Online Censorship in Schools Leaves Teachers in the Lurch, Too

Educators describe scrapped lesson plans, laborious appeal processes, and digital dysfunction in response to The Markup’s latest investigation By Tara García Mathewson

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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.

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