May 2008 — Features

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What Are We Protecting Them From?

by Matt Villano

What's alarming about the NSBA study is this number: 52 percent of the 250 surveyed school district officials report that students are providing personal information online-a practice that can lead to harassment, cyberbullying, and in the worst cases, kidnapping or molestation.

With the online environment dramatically changed, federal legislators have taken a number of different strategies to guard against the new dangers.

A first strike was HR 5319, a bill brought before the US House of Representatives by Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA) in May 2006. In theory, the bill, originally known as the Deleting Online Predators Act, or DOPA, took aim at social networking in an attempt to protect minors from online predators. In a nutshell, the measures would have amended the Communications Act of 1934, introducing new language requiring schools and libraries that receive E-Rate funding to prohibit access to social networking sites to minors.

The trouble began with DOPA's classification of a social networking site, which includes this condition: enables communication among users. "The definition basically includes any place where someone could post material," Willard says. "It would have resulted in schools being forced to block access to 50 or 75 percent of the internet."

"Do these laws go a bit overboard? I'd say in many cases, they do. But when we're talking about our children, overprotection is far more important than no protection at all."
-Tom Strasburger, PublicSchoolWorks

Another of the bill's five criteria for what constitutes a social networking site is: permits registered users to create an online journal and share such a journal with other users.

In other words, a blog.

Yet blogging has become for many teachers an indispensable instructional tool. Willard cites Class Blogmeister and Edublogs as examples of educational websites that the legislation would end up blocking. "How are the filtering companies going to decide which interactive sites are educational or not?" she says. "They're not. They're going to block all blogs." That, Willard says, would amount to a large step backward.

"It is essential that schools enhance the use of these technologies. They are the foundation for all that our young people will be doing in their lives. They are the way they will be engaged in career activities, personal life activities, and civic affairs."

School districts that would rather not leave the filtering decisions to the vendor can create their own blacklists and whitelists of websites, but that requires hours upon hours of labor, and most districts don't have that kind of time.

These and other educator criticisms sparked political opposition to DOPA, and the bill stalled in the House, where it remains in limbo today. On the state level, elected officials have taken their cues from the federal efforts and made similar attempts to control children's activity on social networking sites.