Paper short abstract:

This paper provides an ethnographic description of a one-to-one tablet computer program launched in 2013 in a Southern California charter school, focusing in particular on the emergence of a variety of surveillance practices that developed in the pursuit of accountability.

Paper long abstract:

This paper provides an ethnographic description of a one-to-one tablet computer program launched in 2013 in a Southern California charter school, focusing in particular on the emergence of a variety of surveillance practices that developed via the actions (and counteractions) of teachers, students, and administrators in the context of accountability measures. This project looks at surveillance practices as they happened in three distinct, common processes in the school: instruction, advising, and testing. Depictions of the school's complex electronic surveillance measures as articulated by principals, teachers, and student technology workers portrayed the surveillance apparatus as immediate, ubiquitous, and predictive. Paradoxically, as students and teachers adjusted to the use of tablets over the course of two years, the constant invocation of the administration's surveillance capability failed, in some cases, to force a particular behavior or achieve a particular outcome. In effect, reminders of surveillance meant to tout the reach of the school administration's supervisory gaze revealed such vision to be partial, probabilistic, and retroactive. I argue that conspicuous displays of surveillance power, rooted as they are in appeals to a panoptic principle, revealed limits of the power of school authorities to accomplish the goals for which accountability regimes were instituted in the first place; I explore this seeming contradiction and conclude by asking if this pattern holds at different scales of surveillance.