Roughly 16,000 high school seniors — less than 1% of the class of 2027 — have been named National Merit Scholarship semifinalists, proving that objective merit still cuts through even as school districts redirect resources toward AI surveillance and equity bureaucracies rather than academic excellence.

The semifinalists, announced September 9, qualified on Preliminary SAT scores alone — the kind of colorblind, standardized benchmark that the education establishment has spent years trying to dismantle. Meanwhile, at least 100 school districts have installed Flock AI surveillance cameras on their campuses, and Portland's Benson Polytechnic High School faced evacuation after a 15-year-old student ingested unknown chemicals in the cafeteria. The contrast is stark: schools that won't reward excellence are pouring money into monitoring and crisis management instead.

The National Merit Scholarship Program remains one of the few purely merit-based academic recognitions left in American education. Semifinalists qualified strictly on PSAT performance, according to the Mercury News. About 95% are expected to reach finalist standing based on an application covering academic record, activities, and leadership. Roughly half of finalists will win a National Merit Scholarship come spring.

The Bay Area alone produced dozens of semifinalists from schools across the socioeconomic spectrum — from Cupertino and Burlingame to Calistoga and Berkeley. These students earned their spots through test scores, not identity categories.

While these students prove merit cannot be canceled, their schools are spending elsewhere. Flock Safety has deployed AI-powered surveillance systems — license plate readers, video cameras, gunshot detectors, and a mobile app for staff — across at least 100 school districts, according to an analysis of government procurement records by the nonprofit news organization The74, reported by the New York Post. The cameras don't just record; they use AI to generate searchable databases of people's movements.

"It seems like the government's trying to watch you more and more," 17-year-old Gabe Sayer of Loveland, Colorado told the Post. "It makes me feel a little unsafe."

Sayer organized a petition against Flock cameras in his district and launched DeFlock Loveland. His Change.org petition asserts: "An America where companies like Flock are allowed to conduct widespread surveillance of American citizens is an America where our liberties are dangerously in question."

The surveillance scope is staggering. One Texas school district granted U.S. Border Patrol access to its Flock data, the Post reported. Another Texas district's eight cameras were searched by 3,100 different law enforcement agencies more than 733,000 times in a single month.

Sophia Cope, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, framed the democratic stakes plainly: "What are you doing to a whole generation of students that basically have to be resigned to the fact that what they do is constantly surveilled?"

Loveland's district ultimately disconnected the cameras — not because of student pushback, but because the cost wasn't delivering the promised results. Yet the cameras remain bolted to the walls because, as a district spokesperson admitted, "they are the property of Flock and it's up to their determination to remove the equipment." The school doesn't even own the hardware on its own buildings.

In Portland, the institutional failure took a darker turn. A 15-year-old boy at Benson Polytechnic High School is in critical condition after drinking a mixture of unknown chemicals he brought from home, according to the Oregonian. The school was evacuated. Portland police dispatched both their homicide unit and explosive disposal unit. More than 100 students and staff were evaluated by medical responders. Portland Public Schools superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong offered thoughts but no answers: "This is devastating, it's stressful, and it's scary."

The National Merit semifinalists did the work, took the test, and earned the recognition — no equity rubric required. The question is how long objective standards survive when the institutions running American schools would rather watch students than reward them.