Aleeza Siddique, 15, was in Spanish class earlier this year at her high school in Northern California when a lesson about newscasts was derailed by her school’s internet filter. His teacher told the class to open their school-issued Chromebooks and check a list of links he had curated from Spanish broadcast news giant Telemundo. The students tried, but every single link showed the same page: a picture of a padlock.

“None of this works for us,” Aleeza said. “The site is completely blocked.”

He said his teacher scrambled to pivot and fill the 90-minute class with other activities. From what he remembered, they checked vocabulary lists and independently clicked on online quizzes from Quizlet – a less dynamic use of time.

New data released this week of the DC-based Center for Democracy & Technology shows how often some of the blocking occurs across the country. The nonprofit digital rights advocacy organization conducted its fifth annual nationally representative survey of middle and high school teachers and parents as well as high school students about a variety of tech issues. About 70% of teachers and students this year said that web filters hinder students’ ability to complete their assignments.

Almost all schools use some form of web filter to comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which requires districts to take advantage of the federal E-rate program for discounted internet and telecommunications equipment to prevent children from seeing graphics and pornographic images online. A 2024 investigation of The Markupwhich is now part of CalMatters, has uncovered far more widespread obstruction of school districts than required by federal law, some of which are political, mirroring the culture wars of what students have in school libraries. That investigation found that school districts blocked access to sex education and LGBTQ+ resources, including suicide prevention. It also found routine blocking of websites that students were looking for for academic research. And because school districts tend to set different restrictions for students and staff, teachers can as failed by filters as anyone else because of their complexity in lesson planning.

Web filtering is ‘subjective and unchecked’

Elizabeth Laird, director of civic technology equity for the center and lead author of the report, said Markup’s reporting helped spur more survey questions to better understand how schools use filters as a “subjective and untested” method of restricting students’ access to. information.

“The scope of what’s being blocked is much more extensive and value-laden than I think we knew to ask last year,” Laird said.

While previous surveys have revealed how often students and teachers report disproportionate filtering of content related to reproductive health, LGBTQ+ issues and content about people of color, the center asked the respondents this year if they think content related to or about immigrants is more likely to be blocked. . About a third of the students said yes.

Aleeza would have said yes, after her experience at Telemundo. The California teenager said how often he runs around the blocks depends on how much research he’s trying to do and how much he has to do on his computer at school. When he took a debate class, he often ran into blocks while researching controversial topics. An article in Slate magazine about LGBTQ+ rights gave him a block screen, for example, because the entire news website was blocked. He said he avoids his Chromebook at school as much as possible, doing homework on his personal laptop away from the school’s Wi-Fi whenever he can.

Fully three-quarters of teachers who responded to a recent survey said students use workarounds to access an unfiltered internet. Laird found this number extraordinary. Web filters, then, do not prevent students from accessing the websites they want to access, and they hinder the completion of schoolwork. “This raises a fundamental question of whether this technology, in trying to prevent students from accessing harmful content, is doing more harm than good,” Laird said.

Nearly a third of teachers surveyed by the Center for Democracy & Technology said their schools block content related to the LGBTQ+ community. About half of the said information about sexual orientation and reproductive health is blocked. And Black and Latino students are more likely to say that content related to people of color is disproportionately blocked on their school devices.

For students like Aleeza, blocking is frustrating in practice as well as in principle.

“The amount they’re replacing is actively interfering with our ability to have an education,” he said. Usually, he has no idea why a website triggers the block page. Aleeza said that this is arbitrary and believes that her school should be more transparent about what it blocks and why.

“We should have the right to know where we are being protected,” he said.

Audrey Baime, Olivia Brandeis, and Samantha Yee, all members of the CalMatters Youth Journalism Initiative, contributed reporting for this story.

This article is originally published on The Markup and republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.