Schools Under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education

Introduction

Introduction Torin Monahan and Rodolfo D. Torres The imperative to protect children is seldom questioned. It would seem degenerate to do so. But one must wonder what it means when armed police officers roam school hallways, when students line up for more than an hour before class just to get past security screening checkpoints, when fingerprinting is required for students to enter schools or use school cafeterias, or when schools look more like prisons, with barbed-wire perimeters, video surveillance, and police cars parked on campus. Sometimes public schools are even located in former prisons.1 Public education is one important domain where the perceived need for greater security has given rise to new formations in school discipline, primarily for students but increasingly for teachers and administrators too. Some of the well-known mechanisms of student and teacher discipline include high-stakes standardized testing, zero-tolerance policies for violence, rigid schedules, and architectures of visibility and containment. Less obvious is the host of new institutional arrangements and technologies that augment these existing disciplinary mechanisms: on-site police officers who routinize experiences of crime control and effectively interlink public education and criminal justice systems; advanced surveillance technologies that are used to subject students to constant monitoring and to demand that they engage in ritual performances—such as submitting to metal detectors—to demonstrate their innocence; and new bureaucratic developments in so-called decisionsupport systems and performance audits, by which students and teachers are evaluated from afar and micro-managed or disciplined accordingly.2 Most school surveillance today is of the kind just described, though it must not be forgotten that face-to-face human surveillance in schools is far from extinct. Examples of such surveillance include simple observation, watching, listening, and following; the use of human spies, undercover operatives , and informers; and mandatory drug tests and searches. Some peer-to-peer surveillance occurs when students use cell phones or social networking Web sites to find out about each other’s activities, allowing for social bonding but sometimes creating distrust and violence among students.3 The most intensive 1 To r i n M o na h a n a n d Ro d o l f o D. To r r e s 2 authoritarian surveillance regimes have been constructed around not much more than these basic ingredients, usually combined with a strong sense of mistrust and fear of infiltration, persecution, or invasion of privacy.At its root, therefore, surveillance is not simply about monitoring or tracking individuals and their data—it is about the structuring of power relations through human, technical, or hybrid control mechanisms. Perhaps not surprisingly, racial minorities are disproportionately subjected to contemporary surveillance and policing apparatuses. The emerging governance regimes may be fueled by public fears of crime, but control mechanisms are applied differentially and with different effects.Thus, students in poorer inner-city schools are subjected to more invasive hand searches and metal-detector screenings, while students in more affluent schools tend to be monitored more discreetly with video surveillance cameras. Lower-income minority students, especially males, also get funneled more systematically into the criminal justice system by police officers on school campuses. Similarly, military recruiters enjoy a great deal of access to poorer students—mostly in urban and rural schools—and actively collect intelligence on them in order to further their mission of enlisting soldiers. Given that public education putatively supports the progressive goal of equality, the use of surveillance to target and sort students along lines of race, class, and gender deserves continued scrutiny and critique, especially as the institution of education further aligns itself with the criminal justice system, the military, and private industry. Political and Economic Context To begin to understand the complexity of surveillance and security practices in public education, it may be useful to outline some of the factors contributing to such cultures of control. Certainly fear should not be underestimated . Tragedies of school shootings become shared media and cultural spectacles, instigating moral panics that overshadow any cold, objective assessment of risk (Monahan 2006c). After all, schools continue to be perhaps the safest place for children; far safer than streets, cars, or homes (ACLU 2001; Dinkes et al. 2007; Rand and Catalano 2007). Recent statistics show that in the United States one homicide or suicide occurs while at school for every 3.2 million students—for a total of 14 homicides and 3 suicides between July 1, 2005, and June 30, 2006 (Dinkes et al...