Blog Monitoring by Schools? February 26, 2008
Check this out! Any thoughts?
“The AP [reported] that the Illinois School District [planned] to monitor the blogs and MySpace profiles of some of their students.
The board of Community High School District 128 voted unanimously… to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of ‘illegal or inappropriate’ behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action. District officials [weren't going] to regularly search students’ sites, but [would] monitor them if they [got] a worrisome tip from another student, a parent or a community member.
At least one parent was unhappy with the decision. Mary Greenberg of Lake Bluff, who has a son at Libertyville High School, argued the district [was] overstepping its bounds.
‘I don’t think they need to police what students are doing online,’ she said. ‘That’s my job.’
That comment was criticized by the associate superintendent.
‘The concept that searching a blog site is an invasion of privacy is almost an oxymoron,’ he said. ‘It is called the World Wide Web.’
Technically the parent talked about policing and not about privacy, but the associate superintendent is correct about the lack of privacy on the Web. Any blog or social networking profile can be seen by just about anyone using the Internet unless the blog or profile is passworded or is set up so that it can only be seen by preselected people.”
Courtesy of http://www.bloggersblog.com/teens/
If it’s online, it’s fair game. It’s an excessive step on the part of the school district, but if they want to waste their time, more power to them.
This is one of these things that gets everybody worked up, but then once the district realizes how many human hours they’d need to actually devote to reading blogs and MySpace profiles and how utterly useless the fruits of their labor will be, they will probably come around to agreeing with everybody else: it simply isn’t worth it. For me, this isn’t an ethical issue so much as a political one. As a tax payer, my money is going to somebody to sit around and read MySpace? Uh, no–I’m sorry. Next time school board elections come around, those fools are out on their butts.
To what degree of illegal action are we talkiing about? If a teen is threating to harm or even kill other students, then I think that the school should step in. If a teen has porn on his or her website, that is not the school’s problem. Its the parents’ problem.
While I don’t think it’s feasible to devote the kind of manpower it would take to monitor students’ websites on a frequent, consistent basis (the money can be better spent - I had to use textbooks in my classroom that were more than a decade old, for example), I do think students should be prepared to face the consequences if administrators and the police deem posts that include references to behavior/events - in the school setting, that is - a substantial threat. If the references are to illegal or inappropriate behavior entirely unrelated to school, it must be the jurisdiction of the parents. The “in loco parentis” function of educators has been sorely abused, but they’ll have to be the first to say enough.
“The ‘in loco parentis’ function of educators has been sorely abused, but they’ll have to be the first to say enough.”
Great point. It does seem to be well overstepping their traditional mandate. Educators aren’t private detectives. Their interests in the behavior of their students should be largely confined to their own jurisdiction: the schools. Totally agree that this is outside their role.
Well, let me backtrack just a bit… I wasn’t suggesting that teachers have overstepped their boundaries as stewards of children. It’s that they’ve been FORCED to take on an unreasonable range of responsibilities that really belong to parents because some moms and dads simply won’t step up to the plate as they should. (Richard Peck recently referenced this in a powerful opinion piece, noting that there was a time when parents were afraid to get calls from schools, but now, it’s the schools who fear calls from parents.) When a threatening comment is made by a student on his/her blog that directly references the school setting, then yes, teachers and administrators have the right to get involved. But if the comments are otherwise framed, then the parent MUST be the primary agent in addressing the situation.