind of analysis to a surveillance tool that can hover over students all the time? 

Oh, and the Florida drones would be captained by people in Austin, Texas. I can't imagine how many ways that could go badly.

I get that high security for low costs has a seductive appeal, and reportedly Homeland Security is going to buy $100 million worth of drones. But there are just so many ways this could be abused or simply go wrong. Here's hoping that this little industry fades away sooner rather than later. 

The Big Standardized Test Is Still The Worst Thing In Education

For forty-some years, an array of forces have tried to shape public education in damaging ways, and I have bitched about pretty much all of them in this space. But if you gave me the power to wipe any one of these ugly insects off the windshield of public education, I would not need to think for a second. The worst--the very worst--of the forces employed to dismantle and disfigure public education is the Big Standardized Test.

The BS Test, an annual event inflicted by the state on every public school system, has undergone its own transformative journey even as it has been employed by an assortment of toxic movements. Let's collect data on students so that we track them cradle-to-career, the better to let employers order up the exact meat widgets they're shopping for. Let's come up with objective data that will let us pinpoint the worst schools so we can dismantle them. Let's collect data that will let us pinpoint the worst teachers so we can fire our way to excellence. Let's make every state use the same BS Test so that we can put some teeth behind a national standards movement. 

And it hasn't made a damned bit of difference which politicians were in charge. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden-- every one of them has kept the BS Test grinding away like a blind badger digging its way through the guts of the public education system. 

BS Testing has warped schooling itself. The tests create a hierarchy of content, with schools reducing the amount of arts, music, science, history, even recess because that content is Not On The Test. Not that favored content fares any better; in English class, full texts have been replaced with short excerpts, and meaningful slow, thoughtful discussion has been replaced with a quick solitary race to answer multiple choice questions.

Test-centered schooling encourages sorting students into three groups, usually via more time-wasting "practice" or "benchmark" tests early in the year. Students are labeled as 1) probably going to get a good score on the BS Test, 2) probably no hope they'll get a good score on the BS Test, and 3) enough of a borderline case that if we really hammer them, maybe we can get a good score out of them. Group 3 gets to suffer intensive test prep. That's because test-centered school is upside down-- the school is not there to serve the students' educational needs; instead, the students are there to serve the school's need for good data, aka high scores.

In that pursuit, we waste soooo much time on the test. Prepping for it, practicing for it, taking it-- the school year has been radically shortened by the BS Test. 

And as the BS Test became cemented as part of the status quo, a generation has absorbed the notion that the BS Test is the whole point of school, that the year is about prepping for the test and once the test is done, the year is basically open. At an even deeper level, we find the underlying assumption being passed on that Understanding and Knowing are just the acts of selecting and plugging in the One Correct Answer (which is already known by someone Out There). And these meager and stunted ideas about education and school are now part of a self-feeding loop as students who have spent their life on this tiny treadmill come back to the classroom as teachers. 

You can argue that attempts have been made to reduce the high stakes of BS Testing, but little has been done that made a difference. A decade of insistence that this test is a valid measure of school, teacher and student achievement has produced a public that thinks "what are the test scores like" is an incisive probe into school quality--and many of those folks are now on school boards. 

If that were the end of the matter, it would be problematic enough. But every troubling trend in public education has been nourished with water from this toxic spring. 

Of course, BS Test scores were important in selling school privatization, allowing fans of that movement to claim that they had hard data "proving" that public schools were failing. When it turned out that results for charter and private schools weren't any better, BS Test scores quietly exited the discussion. But the damage was done; one of the biggest frauds perpetrated in education policy and journalism is the continued use of "student achievement" as a euphemism for "test scores."

Yet there's a secondary effect-- the BS Test has made alternatives to public school more attractive by making public schools less attractive, because it turns out that parents are not that excited about subjecting their children to test-centered schooling and its hollowed-out de-humanized version of education. 

As we've sold the idea that knowledge and understanding are about being able to Pick The Right Answer, it's no wonder we've also seen the rise of "Why should students learn stuff when they can just google the right answer." This is life under the BS Test-- schooling is about grabbing right answers and generating data deliverables. 

The widely reported difficulties with student behavior and attendance have complex roots, but BS Test-based schooling shares some of the blame. What is there in test-centered schooling to engage students? What is the message beyond "As long as you can pick up those answers on the test, the job is done." I'll argue that when the treadmill stopped for the big pandemic pause of 2020, many folks looked at what they had been doing on autopilot and thought, "Wow, that was some bullshit." That includes students, because by 2020, test-centered school had injected a great deal of BS into schools (not that I'm going to argue that schools were ever fertilizer-free pastures).

Ditto for teachers. Of all the things that inspire people to go into the profession, "I've always wanted to help students prep for a mediocre multiple choice standardized test" is not top of the list. The BS Test is a monument to the general stripping of autonomy from the profession, encouraging districts to prescribe exactly how and what teachers should teach. 

Even the newest educational panic over AI owes much to BS Testing. AI moves most easily into spaces where heart and humanity have already been hollowed out, and a system centered on forking over the preferred answer is primed for AI. Approach students with an attitude of "Just fork over the right answer, kid," and they will find a quick and easy way to do just that.

We could argue about all of the above if the BS Test was actually useful for something. It is not.

Teachers are not allowed to see the questions on the test, and therefor get results that are meaningless, vague, broad, and way too late. And that's before we even get to the baloney of using maths to beat data into value-added scores. We have seen repeatedly that school level results correlate directly to socio-economic demographic data. 

That correlation is meaningless because twenty-some years in, we still don't have a lick of data (despite the claims of Hanushek et al) that raising BS Test scores improves life outcomes. The premise is that if we take a student who would have scored 55 on the test and fix her so she'll score a 75, she'll be more successful, make more money, and have a better life. Researchers have had decades to provide evidence of that premise and yet they haven't found enough evidence to cover a gnat's eyelash.

And that's before we even address the question of whether or not students even make a serious attempt on these things. 

"But if we stop giving the Big Standardized Test," come the objections, "how will we hold schools accountable? How will we know how schools are doing?"

You know what's worse than not knowing something? Believing you've got an answer when you don't. Ceasing the search for the truth because you have accepted a lie in its place. Or, to quote Josh Billings (probably), "I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so."

I agree that accountability is important, and that we should know how schools are doing. Big Standardized Tests don't give us either of those, and in fact make public education worse and less accountable. The answer to those objectors' question is, "You don't know any of those things now, and you are damaging the system at the same time."

Lord knows I'm not going to argue that eliminating the BS Test would return public education to some imaginary state of perfect grace. There are other issues that need--have always needed--to be addressed. But test-centered schooling is an obstacle rather than an aid to pursuing those improvements. 

One of the challenges of public schools is inertia, and after all these years, the BS Tests have inertia on their side. When the pandemic pause hit, there was a moment when that inertia was interrupted, and testophiles panicked and fought hard to keep testing, and mostly, they won. Now some states are testing more (while pretending they'll test less). I haven't said anything here that I haven't said multiple times over the past umpteen years, but one of the ways that institutional inertia works is that Bad New Ideas become that Same Old Thing We're Tired Of Complaining About. 

If we're looking for things to reform, axing the BS Test would be a great place to start. We wouldn't lose much of anything worth having, and we would take back time, money and focus for education in this country.