Decent Exposure

Should schools limit access to the Internet?

By Andrew Trotter

Andrew Trotter, formerly an associate editor of Electronic School, is a staff writer at Education Week.

This fall, many schools across the nation will unwrap the Internet in their classrooms for the very first time--the culmination of much planning, staff training, and public expenditure. And scores of school districts aim to give their students access to the Internet over the next couple of years--or as soon as they can scrape together funds to wire their buildings. Failure to take advantage of the Internet, school leaders say, would ignore society's demand for a technologically literate workforce. It also would forsake a boundless global information system--with countless tributaries and backwaters--that might be the next, best resource for irrigating young minds.

But even as school officials anticipate letting students navigate across the World Wide Web, many quietly dread the first day their Internet connection is misused--when a student or staff member uses the information conduit to pump filth, or when a child somehow comes to harm because of information found there.

Drawing up grim Internet scenarios is not difficult: Combine youngsters' curiosity and mischievousness with their computer savvy and the point-and-click ease of navigating the web, then toss in a few samplings from the dark side of the vast cross-cultural Casbah that is cyberspace--and you've got instant nightmares for parents and school people alike.

Speculation is rife that youthful Internet users will become preoccupied with pornography, participate in hate groups, form relationships with pedophiles, and gather recipes for bombs.

And that speculation has been heightened by a few reported incidents. Last winter, for example, a Massachusetts teenager reportedly dropped out of high school to run an Internet porn business, according to the Quincy, Mass., Patriot Ledger. And in May, four students at Travis Ranch School, near Anaheim, Calif., were suspended for several days "for disruption of the educational process" after they brought to school several bomb recipes one of the kids had downloaded at home from the Internet. "Other students became extremely concerned," says Karen Bass, public information officer of the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District.

Finally, in Tupelo, Miss., a popular drive-time disc jockey pleaded guilty in June 1995 to distributing child pornography by computer and traveling to New Orleans with the intent of having sex with a 13-year-old boy, according to the Times-Picayune. The two had met initially in a chat room on America Online, but in person, the 13-year-old turned out to be a grown-up journalist accompanied by a television crew.

The weight of perceptions

Pornographic images and racy talk are out there for the taking--most plentifully in electronic forums called discussion groups and chat rooms. Generally speaking, the electronic pathways to commercial pornography are barred to children who can't muster a credit card number or an access code, but net-clever adults or children can find plenty of free and "amateur" sources of indecent material, and much worse.

Educators who are experienced Internet users say on-line dangers shrink to insignificance compared to the risks children face off-line: What's a nude photo compared to violence, drugs, or gang involvement? But school officials are understandably wary of public perceptions. "If something bad happens [on the Internet]--particularly given the volatility and lack of school funding--it potentially is going to create embarrassment, where school officials are going to look bad," says Nancy Willard, a school technology consultant in Oregon.

Willard, who advises the Oregon Association of Educational Service Districts on a project to bring Internet access to small school districts in the state, says school officials there express "excitement and interest and recognition that [the Internet] is the way to go." But they also have "a lot of undefined fears," she says--especially those who feel uninformed or "very uncomfortable with the technology personally." Such anxieties are "not a prescription for firm leadership," Willard says.

Willard adds that she is much more concerned about children's individual e-mail accounts than about pornography. "Quite frankly," she says, "you've got far more danger from a student being stalked" if personal information is gleaned over e-mail than from the child's possible exposure to dirty pictures.

Even so, many educators were unsettled last summer by what purported to be a serious study of porn on the Internet. The study, by Marty Rimm, an undergraduate at Carnegie-Mellon University, claimed that 83.5 percent of the images transmitted by an on-line discussion system called USENET are pornographic. A July 3, 1995, cover story in Time magazine repeated the claim in an uncritical report on the study, causing a flurry of alarm about Internet porn.

Advocates of stricter federal controls over Internet content touted Rimm's study--even as scholars and experienced Internet users rushed to point out its flaws. Among the criticisms: The study mainly examined for-profit bulletin board services, which are not part of the Internet; and it measured on-line traffic according to the quantities of data bytes, which exaggerate the prevalence of images and video compared to text. (A complete discussion of the study is available on the web.)

The Rimm study was cited in Congress by supporters of the bill that became the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which, among other things, would impose criminal penalties for knowingly transmitting indecent materials to a minor over the Internet. The Communications Decency Act was enacted in February as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Just four months later, in June, a panel of federal judges ruled that the indecency provision violated the Constitutional right to free speech, but at press time, the Department of Justice was planning to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. (For a discussion of the federal judges' ruling, read the accompanying article: Decency vs. Free Speech.)

Although Rimm's study has been discredited, its influence lingers, and educators still discuss it in on-line forums. What's more, the study rendered a back-handed service by forcing school officials to look seriously, and early, at the issue of inappropriate materials on-line, says David Foreman, senior database administrator and webmaster of the Chesterfield County (Va.) Schools. "It would have been worse if we had started with 'Everything is roses' and then got egg on our face," Foreman says.

What's acceptable?

Instead, school leaders have turned to an array of strategies to keep students out of trouble on the web, with each district creating its own blend.

For most school officials on the verge of cyberspace, an acceptable-use policy (AUP) is as essential as a copy of Netscape. Many examples of such policies are available on-line, and districts are cutting and pasting together their own versions. An AUP should give children clearly enunciated standards on use of the Internet--and many districts are sending such policies home with compliance contracts for parents and students to sign. No signatures, no surfing.

But Oregon's Willard faults many AUPs for lack of clarity. She says policies often include such phrases as "students shall not access inappropriate or unacceptable material" without defining the words "inappropriate" or "unacceptable." That imprecision shifts decision-making power away from students and toward administrators, who decide after an incident whether the policy was violated.

"We want students to know what the boundaries are--and the vast majority of AUPs out there do not define that," she says. As an alternative, Willard recommends phrasing along these lines: "A student shall not access material that is profane or obscene (pornography) or that advocates violence toward other people."

Willard agrees, however, that an acceptable-use policy should allow for legitimate student research--such as a project on skinheads or war--without requiring the student to get permission to access information on gray areas.

Educators seem to agree that consequences for misuse of the Internet belong in the student discipline policy, not in a contract. "Students have an obligation to follow the school disciplinary policy," Willard says. And Foreman says it's always better to keep the rules to a minimum. He notes, however, that the Chesterfield County Schools lack a student policy against on-line "cracking"--unauthorized tampering with computer networks or files. He has proposed that cracking be treated as vandalism, on a par with spraypainting a wall.

Foreman adds that the conduct of staff members on the Internet is covered adequately by staff regulations on moral turpitude and ethical and appropriate behavior.

One school that has stopped short of issuing an AUP is L'Ouverture Computer Technology Magnet (K-5; enrollment 375), in Wichita, Kan. L'Ouverture's students have been using the Internet since January without such a policy--and without incident, says Principal Howard Pitler. A written policy, he says, is too "black and white" and has "all kinds of loopholes by its nature, once you write it down."

But Pitler does use the filtering and blocking software that many school districts have embraced with great enthusiasm. These programs--nearly a dozen are available, under brand names such as Cyber Patrol, Net Nanny, and SurfWatch--can be installed on classroom computers or on the district server, or applied by a commercial Internet access provider. Some of the programs block Internet sites that are known to contain pornography or violence; some keep out downloadable images (called "binaries"); others scan incoming text for four-letter words; one model allows access only to certain approved web sites.

Filtering or blocking programs do work--a recent PC Magazine review said they provide "admirable coverage"--but they aren't 100 percent effective. One problem is that the programs require regular updates of sites to be blocked; another is that the programs can be circumvented by discreet indexing or by expert users.

And blockers might also bar valuable resources, such as health-related information. Indeed, as Wired magazine's Brock Meeks points out, "some programs ban access to newsgroups discussing gay and lesbian issues or topics such as feminism." One even blocks the web site of the National Organization for Women.

But many educators rely on these programs. Of the SurfWatch filtering program installed on the Chesterfield County Schools' districtwide server, Foreman says, "It only filters out the most gross things." To augment the software, Foreman has decided not to carry chat rooms and newsgroups on the server: "Both are too poorly moderated now," he says.

Most school districts will feel compelled to have both an AUP and blocking software, says Gus Steinhilber, general counsel of the National School Boards Association. "It shows they've done something in good faith," he says.

As for tracking e-mail, Jerry Taylor, educational technology coordinator at Arcadia Middle School in Greece, N.Y., says the way his school manages student e-mail makes improper use fairly easy to detect. The e-mail system saves messages only to designated floppy disks that are shared by several students--and by some adult after-school users. E-mail, then, is semipublic, as one boy found last spring when he typed "an F-U message to another student," Taylor says. The boy lost Internet privileges for a month.

The Chesterfield County schools take a different tack, Foreman says. Student e-mail accounts technically are assigned to their parents, who have full access to their child's e-mail. (School officials do, too, when acting in loco parentis.)

Sharp eyes

More vital than any policy or software solution, though, is good supervision. Teachers can't be everywhere at once, of course, but Foreman points out that such simple matters as room arrangement can aid in supervision. In Chesterfield County, Internet-connected terminals face toward the center of the classroom or toward other areas frequented by adults, he says. Other supervisory aids--the subject of debate in on-line educator discussion groups--include Internet "driver's licenses," passwords, and posted lists of students who have signed usage contracts.

Still, supervision isn't really effective when teachers don't understand the Internet, Willard says. "If the kids turn on the computer before the teachers--where the kids know more--you have a problem," she says.

Internet safety, then, is yet one more reason to make teacher training central to a district's technology investment. And the need for intensive training will become more acute as Internet use is extended to the classrooms of teachers with less technology experience. Along with training, teachers need access to the Internet and time for surfing.

It's plain and simple, Willard says, that as teachers learn how to integrate the Internet into their classroom activities, "the beneficial uses increase and the nonbeneficial uses decrease." She adds that "the cases where we had difficulties in Oregon were ones where somebody turned on the switch, and they came back in the room, and the kids were all over, looking at [illicit] stuff."

For some teachers, the learning curve seems daunting. Last spring, before student handbooks containing his district's new acceptable-use policy went home to parents, Foreman was already getting questions from teachers. An art teacher called him to ask whether his class could access paintings of nudes, Foreman says. "I asked him, 'Do you have books in your classroom that have these pictures?'" When the teacher answered affirmatively, Foreman replied, "Why would it be any different on-line?"

Good projects that require purposeful use of the Internet can go a long way toward keeping kids out of trouble on school equipment. But to plan lessons well, teachers need time to plan. To that end, some districts have adopted a teacher-first approach to the Internet. At Rankin Elementary School in Tupelo, Miss., Kameron Conner says, that means she and her fellow teachers are encouraged to do most of the Internet exploration and to download materials for classroom use.

At Peotone High School (9-12; enrollment 520), near Chicago, students have web access in the library. But the Internet lines being extended to every classroom are intended primarily for the teacher's use--for now, at least. Beginning this fall, says Principal Mike Davis, the school is going to provide "massive amounts of in-service" on classroom applications as well as technical aspects of using the Internet.

Once teachers know how to direct students to the Louvre, the Library of Congress, and the proliferating "ask an expert" web sites, they are much better equipped to keep youngsters on task and on target. Internet educators take pride in their collections of bookmarks (called addresses or URLs, for Uniform Resource Locator) to good web sites. At L'Ouverture, the school provides a rich collection of sites "approved and recommended by the staff," Pitler says. Staff members have checked out the links from these sites "about eight levels deep," he adds.

Personal responsibility

The surest protection for youngsters, though, comes from teaching them responsibility and good values, a task educators share with parents.

Willard points out that students' capacity for responsible behavior is tied to their cognitive development. During the developmental leap that coincides with puberty, for example, children become increasingly able to look at things from another person's perspective. Teachers are knowledgeable about these changes, Willard says, and once they understand the technology, school officials can trust them to make good judgments on pedagogy.

Case in point: The Internet planning committee in the Plano, Texas, school district has adopted screening software for the younger grades through middle school but decided not to screen at the high school level, says Bill Adkins, a former member of the advisory committee who is now director of information technology at the nearby Highland Park Schools. High school students are "about to go to college," he says, "so we have to make sure they're accepting their responsibilities."

At Peotone, Davis says, every incoming student takes a computer literacy class; upper-class students take a one-semester "media and research" class on using the Internet. Although they don't necessarily discuss pornography directly, such courses teach students discernment in making choices and in safeguarding personal information. They also cover the ethics of honoring the AUP contract, abiding by copyright law, and using school resources as they are intended to be used.

Schools might also encourage personal responsibility by avoiding paranoia on the misuse of the Internet and giving students opportunities to talk to teachers on the issue. Last Valentine's Day, Pitler gained confidence that such an approach would be successful when a fifth-grade boy asked his teacher for assistance with a web search. The boy was helping a third-grader search for materials for a unit on chocolate. He started typing the word "candy" into a web search program, he told the teacher, but then he remembered that "a lot of girls in my dad's magazines are named Candy, and I thought I'd probably go to a bad place" on the web.

By offering Internet courses to parents and the general public, school districts can highlight the benefits of the Internet and dispel some of the free-floating anxiety about possible dangers. (The Plano, Texas, district plans to offer such courses--one of which students and parents would take together--when it launches its Internet program.) But well before that, a broad spectrum of the school community--including parents, other community members, and technical staff--should be invited to take part in the crafting of the AUP. It's a lesson in process and outreach that districts can learn from experience in crafting mission statements. As Lew Frederick, public information director of the Portland (Ore.) public schools, puts it, "We're saying it's not a matter of 'just trust us.'"

A publicized incident involving the Internet will raise the stakes, even if it doesn't involve your schools (or any others). The arrest of the Tupelo disc jockey, for example, occurred just one week after Tupelo's Rankin Elementary School got its Internet connection, says Kameron Conner. "Initially we did have a concern about the danger," she says, noting the program was a pilot for the entire school district.

In addition, publicity was intense in the city, the home of the American Family Association, a staunch advocate of the Communications Decency Act. The board and administration allayed the community's fears by inviting parents and city leaders to observe Internet use in classes. "Once we did that, the response has been overwhelmingly in support," says Conner, who adds that districtwide rollout of the Internet begins this fall.

Involving parents brings up another issue, says Oregon's Willard. A former attorney, Willard says parents may be legally entitled to withdraw their children from classes that use the Internet, just as they may "opt out" of using certain textbooks or taking certain courses. But most parents, she believes, will agree that learning to use the Internet--like learning to use the computer itself--is an essential skill their children must learn to succeed in life. "If we can use access to the Internet as the incentive and the initiative to discuss values," she says, "then we are using it to its highest potential."


Reproduced with permission from the September 1996 issue of Electronic School. Copyright 1996, National School Boards Association. This article may be saved to disk, downloaded, or printed for individual use, but may not be otherwise transmitted or reproduced without the consent of the Publisher. Send inquiries to electronic-school@nsba.org.