Justin R. Lester warns that school districts are beta-testing AI cameras in classrooms to monitor students, flagging Black and Latinx children and predicting behavioral issues before third grade. He connects this surveillance to police data-gathering, asking what personal information is being harvested from children daily.
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What is the policy for your kids at the school district? But you so worried about the prostitutes walking down the street because you keep looking at them. My name is Justin R. Lester and I approve this message. We so concerned with the wrong thing. Smokescreen. What is the AI policy? What is the data that people are getting on your kids at school every single day? Well, talk to me, somebody. What is the data that police surveillance is getting with artificial intelligence? Are they— did you guys hear about schools are beta testing? I'm gonna give you this. They're beta testing putting cameras inside of classrooms to monitor problematic students. But do you know where they're starting? Inner city schools. They're not going to the suburbs. They're coming to inner city schools to find, how do you find problematic kids and how they sit in desks? And all the data is saying we can monitor Black students and Latinx students to see how problematic they are so that we can predict whether or not we need to move them into different spaces before they get to 3rd grade. They're the ones judging how problematic your kids are.