The Great Firewall of Comp Sci High
“This is actually a bigger issue than just being monitored. This is a privacy issue; this is a trust issue; this is an equity issue; this is an issue that impacts all of us.”
Youtube…BLOCKED. Common App…BLOCKED. Vox…BLOCKED. The New York Times…BLOCKED. Forbes…BLOCKED. Spotify…BLOCKED. USA Today…BLOCKED. The Washington Post…BLOCKED.
Imagine a world where certain websites are blocked on your laptop; a world where you can’t complete the work required of you because the resources you need to complete that work are blocked; a world where your every action is monitored and screened. This is the world that CSH students live in.
PART 1: WE ARE BEING MONITORED
Since the founding of CSH, the school has had certain websites blocked on students’ laptops and has encouraged the use of GoGuardian — a software used to monitor the actions of students online in real time — by teachers.
So how exactly does it work? And what’s wrong with it?
When a teacher uses GoGuardian, they are able to see the screens of each of their students and even do things like close tabs and control their screens. I recall practically all of my teachers (with the exception of one or two) using GoGuardian throughout my freshman and sophomore years (in my junior year only one used it, and in my senior year, no one has used it — but that isn’t the case for everyone).
If someone being able to see your every move online sounds creepy to you, don’t worry – it is creepy.
GoGuardian is technically only supposed to be used by teachers during school hours, and even more specifically during their classes; however, many of the current seniors and CSH alumni have stories to tell of teachers monitoring their actions with GoGuardian outside of school hours. Teachers are able to view all of their students' screens at the same time on one large browser, but once they click on a specific student’s screen, that student gets sent a notification that says GoGuardian is activated.
I can still recall one time in my sophomore year where I was up at around 8 PM doing homework and I got the notification that somebody was watching my screen with GoGuardian; what made it even worse was that, because GoGuardian doesn’t tell you who is watching your screen, I had no clue who it was. This happened to me at other times, when all I was doing was school work on my laptop. Fellow CSH senior Emilie Davis also had a similar experience where, on a four day weekend, she was using her laptop, and she received the notification that someone was watching her screen. Not long after she got the notification, whoever was watching her screen started closing her tabs even though she was doing nothing wrong.
My four years at Comp Sci High have made me get used to being monitored, so whenever something was blocked or I was being watched with GoGuardian, I grew accustomed to barely giving it a second thought. However, that all changed when I realized that this is actually a bigger issue than just being monitored. This is a privacy issue; this is a trust issue; this is an equity issue; this is an issue that impacts all of us.
To really get to the heart of this issue, I interviewed six students from the CSH community and asked them how they felt when teachers viewed their browser with GoGuardian and if they thought that teachers should be able to use it. They all unanimously agreed that the use of GoGuardian is “creepy,” an “invasion of privacy”, “a breach of space,” a “violation of personal information,” and that teachers should not be able to use it.
So why use software that is so invasive? What are the real benefits?
CSH Director of Culture, Brenda Gonzalez (who is in favor of GoGuardian), told me that some benefits are that “[the school] can protect kids from some pretty horrific stuff on the internet,” and that the school is also flagged “if students are doing an extensive amount of research about self harm and suicide so [the school] can intervene earlier rather than later.” She does wish that there would be more restrictions for 9th graders and less for 12th graders; however, the likeliness of that is very low because the school would need someone whose role is to specifically focus on and manage GoGuardian across all grades.
I also had the opportunity to speak with the CSH Assistant Director of Culture Mr. Smartt, who is in favor of the use of GoGuardian. When he was in high school, students just “had to do work on a piece of paper,” which felt a lot more “authentic” to him, and of course he knows we’re “moving into a digital era,” but he often likes “going back to the basics.” With so many options and things available online, he finds that “people get sucked into things other than work” very easily. The use of GoGuardian, to him, is essential in preventing people from falling down those rabbit holes of distraction.
But is monitoring people to stop them from being distracted a benefit? Or does it prevent them from learning because they are being hand-held?
CSH Director of STEM, Ms. Liani, only likes to use GoGuardian when necessary and believes that the overuse of GoGuardian can prevent students from “feel[ing] the repercussions of wasting their time or of cheating,” and ultimately takes away that lesson of learning through their actions. However, she also acknowledges that GoGuardian does have some benefits like making it easier for teachers to view students' work (instead of them having to flip through multiple documents), helping monitor students when they take tests, and seeing the pacing of students (which helps in lesson planning and checks for understanding).
In agreement with Ms. Liani was CSH English teacher Mr. Brooks, who believes that “if we’re using GoGuardian and not teaching executive functioning skills, then students lose those skills.” He also sees the value in giving students extra support with GoGuardian and helping those who can’t self-monitor learn how.
But let’s backtrack for a second, because this article isn’t just about GoGuardian — it’s also about the blocking of websites by the school.
PART 2: BLOCKED
From the hours of 9 AM to around 4:30 PM (whether school is in session or not), a copious amount of websites are blocked on the school laptops. This includes educational websites and resources that students need to complete their work, and, of course, entertainment sites like YouTube, which can still at times be needed by students to complete work.
In my AP Comparative Government and Politics class, one thing that we have explored is how authoritarian regimes like China and Russia heavily monitor citizens' internet usage, and how they have put up firewalls that prevent them from seeing anything that the regime doesn’t want them to see.
CSH is no different.
Of course, CSH isn’t literally an authoritarian regime, but it does monitor students in some of the same ways that an authoritarian regime might use. And in case you are wondering why this matters, it’s because heavily monitoring students by blocking their access to websites does have an impact on their learning.
The same six students that I mentioned interviewing about GoGuardian also unanimously agreed that the blocking of websites greatly hinders their ability to learn.
Among the six was CSH senior Jeremiah Padial, who shared with me a story about how he had been assigned a lab for chemistry on YouTube, but because all of the videos were blocked, he had to wait to complete the assignment. And while his grade wasn’t impacted because his chemistry teacher Ms. Bute was aware that many sites were blocked, he believes that if she wasn’t aware, it probably would have had a negative impact on his grade.
Even outside of the student experience, teachers also find that the blocking of sites hinders students’ ability to learn. CSH History Teacher Mr. Murray expressed to me how he has been “frustrated or surprised with sites that are blocked,” and feels that “one of the unintended consequences of [the] really rigorous vetting of websites is less academic rigor because [teachers are not] able to connect students with resources that can really push their thinking.”
Not too long ago actually, in Mr. Murray’s AP Comparative Government and Politics class, we were learning about the case of Mexico’s missing 43 students with relation to legitimacy and corruption in a regime. Mr. Murray’s lesson asked us to watch a video on the case so we could make connections to what we’d been learning in class, but (in case you didn’t see it coming) the video was blocked on all of our laptops. He ended up having to push back the lesson and cast the video for us in class, which wasn’t even that much of an improvement because there were so many technical difficulties in casting it.
Blocking websites doesn’t make students simply give up on doing their work; instead, it makes them “have to resort to creative methods” to get information. Consider the example of CSH Alum Frenly Sanchez, who had to get creative when the sources given to him by Mr. Kelly and Mr. Brooks for an English essay were blocked. In the words of Sanchez, “[s]tudents should not be distressed to the point where they have to do things that aren’t normally expected of them to get their information.”
PART 3: CULTURE
This isn’t just about learning, though. In fact, as I mentioned before, this is also about trust.
When I interviewed those same six students, I also asked them what message they felt the blocking of websites sends. Once again, they unanimously agreed — the blocking of websites sends the message that the school does not trust its students.
CSH senior Adyel Lantigua believes that “If [the school] trust[s] us enough to break a laptop and pay $150 for it, then [they] should trust us enough to go on a website.” And of course, he understands that “it makes sense to block certain things” like pornographic websites and other potentially harmful sites, but he does think that blocking “news sites is crazy.” His point about being trusted to pay for a laptop isn’t one taken in vain however.
Why give students laptops if you don’t trust them to use them? It’s completely illogical.
CSH Executive Director David Noah believes that before we can remove blocks and lessen monitoring, we have to “all agree we don’t want to look at pornography in school.”
There will always be students who do what they aren’t supposed to be doing, but to group everybody into the same category of recalcitrance and contempt is just wrong.
At CSH there is a big emphasis placed on student-teacher relationships — it's why we have restorative conversations and it’s why we do so many bonding activities.
But what impact does this message of distrust have on those relationships and even more specifically on our school’s culture?
Another thing that the six student interviewees unanimously agreed on was that the school blocking and censoring things has had a negative impact on our culture.
Padial believes that it has “built up more of a gap between staff and students where students begin to resent authority more and more because they’re being more and more limited in what they can and can’t do.” CSH senior Shannakay Isaacs agrees, and also feels like “there could have been a conversation before [the school] blocked everything” but instead it was just “block and no explanation,” which furthered “the lack of communication that [students] seem to always get from teachers.”
Director Gonzalez has also found that “when teachers haven’t been honest and transparent with kids about using GoGuardian that has been harmful to our culture.” However, she does hope that the use of GoGuardian and the blocking of sites does “send a message about the formality of school” and how it is a “place [that] should be more formal than when you’re at home.”
But how can we expect to have a positive culture amongst teachers and students if the only message that students receive is “we don’t trust you?”
We can’t have a positive culture if not everyone feels some level of autonomy and trust, because it doesn’t matter which way you place the cookie cutter, distrust is distrust.
PART 4: EQUITY
But what does this have to do with equity?
CSH is a school that serves a low-income, Black, and Hispanic majority — meaning that students “rely more heavily on school devices” (Ceres). Not every CSH student can afford to buy themselves a laptop, and even worse is that those who can can’t use them in school because the school won’t allow them to be hooked up to the school wi-fi (unless they do an internship like Careerwise virtually from school). A March 2022 study by Senators Warren and Markey found that those same low-income, Black, and Hispanic students “are exposed more to surveillance than affluent students” since they can only use electronics provided by the school (Ceres).
My close friend Penelope Segerdahl is a senior at the Nightingale-Bamford School, an all-girls private school on the Upper East Side that costs over $60,000 a year to attend. Her school blocks only social media sites on their in-house wifi, so her learning has never been hindered by the blocking of educational sites. Not only that, her school also doesn’t use software like GoGuardian to monitor students.
There’s a clear difference in how CSH surveils its students and how Nightingale-Bamford surveils theirs, and it isn’t a positive one. It makes you wonder about the difference in equitable practices between a school that serves a largely affluent population and a school that doesn’t.
What makes this an even bigger issue, is the impact that this monitoring has, and specifically what schools do when they are alerted of suspicious behavior and searches. The aforementioned study found that “schools and companies were often not required to disclose the use and extent of their monitoring to students and parents. In some cases, districts can opt to have a company send alerts directly to law enforcement instead of a school contact” (Ceres). This ultimately means that a low-income minority student could face charges directly without any intervention from the school because their data was sent directly to law enforcement — it’s important to keep in mind that if an affluent student were to experience the same it’s less likely for them to face any serious consequences from the law because of the money they could expend towards legal resources.
And to look at it from an even broader lens, if you think about things like the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the creation of legislation that targets members of the LGBTQ+ community, they’re all connected to this monitoring. Thankfully, we live in a democratic state where that type of harmful legislation doesn’t really impact us, but a lot of other youth in this country can’t say the same.
Youth living in conservative states with anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation who rely on finding support and resources through their school device can have their data weaponized, especially if it goes straight to law enforcement or even an adult in their school who doesn’t share the same views as them.
According to a CDT report, “13 percent of students [know] someone who had been outed as a result of student-monitoring software” (Ceres). And even outside of sexual identity, in 2020, some Boston Public School students had their personal information (including documentation status) “shared on over 100 occasions with an intelligence group based in the city’s police department,” because the school had received it in a data report from a monitoring site, thus increasing their “risk of deportation” (Ceres).
This is a serious issue with serious implications for students. And it isn’t to say that CSH weaponizes its students’ data like the study found, but it is to say that by simply using software like GoGuardian, the school not only indirectly supports that weaponization, but also contributes to the equity issue of surveilling less affluent students.
I spoke with CSH English Teacher Mr. Ryan, who is vehemently against the use of GoGuardian and constant monitoring of students because of the aforementioned equity concerns and the negative emotions such monitoring creates. He has never used GoGuardian; however, he does believe that there are “some short term benefits that make things easier for adults” rather than students, which is why adults use it. Overall, he finds that “surveillance in general is demotivating rather than motivating,” which makes sense because one of his biggest concerns is that GoGuardian may “break privacy laws.”
On GoGuardian’s website, they have a list labeled “We Do,” and on that list they state that they:
“[C]omply with all federal and state student privacy laws.”
“[D]e-identify Personal Student Information for product development.”
However, there is a very distinct difference between complying with student privacy laws and respecting students’ privacy.
Of course, as Mr. Ryan said, there’s a “need for companies to protect their digital infrastructure and besides that there are important professional norms around what you use company tech for,” however, there is software that can do that without making people feel violated or distrusted.
PART 5: THE DARK SIDE?
One question that Mr. Ryan posed to me was “is there value in looking at the dark side of things for learning?”
There are dark and horrible things that define our human existence. Horrific events, people, and so many other things. But what if those things were used to educate oneself and learn?
A common saying is that history repeats itself, but the truth is, history repeats itself when people aren’t educated about the past. Instead of blocking off the “dark side,” perhaps we should leave it open for educating ourselves. Because, if you really think about it, looking up something like a true-crime case doesn’t make the student who searched it a future serial killer — it makes them someone who wants to learn or even just has an odd interest. But imagine that same student being blocked in the midst of their curiosity. What message does that send? How might that student feel?
CSH is a place that encourages curiosity, and yet, students can’t even be curious or educate themselves because so many of the resources they need are blocked.
If students can’t educate themselves or engage their curiosity, then is CSH really doing it’s job?
Curiosity can only be encouraged with freedom, and so I ask that CSH reconsiders not only the freedom it gives its students, but also truly reflects on the impact its restrictions have had on its students..
It’s up to us to extinguish the Great Firewall of Comp Sci High.
Work Cited
Ceres, Pia. “Kids Are Back in Classrooms and Laptops Are Still Spying on Them.” WIRED, 3 August 2022, https://www.wired.com/story/student-monitoring-software-privacy-in-schools/. Accessed 21 November 2023.