A major internet filtering company will stop collecting and selling the web habits of millions of schoolchildren who use its product after privacy groups howled and the Defense Department had second thoughts, the company disclosed Feb. 22.

N2H2 Inc., whose “Bess” internet filtering solution is used by a reported 14 million students in the United States and recently was voted as the best internet filter available by eSchool News readers, said it has stopped selling its “Class Clicks” list that reports the web sites students visit on the internet and how much time they spend at each one.

After N2H2 announced its deal with marketing research firm Roper Starch Worldwide last September, privacy groups called the filtering company a “corporate predator” and were incensed over reports the information would be sold to the Defense Department for recruiting.

“It is not the purpose of the public schools to abet corporations that spy on the web browsing of schoolchildren,” said Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert, a Washington-based group targeting commercialism in schools.

The Bess filter is used by 40 percent of the schools that use internet filters to screen out objectionable web sites. N2H2 spokesman Allen Goldblatt said his company and Roper Starch “mutually decided” to drop the relationship.

“From our end, this was a distraction for us,” Goldblatt said. “What we do is work on filtering.”

Goldblatt said that no personally identifiable data about kids were ever collected or sold. Federal law prohibits collection or sale of a child’s personal information without parental permission.

“Our business is protecting kids. We never would, never have, and never will jeopardize anyone’s privacy,” Goldblatt said. “I think any time you have a great public debate about privacy issues …, this is a good thing.”

The company will stop providing all reports, Goldblatt said.

After writing to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to stop the deal, Ruskin received a letter from the department saying that, while learning how kids used military web sites would be “appealing,” the department had second thoughts.

“Prior to the news articles that were recently published, we believed that Class Clicks was a commonly used market research service,” read the February letter from W.S. Sellman, the Pentagon’s director of accession policy.

“Upon further investigation, we realized that it is a new concept,” the letter continued. “At this point, we are delaying our decision about participating in the Class Clicks project, indefinitely.”

Ruskin called the announcement a victory, saying many school administrators did not know about the collection of data and objected to its use.

“It’s good that N2H2 is going to stop its schoolroom snooping,” Ruskin said.

For its part, N2H2 says it has been talking about—and distributing—this information for more than a year, including presentations at educational technology conferences and monthly dispatches of data to the education press for dissemination to educators.

The company said it began collecting the information to help educators use the internet more effectively during instruction. N2H2 subsequently explored ways to share and profit from the information—hence its business venture with Roper Starch.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) began investigating the Class Clicks list in January, asking the Defense Department and individual states for their records on the deal.

EPIC legal counsel Chris Hoofnagle said he was skeptical about N2H2’s commitment to privacy.

“EPIC believes that children should not be profiled while using the internet,” Hoofnagle said. “It’s not clear from what I know now that [such profiling] will end.”

A law passed during the closing moments of last year’s Congress requires libraries and schools to install internet filters, or lose federal funds earmarked for technology.

The law, called the Children’s Internet Protection Act, takes effect in late April, but the American Civil Liberties Union and American Library Association are challenging it in court.

Despite N2H2’s decision to stop selling its web-use data, privacy advocates worry there are no rules requiring internet filtering companies to disclose their business practices fully, especially since CIPA would require schools to use their products.

“We want to see broader protections for children,” Hoofnagle said. “There’s not adequate assurance that [information collected by filtering companies] will remain anonymous.”

Links:

N2H2 Inc.
http://www.n2h2.com

Roper Starch
http://www.roper.com

Commercial Alert
http://www.essential.org/alert

Electronic Privacy Information Center
http://www.epic.org

Education Secretary Rod Paige—who served as superintendent of the Houston Independent School District before joining the Bush administration—joined three other exemplary superintendents in discussing how technology can be used to break down barriers to student achievement at the 133rd annual American Association of School Administrators (AASA) conference in Orlando Feb. 16 to 18.

Paige said there are many ways technology can be used to enhance education: “It’s just a matter of the amount of imagination we bring to student learning.”

In addressing a question about linking student achievement to technology, Paige asked whether pencils or overhead projectors advanced student learning and warned that schools can’t view technology as an end to itself.

“Technologies are simply tools to help good teachers refine skills,” he said. “There are great uses of technology, and there are uses of technology that are completely meaningless.”

Paige was joined in the technology discussion by David Clune, superintendent of the Wilton Public School District in Connecticut; Raymond Yeagley, superintendent of the Rochester School District in New Hampshire; and Neil Pedersen, superintendent of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City School System in North Carolina.

Paige encouraged administrators to set high standards, since this motivates people to do outstanding things. As Houston’s superintendent, his rule was “no school is going to be acceptable anymore”; instead, schools had to be exemplary.

He also said creative teachers are key to making good use of the internet in schools. “The very best way to get good use of the internet is to get creative teachers,” Paige said.

The Houston public schools use the internet to offer rare courses, such as Russian, through distance learning. Also, Apex Learning provides Advanced Placement courses, such as World History or microeconomics, to the district’s students via the internet.

“We can have that student stay in their own school and take that course,” Paige said. “It gives us an opportunity to maximize scare resources and ignore geographical boundaries.”

Pedersen said educators must reinforce the idea that anyone can publish material on the internet, so what is posted isn’t always accurate.

The AASA conference offered school administrators several opportunities to examine leadership in all areas of education—including dealing with parents, relating to the community, improving equality among students, and using technology to improve education.

“School leaders truly have a unique opportunity to shape and form our schools,” AASA President Ben Canada said during the opening session. “Leadership, it’s in our hands.”

He reminded school administrators that most is not all, and much more needs to be done to ensure that all kids succeed. “Our purpose is to educate ‘all’ the children,” Canada said.

Paige also was honored as AASA’s National Superintendent of the Year.

“The life span is so short for a superintendent,” Paige said during his acceptance speech. “We cannot solve long-time problems with short-term leadership.”

Paige said President George W. Bush is serious about his goal, “No Child Left Behind.”

“You and I both know some children are not getting an appropriate education,” Paige said. “You and I have an ‘appropriate education gap’ to close.”

He said the new administration will help educators close that gap by offering schools more flexibility, in exchange for greater accountability.

Exhibitor news

AOL Time Warner and online test preparation provider TestU have teamed up to offer free SAT preparation to all students through the AOL@School web site. In an effort to equalize the playing field for all kids going to college and also to increase its brand name, TestU has provided a four-week SAT “crunch” course on AOL@School, which receives millions of page views each month.

“AOL is this huge megaphone,” said Richard Bolton, TestU’s president and chief executive.

TestU’s SAT course diagnoses a student’s ability and then provides the student with a customized curriculum based on his or her strengths and weaknesses. Students who practice for the SAT with TestU’s service generally increase their scores by about 130 points, Bolton said.

Since students in kindergarten through second grade have limited reading skills, AOL@School has added a pictorial search tool that lets students search for appropriate web sites using picture buttons, such as an animal button. Also, AOL’s parental controls, which filter internet content, recently were rated No. 1 by Consumer Reports, the company said.

Learning.com, based in Portland, Ore., announced its online courseware that teaches core computer skills to students in kindergarten through grade five, called the Easy Tech Instructional System. This software program systematically teaches students computer concepts—such as typing, bolding text, and making graphs and spreadsheets—so teachers can focus on applying those skills, rather than teaching them.

Easy Tech is delivered over the internet, and its lessons are correlated to the International Society for Technology in Education’s National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) at each grade level. The lesson content draws from traditional subjects such as math and language arts, so the time students spend with Easy Tech reinforces other learning objectives, the company said.

NetSchools Corp. is providing a complete, bundled hardware package, called NetSchools Constellation, that gives every student a wireless, kid-proof StudyPro laptop made by Hewlett-Packard Co. The StudyPro lacks a disk drive, but because it’s wireless, students can beam their work to their teacher or the printer. The StudyPro laptop also comes with Microsoft Office, Netscape’s internet browser, and a patented anti-theft device which shuts the computer down completely if it hasn’t made a connection with the school’s network within eight days.

The NetSchools Constellation program also gives each teacher a fully functioning HP OmniBook notebook computer and a subscription to NetSchools Orion, which features links to more than 47,000 web sites correlated to state standards and an assortment of online tools, including eMail for keeping in touch with parents.

Plato Learning announced that it now offers computer-based courseware for students in grades K-12 as a result of its acquisition of Wasatch Inc., a provider of K-8 educational software. Wasatch, of Salt Lake City, provided software to a reported 1,500 schools in 600 districts.

“Plato will integrate the Wasatch K-8 courseware with its comprehensive Plato Learning System for middle and high schools to become [a] truly comprehensive and … contemporary online curriculum for the K-12 market,” said John Murray, president and CEO of Plato Learning.

The ScholarChip Co., which sells a smart card with a micro chip imbedded on it, launched at AASA. Not only does this card serve as an identification card, but students can use it to buy lunch, gain entry to locked areas, and to permit their access on the school’s network.

“Students who are receiving free or reduced lunch, for example, sometimes feel embarrassed,” said Roberta Gerold, superintendent of the Miller Place School District on Long Island. “The ScholarChip card can be used as a debit card—no one needs to know the lunch code is funded through personal dollars or through financial aid.”

TaskStream, which offers online staff development, announced the TS-Tracker, a tool that lets administrators monitor, manage, and assess the effects of professional development on classroom teaching. TaskStream’s professional development teaches educators a new skill and then helps them create a lesson to implement the new skill in their classroom. All the work is captured in TaskStream’s database. The TS-Tracker lets administrators see this information for purposes of evaluation.

Vantage Learning debuted its Intellimetric technology, which reportedly grades long-answer questions using artificial intelligence with the same accuracy as human scorers. The company says its technology lets teaches assign more writing assignments to students without the extra burden of marking or delays before students get any feedback. Intellimetric already is used by Edison Schools and the College Board, Vantage Learning said.

Links:

American Association of School Administrators
http://www.aasa.org

Houston Independent School District
http://www.houstonisd.org

AOL@School
http://school.aol.com

TestU
http://www.testu.com

Learning.com
http://www.learning.com

NetSchools Corp.
http://www.netschools.com

Hewlett-Packard Co.
http://www.hp.com

Plato Learning Inc.
http://www.plato.com

TaskStream
http://www.taskstream.com

Intellimetric
http://www.intellimetric.com

A new policy that may keep used military computers out of schools could hamper technology in some of the nation’s poorest classrooms and force schools to find additional funding for computers.

Deputy Defense Secretary Rudy de Leon issued a memo Jan. 8 directing all military agencies to destroy all hard drives and processors on computers they are no longer using, including computers that had not been used for classified work.

Since 1992, the department had required only computers that dealt with classified information to be destroyed. Hard drives on computers that dealt with unclassified information were supposed to be wiped clean and donated to schools through the federal government’s “Computers for Learning” program.

Each year since 1994, Utah’s Hill Air Force Base has donated $5 million worth of computers to schools in Utah, Idaho, Arizona, and Nevada, said Brenda Snyder, the alternative equipment officer.

Snyder said the new memo makes all computers that were to be donated this year worthless to schools because she must remove and destroy all hard drives, cables, and processors.

The base will continue donating monitors and printers to schools, Snyder said.

The new policy is overkill, said a spokesman for Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah.

“We see this as a typical federal government overreaction to deal with a real problem of security lapses,” said Bill Johnson, Hansen’s spokesman.

Johnson said this policy will hurt the federal Computers for Learning program. “It [Computers for Learning] has benefitted the public by donating millions of dollars of computers to schools nationwide,” he said.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said he supports the new policy and does not believe the Computers for Learning program will suffer.

“I am encouraging the Department of Defense to continue looking for a reliable way to erase sensitive information from computers. But until the Pentagon can find one, I must support the decision to destroy hard drives before computers are given away to school districts as a responsible one,” Hatch said.

Susan Hansen, a spokeswoman for the Defense Department, said the department’s audit revealed that in some instances “sensitive information, such as lists of people’s names and their addresses,” had been left on hard drives of donated computers.

“Even unclassified defense information can be a serious risk if it is accidentally left on computers and somehow gets into the wrong hands,” Hatch said.

Susan Hansen, wife of Rep. Jim Hansen, said the Defense Department last year donated more than 74,000 pieces of computer equipment—totalling nearly $60 million—to schools nationwide.

Johnson said Rep. Hansen plans to “dig in and ask questions why they want to destroy perfectly good functioning computers” instead of donating the computers that did not handle anything more classified “than love eMails to wives.”

Clearfield High School, which is part of Utah’s Davis County School District, has 40 computers from Hill Air Force Base, and all the hard drives were wiped clean when the school received them, said Casey Brown, the school’s technology specialist.

Robin Marble, K-3 resource teacher for the district’s Hill Field Elementary School, said out of the 35 computers the school received in November and December, three of them still had some information on them “that was totally useless to us. I just reformatted them. We needed the computers.”

Marble said the donated computers run slower than the current models on the market, but much faster than the ones the school had before, and they are compatible with programs the students need now. The school’s old computers could not run the new educational programs.

Besides donating the computers, the base also donated the monitors and the Windows 95 license so the school could use the programs, Marble said.

Links:

Computers for Learning
http://www.computers.fed.gov

Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah
http://www.house.gov/hansen

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah
http://www.senate.gov/~hatch

Department of Defense
http://www.defenselink.mil

Clearfield High School
http://www.davis.k12.ut.us/chs

Hill Field Elementary School
http://www.davis.k12.ut.us/hillfield

The Massachusetts Department of Education is considering whether to allow tech-savvy students to use computers to take certain parts of its high-stakes assessment. Reason: A recent study found students who regularly use computers for writing assignments scored up to 10 percent higher when tested via computers.

Partly it was a matter of what students were used to. Those accustomed to writing in long-hand did better when asked to complete writing assignments using that method. But overall, on an 80-item test, the computer users scored up to eight points higher than those who completed writing assignments in long-hand.

“The Department of Education will be addressing the matter in the coming years to determine if it is feasible and reliable” to permit computer use, said David P. Driscoll, the state’s commissioner of education.

But Driscoll said statewide computerized testing is still a long way off, because not all schools have equal access to computers.

“We’d have to make the availability and the keyboarding experience equal throughout the [state] for all children, and that’s going to take awhile,” Driscoll said. “For the foreseeable future, all students will have to take some form of paper-and-pencil writing assessment.”

Last year, Boston College researcher Michael Russell along with Tom Plati, director of libraries and educational technologies at the Wellesley, Mass., Public Schools, led a study involving 525 fourth-, eighth-, and 10th-grade Wellesley students.

Half were given the essay portion of the 1999 Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) language arts test via computer, while the other half wrote their essays out with a pencil and paper.

Before the tests were scored, the written answers were typed so they looked the same as the others.

After studying the results, the researchers found that students scored higher when they took the exam using the technology they used on a daily basis, whether it was typing on a computer or writing long-hand. In addition, students who used computers wrote significantly longer essays.

The results—which were published in February in TCRecord.org, an online journal of Teachers College at Columbia University—showed the computer-users outperformed their pencil-using peers. This confirmed similar research conducted in 1995 and 1998 by Russell, who is affiliated with Boston College’s National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy.

“MCAS has the potential to help improve the quality of public education,” Russell said. “The test’s current paper-and-pencil format, however, does not allow students who are accustomed to working on computers to produce their best work.”

Plati agreed. “A lot of kids are not being measured accurately,” he said. “In three years, you’re talking about 10,000 [fewer] kids [who could be] failing the language arts test.”

The MCAS exam has been given annually to students in grades four, eight, and 10 since 1998 as a way to assess student performance and evaluate the state’s school districts.

Results have been disappointing each year, and more than one-third of all sophomores failed the 2000 exam. Beginning with the class of 2003, all students will be required to pass the MCAS to graduate.

Russell said students taught to write on keyboards from an early age are accustomed to using short cuts to edit and rewrite their work. When asked to switch to paper and pencil they quickly tire, get sore arms, and can grow frustrated, he said.

If students are accustomed to writing with paper and pencil, they should take the tests using paper and pencil, the researchers said. But if students are used to writing with computers, they should have access to computers during a test.

“What we are saying is, let kids use the medium they are used to using,” Plati said. “You’re hurting kids that use technology” by giving them a pencil-and-paper essay exam.

Some state officials have criticized the study for inaccurately representing the state’s demographics. Wellesley Public Schools has a student-to-computer ratio of 4.7 to 1. According to the Department of Education, most districts had an average ratio of 6.3 to 1 as of the 1998-99 school year.

In response, Plati and Russell called for the study to be recreated around the state. The findings, they said, will likely be the same.

“Allowing students the option of performing written items on computer or on paper would be an enhancement to any assessment program, but adding a computer option clearly presents logistical challenges and raises test security issues,” Russell acknowledged.

Indeed, Department of Education spokesman Jonathan Palumbo said the study’s findings were interesting, but it will take time before testing procedures can be changed.

“Our first concentration now is to help kids pass the test,” he said. “Not to say helping kids score higher isn’t important, but right now we first want them to pass the test so they can graduate.”

Links:

Massachusetts Department of Education
http://www.doe.mass.edu

Boston College’s National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy
http://nbetpp.bc.edu

Wellesley Public Schools
http://www.wellesley.mec.edu

TCRecord.org
http://www.tcrecord.org

Two leading educational technology advocacy groups have sent a joint position paper to President Bush’s staff and to members of Congress, urging continued federal leadership on key ed-tech issues.

The document is a response to Bush’s education plan, which calls for a consolidation of technology funding into a single block-grant program that would be administered state by state.

The 14-page “Preparing the Classroom for the 21st Century: An Agenda for Federal Involvement in Educational Technology” was written by Leslie Harris & Associates, the legislative representative for the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN).

“We will use this as a ‘talking points’ document,” said Lee Jee Hang Lee, the firm’s senior legislative associate. “We wanted to map out how we feel about education technology, and we wanted to have a new document to provide guidance to the 107th Congress.”

According to Lee, the policy paper has been posted to both groups’ web sites and has been sent to key members of Congress, particularly to education-related committee members. It also was directed to the Department of Education and to President Bush’s domestic policy staff.

The paper references many of the findings of the Congressional Web-based Education Commission, a bipartisan commission charged by the Clinton administration with researching and reporting on the internet’s potential to transform learning. In January, the commission released a report titled “The Power of the Internet for Learning: Moving from Promise to Practice.”

“ISTE and CoSN both contributed testimony to that commission, and they felt the commission had some great recommendations,” said Lee.

The ISTE and CoSN document praises federal education technology initiatives that have flourished over the past several years.

“Through support for programs embodied in Title III of [the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA] and the eRate, among others, the federal government has spurred the development of innovative learning strategies and connected thousands of schools to the internet,” the report points out.

But, without sustained federal leadership in these areas, the Bush plan risks undermining the progress schools have made already, the groups say.

“ISTE and CoSN stand ready to work with Congress and the [Bush] administration to identify where consolidation and additional flexibility may be appropriate,” according to the position paper. “But we believe that the gains that have been achieved thus far will be imperiled if the federal government simply cedes its leadership role in this area.”

Bush’s plan, called “No Child Left Behind,” states his preference for block grants, in which states are given chunks of federal money and left to determine which state programs that money will be allotted to, and in what proportions.

“We realize that things are going to be consolidated under Title III grants [if Bush gets his way], but we used this paper to talk about the three primary areas where we feel consolidation is not a good idea,” said Lee.

First, consolidation could hurt the research and development portion of the national education technology plan, Lee said.

“There is just no way to efficiently disseminate best practices for each of the 50 states,” he said. “The federal government has to have a role in that area.”

Second, said Lee, ISTE and CoSN do not believe in consolidation of funds for preservice training for teachers, and they urge the continuation of the Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) program as it exists now.

PT3 is slated to disburse $125 million in grants this year to consortia of teachers’ colleges, community organizations, and local school districts to ensure that future generations of classsroom teachers have the skills needed to use technology effectively in their lessons. It is one of nine Title III programs that would be consolidated into block grants under Bush’s plan.

Finally, Lee said, “We hope the eRate will be left out of any block grant program. We fully support the continuation of the eRate as a separate fund.”

Keith Krueger, executive director of CoSN, said he thinks this is the most important of the groups’ recommendations.

“Bottom line, we want to make sure that the eRate is maintained as a separate activity,” he said. “If the Bush administration chooses to move to block grants, we don’t want to lose the momentum [the eRate has gained] so far.”

Bush’s plan to shift eRate funds into a single block grant that also encompasses Department of Education funding has sharply divided educators. Many school leaders have said they would welcome the reduction in paperwork such a solution promises, while others fear it would leave the eRate—which is now written into law—vulnerable to the vagaries of the annual appropriations process in Congress.

Most observers agree it might be too early to tell exactly what changes will take place under the Bush administration. But ISTE and CoSN hope to use their position paper to steer discussion on these issues.

“We’re having initial discussion with the White House now, but we’ve been working with the House and the Senate to provide them with input on legislation they are crafting,” Lee said. “Hopefully, the Senate and Congress will look at this document as a useful source of information. We want to move the discussion along about education technology.”

Krueger’s best advice to the new administration? “I’d say, listen to the folks who are really making ed-tech work. Let’s not lose the progress we’ve made so far, and let’s leverage it to continue to make progress in the future.”

Links:

Consortium for School Networking
http://www.cosn.org

International Society for Technology in Education
http://www.iste.org

“Preparing the Classroom for the 21st Century: An Agenda for Federal Involvement in Educational Technology”
http://www.cosn.org/resources/iste_cosn_policypaper.pdf

Leslie Harris & Associates
http://www.lharris.com

“No Child Left Behind” (Bush education plan)
http://www.ed.gov/inits/nclb/index.html

RECOMMENDATIONS OF ISTE AND CoSN

The “Preparing the Classroom for the 21st Century” policy paper urges lawmakers to consider nine main points when examining legislation that could affect current educational technology programs:

1. Maintain an emphasis on equity. According to the policy paper, “The principal goal of federal education policy is to ensure equity. Despite significant gains in technology capacity and connectivity, attributable in large part to federal programs, schools serving poor children continuously lag behind in understanding how to effectively integrate technology into curricula.”

2. Keep a separate technology title in ESEA. “Federal leadership has been crucial to maximizing investments in education technology at all levels. A separate technology title will [ensure] an emphasis on innovation and place a national focus on bringing education technology to schools. It will also help [ensure] that the consolidation process does not diminish federal dollars committed to ed-tech.”

3. Sharpen the focus on professional development. “Both recently released reports of the Web-based Education Commission and the Department of Education recommend bold action to improve teacher preparation, particularly in the area of technology use and integration,” the groups say. They recommend that 30 percent of all funds distributed to states and local districts, whether through existing programs or block grants, should be committed to professional development for staff at all levels. “In turn, the federal government should examine emerging models and disseminate information nationally to ensure a focus on integrating technology into the curriculum,” they add. They also recommend that federal policy makers “create incentives in ESEA that encourage states to adopt educational technology standards for all education professionals” and urge continued support of the Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology program.

4. Include rigorous evaluation in all federal ed-tech programs. But standardized testing may not be enough, say ISTE and CoSN. “Periodic standardized testing identifies where and which schools are improving, but without formative evaluation during the life of the program, it is difficult to say why a school has improved or, in the case of ed-tech, whether or how it has made a difference in the classroom.”

5. Invest in education technology as an assessment tool. According to the policy paper, ISTE and CoSN believe that “the federal government should develop and disseminate quality assessment tools and strategies and provide assessment of education on a national scale. New assessment indicators need to be developed to capture the effects of students’ access to new tools.”

6. Expand the ed-tech research agenda. “The federal government must develop and pursue a national research agenda that includes nonvendor-specific research into cognition and learning sciences, national assessment strategies and tools, and the identification of best practices in the area of ed-tech.”

7. Create an ed-tech clearinghouse. ISTE and CoSN both believe that a national clearinghouse for best practices in educational technology will help maximize the federal government’s investment in education reform “by identifying the processes that have successfully improved student achievement.”

8. Preserve and expand the federal leadership role. According to the policy paper, the National Activities section of the ESEA’s Tile III “gives the secretary of education broad discretion to nurture the growth of innovation in education technology and build leadership at all levels.” ISTE and CoSN believe that “this federal leadership role is crucial if there is to be a focused and coherent strategy in this area.” The paper recommends that the secretary of education be given the “discretion to pursue programs of national significance” and that the Department of Education’s Office of Technology be retained.

9. Maintain the eRate program. According to ISTE and CoSN, “The work of the eRate is far from over.” Citing increased demand for Year 3 discounts, the paper says, “Calls for the eRate to be moved to the Department of Education and folded into block grants are misguided. Not only is the legal authority for such action unresolved (since it is a universal service program paid for by telecommunications carriers), but ending the program and placing it in the annual appropriations process would jeopardize the security of its funding and undermine the careful technology planning of thousands of eRate participants, ultimately setting back efforts to bring powerful new learning tools to these education institutions nationwide.” Rather than dismantle the eRate, ISTE and CoSN urge the FCC to streamline the application process within the current structure.

Privacy advocates found another reason to oppose the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) when the Wall Street Journal reported Jan. 26 that the Defense Department had purchased information about students’ web-surfing habits from filtering company N2H2 Inc. of Seattle.

The news prompted the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) to ask the Defense Department why it wanted this information. The group filed a Freedom of Information request asking for all documentation related to the transaction. “We wanted to know essentially what interest the Department of Defense has in this data on children and [what it has to do with] the defense of the country,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a staff attorney for EPIC. Hoofnagle said he also filed a Freedom of Information request with Florida’s Hillsborough County School District to see what N2H2 tells customers about its business practices.

Other privacy groups reportedly contacted Pentagon officials and asked them to not use information collected about children for marketing purposes.

EPIC and other privacy advocates are concerned that internet filtering companies might profit from collecting and selling data about which web sites students are visiting at school. Their concern is even greater because CIPA would give public schools that receive federal funding no choice but to use filters.

N2H2’s filtering system, Bess, is widely used by the K-12 community, and eSchool News readers recently voted it as the best internet filter available. Bess keeps a log of all web site addressess that users visit, without recording any identifying information about users.

Because the logs provide useful insight into which web sites are visited the most for educational purposes, N2H2 has been developing ways to share and profit from the information, said Jim O’Halloran, N2H2’s director of product marketing.

N2H2 started a business venture with marketing firm Roper Starch Worldwide, which sells the data to interested companies—such as the Defense Department—as a monthly report on where children spend their time online at school. A Defense Department spokesman told the publication Inside the Pentagon that the department signed a contract with Roper Starch to help target the military’s recruiting efforts, since the army recently launched a new recruiting campaign.

“We don’t make the decision of who the aggregate information goes to. That is a Roper Starch determination,” O’Halloran said. “I should add that the nature of this information—being highly aggregated and anonymous—should not cause anyone any concern at all.”

O’Halloran said the information N2H2 collects and sells does not reveal the identity of any particular users, because Bess doesn’t require users to sign in with a username or password. “There is no risk to any individual and no risk to any group. You could leave this information lying on any street corner, and it would cause no harm,” he said.

EPIC’s Hoofnagle said his group is wary of N2H2’s assertions. “We’ve heard arguments like that in the past,” he said. “We’ve also seen companies not fulfilling promises.”

N2H2 is planning to give its information on student web use to its education customers at no charge, O’Halloran said, so they can see how the internet is being used in schools around the country and thereby come to use the internet more effectively in their own schools.

In addition, company officials met with staff members from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to brief them about N2H2’s information-collection methods.

“We received a clean bill of health,” O’Halloran said of the company’s meeting with the FTC.

Toby Levine, a spokeswoman for the FTC, told eSchool News the meeting between the agency and the company was informal and did not include any type of evaluation of N2H2.

N2H2 also met with staff members of Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., since Cleland has significant concerns about data collection practices on the internet.

Patricia Murphy, Cleland’s press secretary, said the meeting with N2H2 “left our staff with some concerns—you could even say some serious concerns.”

Murphy said the two legislative assistants who met with N2H2 didn’t feel the company was willing to commit to a policy in which it would inform clients of its business practices openly.

“N2H2 [officials] said they were re-evaluating their methods, but they didn’t make any promises about making full disclosure of their practices to schools,” she said. “I think if they have full disclosure to the users of the software, we would have [fewer] concerns.”

O’Halloran said the company does, indeed, inform its customers of the software’s capabilites. “There’s a general awareness of N2H2’s ability to observe aggregate information,” he said.

N2H2 establishes its access to the internet use logs in its agreement with customers, O’Halloran said. “Customers who might be included in our anonymous, aggregated national sample can request at any time to be removed from the sample, but we have not historically provided that clause in the agreement itself,” he said. “We will now reconsider that policy.”

In addition, N2H2 has been talking about—and distributing—this information for more than a year, O’Halloran said, including presentations at educational technology conferences and monthly dispatches of information from the internet use logs to the education press for dissemination to educators. “For people to say that N2H2 has concealed its practice is simply untrue,” he said.

Nevertheless, privacy advocates worry that there are no rules requiring internet filtering companies to disclose their business practices fully, especially since CIPA would require schools to use their products.

“We want to see broader protections for children,” Hoofnagle said. “There’s not adequate assurance that [information collected by filtering companies] will remain anonymous.”

Links:

N2H2 Inc.
http://www.n2h2.com

Roper Starch
http://www.roper.com

Federal Trade Commission
http://www.ftc.gov

Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga.
http://www.senate.gov/~cleland

Electronic Privacy Information Center
http://www.epic.org