Orlando
WaPo, on school districts, focusing on the Orange County, Fla. system, using big data and analytics to find naughty stuff their students might be up to.
All fine and good, until someone finds a fly in the bottom of the jar:
Orange County isn’t alone in choosing to monitor students. Schools in Alabama and California have adopted similar social-media-mining software. In Huntsville, Ala., 14 kids were expelled because of social media posts in 2014. The content of the posts was not made public, but a school board member told AL.com that expulsions result only from serious offenses involving drugs, weapons or sex. Twelve out of the 14 were black, despite the schools’ population of about 40 percent black students and 60 percent white. The expulsions raised concerns from a county commissioner that social media monitoring unfairly targeted black students, according to AL.com. The case raises questions about which students are most vulnerable when digitally tracked by the school and police working in concert.
(1) You knew there would be massive wreck at the intersectionality of preventing school violence and shutting down the school to prison pipeline. You can’t exactly accuse the modern left of being good at systems integration.
(2) Because everyone is supposed to be paranoid about suspending black students, the only way they’re going to be suspended is if they do something major league bad, so bad that suspending them is the only option, because the districts’ insurance carriers exert a lot of pressure on school boards and district admins. The insurance industry is the only known predator to social justice warriorism.
(3) This points to one of the running themes in this space, that big data and analytics is how we do racial profiling while giving ourselves plausible deniability.