May 2008 — Features
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What Are We Protecting Them From?
"Abstinence from technology is a losing battle. To not teach technology use responsibly is neglecting the charge of universal education."-Don Knezek, International Society for Technology in Education
The benefits of the legislation are apparent. On the most basic level, some degree of mandatory filtering is certainly better than no filtering, which leaves school networks completely open for students to visit whatever websites they wish. With the new filters, access to pornographic websites, gambling sites, and other popular distractions is almost entirely locked down.
"Under the old system, where districts were left to handle these things on their own, many schools were opening the door to just about everything," says Jayne Moore, director of instructional technology and school library media for the Maryland Department of Education. "At least with a filter, districts have a good sense of control over what their kids are doing on the internet when they're at school."
Still, CIPA's implementation has faced many issues, the first being its irrelevance. By the time the bill was passed into law, many school districts had already purchased content filters with scanning technology that far exceeded the requirements set forth by the federal government.
A second issue is sheer overzealousness. In many cases, schools have cranked up their filters so high that students searching for an innocuous but easily misunderstood term can't get anywhere. David Burt, who runs the blog Filtering Facts, which is dedicated to providing the newest information and research about internet filtering, tells the familiar story about students who were searching for information about breast cancer, but were impeded because their search contained the word breast.
"When they are turned up to the highest settings, many of these filters actually block good information, too," says Burt, who works as a product manager at Microsoft. "For teachers who rely on the internet to help with specific lessons, this can become very frustrating, to say the least."
Perhaps the biggest problem with CIPA-inspired filtering has become proxy servers. These servers, so-called "safe" sites that act as proxies and forward web page requests to other servers, enable students to dupe district filters into thinking they are visiting one site when they are in fact visiting something very different-and usually forbidden.
Willard says proxy servers are more of a problem than district administrators even know. She recounts a recent visit to a school district during which she met with a handful of students as a focus group to find out what kind of safety issues concerned them. During a break in the action, Willard asked them if they knew how to get around the district's internet filters.
Across the board, the students said yes.
"Schools across this country are spending millions and millions of dollars for technical solutions to comply with CIPA," Willard says, "but our students can easily get around just about everything we throw at them."
