Locating the Tyranny of Filtering - TTT95 - 03.12.08
Posted by Paul Allison on March 23rd, 2008
It’s happening in small, geographically dispersed schools in rural Alaska. Three people are responsible for doing it for over a million public school students in New York City. An independent school in Milwaukee uses the same software that is being used in NYC to do it. In Colorado, an outspoken opponent of it was recently hired for a district level job, and now he is on a small committee that gives the thumbs up or down. In North Dakota, a secret password is emailed each week to a group of thirty teachers who can then undo it in their schools, when needed. In rural Virginia, a teacher carefully measures her arguments for the educational benefit against the possible risks each time she requests for it to be undone. Because so many schools do it in so many different ways, the developers of VoiceThread have to work overtime to keep their Web 2.0 tool available in public schools.
In September, Wesley Fryer “observed from China that the level of content filtering / censorship enforced by the central, totalitarian government was actually LESS severe than the content filtering enforced in many U.S. public schools” (Content filtering in Communist China versus an Oklahoma school » Moving at the Speed of Creativity).
Really? Do the descriptions in the first paragraph accurately represent the tyranny of filtering in U.S. schools today? Or do teachers have more power than we often exercise? It’s become too easy for educators to represent filtering as if it’s something that oppresses us. What if we find that the enemy is us?
From the discussion captured on this podcast, we can sketch a much more complicated picture of how filtering really seems to work in U.S. schools:
- Woody Woodgate is a one of nine local “site techs” in his district in Alaska. Since the distance between these schools makes it difficult for the district tech administrator to get around to all nine schools, the site techs have access to the filter. When a teacher needs to change it he or she finds the site tech in the building and requests a site to be unblocked.
- In New York City, it turns out that one of the three people managing the filter for over a million public school students has been a friend of alternative, progressive education in the city for many years. Olgierd Bilanow, now a system engineer for the NYC Department of Education, agreed to have a public conversation on this podcast about how the filter works in NYC, and how he sees his partnerships with teachers. Olgierd and his colleagues have almost never turned down a request from a school to have a filtering category (e.g. social networks) opened up. However he also points out that he has more requests to block sites and categories from schools than he has to unblock them.
- At Matt Montagne’s independent school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, teachers merely have to send an email or make a call to a help desk to get a category or a site opened. Filtering doesn’t seem to be a problem at Matt’s school, although he still wonders what it would be like to not have a filter at all.
- Bud Hunt is still critical of any school or teacher who wants to use filtering to control students or to avoid problems with what students might do on the Internet. However, Bud still remembers the mixture of embarrassment and frustration he used to feel when he was a teacher and one of his students or he would hit on a blocked site, but he has also seen blocking from the central district’s point of view, now that he works for the district as an “instructional technologist.” Bud sits on a committee of four people in a school district in northern Colorado which approves or disapproves requests from teachers to unblock or to block particular web sites. Bud never votes to block a site. Bud’s advice: Find out who is doing the filtering. They’re probably frustrated with the filter too!
- As the District Technology Coordinator for a school district in North Dakota, Craig Nansen manages the filter for all schools in North Dakota from a central office. Craig says that North Dakota’s filter is user friendly for all of the schools. All a teacher has to do is give Craig a call and a site can be unblocked in about 30 minutes. Craig also provides a password to teachers each week so that they can turn the filter off when they need to during the day.
- Ben Papell and the other good folks at VoiceThread realized that filtering would eventually make it impossible for teachers to use their tool in the classroom. They created a protected space, Ed.VoiceThread where teachers would monitor their students, and where we could argue that because it is educational material, it should be unfiltered.
- In rural Virginia, Lee Baber has formed a strong, trusting relationship with the IT guys in her district. They have learned to trust her requests because she always backs them up with strong arguments about the educational value of opening any particular site. They also know that she will moderate the students work online.
It’s true that these seven examples — and the conversation with these people that you can hear on this podcast — provide little more than anecdotal evidence, but at least it’s enough to begin to question the typical picture of filtering in U.S. schools.
Maybe it’s time to start singing with Joe Hill: Don’t Morn-Organize!
Original image: ‘End Tyranny‘ http://www.flickr.com/photos/19074862@N00/82189385 by: Kerry Released under an Attribution License
March 25th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Dear Teachers Teaching Teachers:
I listened to “Locating the Tyranny of Filtering” with great interest and I would very much like to offer the following observations.
First however, I want to say that I think Teachers Teaching Teachers is a highly significant effort. It is one of the first really solid examples of a trend I know is coming, something I call Technology Empowered School Reform from the Bottom Up.
I was a middle school teacher myself for 18 years, subsequently opting for central district administration as a platform from which to make my contribution during the final third of my career with the New York City Department of Education. I eventually held the position of Director, Office of Instructional Technology there.
I continue to work on impacting the state of education and its future, but as a retiree I can no longer do so as a practicing teacher. Consequently, Teachers Teaching Teachers is something I appreciate greatly. The perspective of those who have significant classroom experience and who continue to teach is an essential element of the movement to improve education. This episode is a good example.
I think you posed the theme of this episode deftly. You are correct, the issue is not so much “Is there filtering tyranny?” as “Can we collaboratively identify the location of that tyranny?” I was heartened as you worked your way through the conversation to dispel the notion that there is some evil, top down, monolithic effort afoot to impose filtering on hapless teachers. Furthermore, I met Olgierd several times while with the department and I believe him to be knowledgeable of and sympathetic to teachers and enthusiastic about enlightened approaches to education. In fact, I think the current administration, largely populated by non-educators, is very fortunate to have him there to ‘keep it real.’
I believe I have a reasonably good perspective on the filtering issue as I was onboard when the first filtering system was put in place as a requirement of the federal eRate program, the funds from which paid for a good deal of the school system’s telecommunications networking infrastructure. Later, I frequently responded to pleas from the trenches for help as teachers early on realized the disempowering effects ‘the filter’ had on their efforts to provide relevant instruction for their students.
I would describe the situation in terms of de facto tyranny instead of de jure tyranny. While there may be no Wizard of Oz-like man behind the curtain thwarting students and teachers from accessing web resources purely as a misguided exercise of power, the effect may be the same. In fact, dealing with unintended tyranny in this case may be more insidious than having to take a Dr. Evil head on, because one becomes involved in an elusive fight in which it is hard to find an antagonist, let alone defeat him.
One thing I can tell you from direct experience though, is that an administration, even of a vast system like New York City’s, can indeed figure out how to make things happen if it sees them as important and wants to do so. While there may be a system in place to cope with filtering, it does not appear there is much of an effort made to let the rank and file know about it, let alone how to make the most of it.
With some regularity I am privileged to meet with classroom teachers who work for the New York City school system. This most often happens when I am invited to be a guest speaker in one of the many graduate education courses offered at universities in the city. I speak to these teachers about how they can tap technology to provide a better educational experience for their students. However, I very frequently meet resistance to my thoroughly grounded, in fact widely published, assertions and suggestions. To my surprise, most often this is not based on conflicting understandings of pedagogy, but of the practicalities involved in using computers and the Internet. The single greatest ‘yeah but’ I hear has to do with ‘The Filter.’
It used to be in these situations that I would quickly point out that there are ways to cope with the filter, that by contacting the right people and asking the right questions, the filter need not represent a brick wall stop to the type of activities they want to do with their students. I get quite a bit of push back to this though currently, by teachers who assert that they have called, or their supervisor has called to have something unblocked by the filter and that they’ve received one type of ’NO’ or another. I, of course, have no way of testing the veracity of these claims, but I will say that I’ve heard it so often, with such tenacity and vehemence, that what is clear to me is that the filter does represent, by reputation if not in fact, a very serious disincentive for teachers to do what by now they really know they must do, involve use of the Internet in their teaching.
Unfortunately, the current administration has demonstrated repeatedly that speaking up and bucking the system may result in disciplinary action. And so, making a big noise for the benefit of the kids is a phenomenon that has waned just as the integration of Web 2.0 resources in the classroom has become more and more necessary.
Many have pointed out that the school system is currently experiencing a revolving door personnel turnover that spins faster than ever before. One facet of this is that teachers hear that the Internet won’t work in their classroom, won’t give them access to much of what they want, and consequently many no longer even try to use it with their classes. That this is due to a filter, let alone that there are ways to cope with it, is often not even part of their understanding of the situation. What is true for them is that the web is not part of the classroom equation, contributing to frustration on the part of teachers and boredom for students, and ultimately abandonment of the school system by a very high percentage of teachers and principals.
The only way to overcome this in terms of promoting the use of the incredibly rich body of web-based resources these professional might use, would be a serious outreach effort. The school system must continually and diligently inform new teachers, those who’ve replaced colleagues who may have known about coping with filtering previously, that they can prevail in this. My inference from speaking earnestly with many in-service teachers is that no significant such effort is taking place.
I find that much of your advice to teachers in this episode was sound. Yes, get to know the man who runs your filter! Yes, be courageous in standing up for the web-based instruction you believe in! And yes, organizing holds promise! These are positive, non adversarial approaches and represent due diligence that should be the first line of action. Yet, in the end, once organized there is likely to be conflict. Not over the issue of “will you (Mr. Filter Man) please help me?”, but in forcing the administration to concede that overcoming the filter’s discouraging effects on its own teaching force involves acknowledging the high importance of using the web in teaching and learning. By evaluating actions instead of rhetoric, an honest assessment would lead one to conclude that this hasn’t happened yet.
From my perspective, the fact that we still have this problem is part and parcel of the real issue, the lack of comprehension by the upper echelon of the administration that there are legitimate… no, make that mission critical reasons, for teachers and students to be working online and that ENSURING that there is a clear path for them to do so is important!
We must all continue to work hard to make sure that they come to and acknowledge this very important point!
Thanks again for this highly informative and important podcast episode!
Your Colleague, Mark Gura
March 26th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Great discussion. Thanks for hitting so many critical issues, includng teacher perceptions. I blogged about it here: http://blog.teachersfirst.com/thinkteach/2008/03/26/slapping-hands-and-removing-barriers/
March 31st, 2008 at 2:35 pm
This is an interesting point of discussion. I work in a middle school library, which has its own content filtering in place, albeit, through a different process than the classrooms. But I saw this today on another teaching blog:
We’re pretty affluent in our own community, but it does make me think, which parts of the content filtering debate comes from which schools, inner city or affluent suburb?.
the quote is from here.
Best, Jim
January 18th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Thank you for your wonderful insights effecting education.
Schools block so many wonderful sites. Districts end up punishing everyone because of a few students’ actions. I feel students need to be accountable for their actions.