Iowa City’s school board heard presentations from “two companies pitching digital surveillance services,” complains a columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette, expressing concerns about their offers to “track students’ digital lives and flag potential threats for in-house analysts and school officials to review.” The student surveillance industry is overrun with buzz words, misinformation and fearmongering. Digital citizenship. Crowd-sourcing. Machine-learning algorithm. Those…
Tag: school district
Installing Air Filters in Classrooms Has Surprisingly Large Educational Benefits
An emergency situation that turned out to be mostly a false alarm led a lot of schools in Los Angeles to install air filters, and something strange happened: Test scores went up. By a lot. And the gains were sustained in the subsequent year rather than fading away. From a report: That’s what NYU’s Michael Gilraine finds in a new working…
One of America’s Biggest Markets for AI-Powered Security Cameras: Schools
New video analytics systems can “identify people, suspicious behavior and guns” in real-time, and the technology is being used by Fortune 500 companies, stadiums, retailers, and police departments, reports the Los Angeles Times. But schools are “among the most enthusiastic adopters,” they note, citing an interview with Paul Hildreth, the “emergency operations coordinator” at an Atlanta school district A year after…