Online Censorship in Schools Leaves Teachers in the Lurch, Too

[usonian]

https://themarkup.org/digital-book-banning/2024/04/23/online-censorship-in-schools-leaves-teachers-in-the-lurch-too

A few paragraphs:

Elizabeth Tyree was recently trying to teach her West Texas students about the connections between Emily Dickinson’s letters and her poetry. The project she designed asked students to read Dickinson’s correspondence and compare them to her art, finding examples of how one led to the other. Dickinson’s letters are available for free through The Internet Archive, a nonprofit, digital library that has, among other content, 44 million digitized books and texts at archive.org.

But Tyree and her students couldn’t get to them. Archive.org is blocked by their school district. The federal government effectively mandated web filters for schools in 2000 through the Children’s Internet Protection Act. At the time, filters were seen as an important way to keep kids from accessing online porn. A Markup investigation published earlier this month, however, showed these filters have morphed into tools of digital censorship, keeping students in some districts from abortion information, sex ed, and LGBTQ+ resources, including suicide prevention.


Tyree has been in classrooms for 16 years, teaching students of all ages a mix of English, writing, science, and music. Because the federal government only requires districts to keep students from obscene and harmful content and otherwise leaves them to block whatever else they want, Tyree has had different problems from one district to another. Sometimes tech support will unblock websites she asks to be unblocked, but her request to get her students access to Archive.org was recently denied over a concern that the website also hosts adult content.

...

One commenter on TikTok said that the process for requesting sites be unblocked in her district requires her to do research about the blocked site (at home, where she can access it), make a case to an administrator, answer follow-up questions, wait for that person to take the request to a board for approval, and then answer more follow-up questions before a decision can be made.