Aleeza Siddique, 15, was in Spanish class earlier this year at her high school in Northern California when her school’s internet filter threw out a news lesson. Her teacher told the class to open their school-issued Chromebooks and explore a list of links he had collected from Spanish-language news broadcasting giant Telemundo. The students tried, but each link opened the same page: a picture of a padlock.
“None of that was available to us,” Aleeza said. “The site is completely blocked.”
She said her teacher tried to change and fill the 90-minute class with other activities. From what she remembers, they looked at vocabulary lists and independently clicked on online quizzes from Quizlet—apparently a less dynamic use of time.
New data released this week The D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology shows how often some of these blockades are happening across the country. The nonprofit digital rights advocacy organization conducted its fifth annual nationally representative survey of middle and high school teachers and parents, as well as high school students, on a range of tech issues. About 70% of teachers and students said this year that web filters hinder students from completing their assignments.
Almost all schools use some type of web filter to comply with the Child Online Protection Act, which requires districts to use the federal E-rate program for discounted Internet and telecommunications equipment to keep children from seeing graphic and obscene images online. AND 2024 The Markup Surveynow part of CalMatters, found far more expansive blocking by school districts than required by federal law, some of it political, reflecting culture war battles over what students have access to in school libraries. That investigation found school districts were blocking access to sexuality education and LGBTQ+ resources, including suicide prevention. Routine blocking of websites used by students for academic research was also discovered. And because school districts tend to set different limits for students and staff, teachers can be frustrated with filters like everyone else because of how they complicate lesson planning.
Web filtering is ‘subjective and unverified’
Elizabeth Laird, director of civic technology equity for the center and lead author of the report, said The Markup report helped inspire additional survey questions to better understand how schools use filters as a “subjective and untested” method of limiting student access to information.
“The scope of what’s being blocked is more comprehensive and more value-laden than I think we were initially looking for last year,” Laird said.
While past surveys have found how often students and teachers report disproportionate filtering of content related to reproductive health, LGBTQ+ issues, and content about people of color, the center asked respondents this year if they thought content related to or about immigrants was more likely to be blocked. About one third of the students answered yes.
Aleeza would say yes, after her experience with Telemundo. The California teenager said how often she encounters blocks depends on how much research she’s trying to do and how much she has to do on her school computer. When she took debate class, she regularly ran into blocks while researching controversial topics. For example, a Slate magazine article about LGBTQ+ rights gave her a lock screen because the entire news website was blocked. She said she avoids her school Chromebook as much as possible, doing homework on a personal laptop away from the school’s Wi-Fi whenever she can.
As many as three-quarters of teachers who responded to a recent survey said that students use workarounds to access the unfiltered Internet. Laird found this number impressive. Web filters, therefore, do not prevent students from accessing the websites they want to access and prevent them from completing their school assignments. “It raises the fundamental question of whether this technology, in trying to prevent students from accessing harmful content, is actually doing more harm than good,” Laird said.
Nearly one-third of teachers surveyed by the Center for Democracy and Technology said their schools block content related to the LGBTQ+ community. About half said that information about sexual orientation and reproductive health was blocked. And black and Hispanic students were more likely to say that content related to people of color was disproportionately blocked on their school devices.
For students like Aleeza, blocking is frustrating in practice as well as in principle.
“The amount they control is actively hindering our ability to educate,” she said. There is often no idea why a website is triggering a blocked page. Aleeza said it seems arbitrary and thinks her school should be more transparent about what it blocks and why.
“We should have the right to know what we are protected from,” she said.
Audrey Baime, Olivia Brandeis and Samantha Yee, all members of the CalMatters Youth Journalism Initiative, contributed reporting to this story.
This article was originally posted on The Markup and was republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Reproduction license.