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NYC Teachers Forbidden To "Friend" Students
betterunixthanunix writes "The New York City Department of Education has issued rules covering student-teacher interactions on social networking websites. Following numerous inappropriate relationships between students and teachers that began on social networking sites, the rules prohibit teachers from communicating with students using their 'personal' accounts, and requires parental consent before students can participate in social networking for educational purposes. The rules also state that teachers have no expectation of privacy online, and that principals and other officials will inspect teachers' profiles. Oddly, the rules do not address communication involving cell phones, which the Department of Education's own investigations have shown to be even more problematic."
Good. That behavior is unprofessional.
Freedom of association? Does that apply? Why do educators seem to love tossing out personal rights and freedoms? Between this, video cameras on laptops, insisting on viewing personal accounts, etc, it's just disheartening. Why not RFID tag them all or lock them in cells on their personal time?
That was an issued raised here, in Georgia. Apparently you can not prevent parents from friending their children.
It's obviously disgusting and deviant that the teacher is boffing the kid's parent. Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.
People should get fired over this. It's almost as bad as teaching evolution.
I hope they worked out the boundary cases (teachers that are parents of students, etc). But by and large I think this is a reasonable first step.
No, I'm not trying to deny the inevitable march into social media, but the issues with Facebook friending are:
- possibility of mixing work and personal lives of teachers - there are many things that teachers are expected to not do in and around students in school, including students into their private social media could create problems
- inability of schools to monitor relationships between students and teachers, hoping to detect, if not prevent them from happening
When I last read about this type of issue, the proposed law was very clear - is a school district runs a Facebook-like web site that includes the ability to monitor communications between employees (teachers) and customers (students) that was fine.
Why do teachers need to 'friend' under-age students of theirs? And no, arguing that this is how kids want to communicate with their teachers isn't good enough - there are too many alternatives for teachers to answer questions, distribute class work, etc.
Ken
Why don't you also ban teachers from talking to students if they see them in a mall or on the street? This smacks of some luddite shithead who dislikes Facebook deciding on behalf of other people who should use it and how they should use it.
The real issue is that people use their personal social networking accounts to broadcast inappropriate information to all their "friends" (who are really aquaintances). I'm afraid that's dangerous no matter what your profession. 200+ people do NOT need to know that you got drunk, took drugs, got laid, are depressed, like inappropriate jokes, hate work, that your kid vomited, or that your pet did something cute. Thing is it should be self-policed, not regulated.
So what happens if the Facebook profile is public? Is the teacher automatically fired? And if it's not public how the hell do you police this? How do you determine a breach has occurred? Do you force them to reveal their passwords to you regularly? Do you force all students? Are we talking NYC or China here? Perhaps you want teachers to stay off the social networks. Anti-social teachers are the new gold standard.
The sad thing is teachers who use social media for outreach, to post interesting things, to share education resources....they just get left out in the cold because they are drowned out by the hoard of immature ego-centric Facebook addicted teachers with no life who won't use any resource appropriately no matter how you govern it.
Collectively we all get what we deserve...and at the moment that is a society in steep decline.
It's stated on page 4 of the document, section E, article 1, just after the (a). The provision that communication over personal accounts may not occur between teachers and students is subject to an exception in the case of relatives.
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I went to school in the 1960's, and obviously social networking and the internet were not a factor. I can't say there were any fewer problems then, but the major difference I see is that were not all afraid.
I'm sure there were unethical and inappropriate contacts between teachers and students then just as now, but it seems like if there was a problem, it was dealt with, but we didn't feel the need to live paranoid lives where everyone was a potential predator and rules about who could talk to who, when, and where had to be put all over the place. If you wanted to see a teacher 1:1 outside of school, you were free to do that. Some students did who were having family problems, sometimes with abusive parents, and they had no one else to turn to.
These days... everyone is afraid of their shadows. How the world has changed.
This collective punishment mentality is great.
....using social networks is still vain and silly.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
How does this square with the federal legislation wending its way through the system that would prevent employers from looking at social networking data of employees?
I'll say. My small community had a teacher busted for sexting a student. And when I was a kid, way back before the 'net and cell phones, there were rumors that certain teachers would give certain students "extra-curricular" attention. One teacher in our local district ended up marrying a student. It happened after the student graduated, but there were rumors that "stuff" was going on between them while the student was still in school.
I'm not sure technology has much to do with it: if teachers and students really want to hook up, they'll find a way.
Slashdotters who overwhelmingly reject the usefulness of Facebook and consider it a useless marketing platform that only idiots would use will communicate their furious anger that somebody would dare to tell someone they can't use Facebook however they wish.
Welcome to the USA. Just because only an idiot would want to doesn't mean that those same idiots shouldn't be allowed to.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
I worked at a high school for a couple years and I wanted my job and the kids kept far apart. You friend your students and now they're a part of your social life whether you like it or not. Anything anyone else does on your list is now associated with your career as a teacher, and that could be extremely disruptive to your classroom. It annoyed me to no end to go out for a night on the town and see underage girls who the bouncers had allowed in (they'd scurry like cockroaches when they saw a teacher).
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Actually, if I were a teacher, I think I'd be OK with this. If you friend a few of your students, then you'd have to friend all of them in order to avoid the appearance of favoritism, and if other teachers were doing it there would be pressure to do it yourself as well. So, instead of having to say, "No, you can't be my friend," you can simply cite the law.
They would be violations of school policy, not misdemeanors / felonies.
Well, that depends a lot on what they mean by "principals and other officials will inspect teachers' profiles."
If they just look at the profile, fine, whatever.
If they log in AS the profile, there's a problem: everyone on that teacher's friend list who has a non-public profile is now visible, and accessing their friends-only profile info under that circumstance is, potentially, a federal crime.
In what world do you live in where teachers in NYC get lifelong healthcare or tenure? They can be "fired" at the drop of a hat simply by not renewing their contract. I have no idea where this image of teachers comes from. Also, pensions don't exist for the majority of new teachers. Most of this information is 20 years out of date.
I guess you didn't pass the section on the Constitution. "Freedom of Association" isn't mentioned there.
It's an inherent prerequisite for freedom of assembly. See NAACP v. Alabama.
You can argue "judicial activism" if you want, but you'd then also have to argue that assembly is somehow possible without association, which would be a neat trick...
Unfortunately, this is not something should have to be governed in the first place.
Teachers can not be friends with students. They have to be leaders and educators, not friends. There are numerous other examples of hierarchical structures where inter-hierarchy friendship is generally... a bad idea.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
So your parental instincts kick in, and all those little cues the media has given you about the dangers that await your daughter if she so much as leaves your home have come to define your reality.
Here is what I will grant you: pedophiles do exist. Sometimes teachers are pedophiles, and they use their position of power to take advantage of their victims. Fortunately, that is not a very common situation, despite what the news media tells you, and most teachers really do care about their students (in an appropriate way).
Unfortunately, the moral panic of the 1980s -- which resulted in the imprisonment of at least hundreds of innocent people, if not more -- has not entirely subsided.
Palm trees and 8
Does Khan Academy http://www.khanacademy.org/ count as a "social network" according to the New York City Department of Education?
-- Terry
The rules also state that teachers have no expectation of privacy online, and that principals and other officials will inspect teachers' profiles.
Does this mean that teachers will be required to accept friend requests from principals or other superior school officials so they can inspect their Facebook profiles and examine their friends lists? I understand having no expectation of privacy online as far as publicly posted material goes, but will teachers be required to give their superiors special access? For my own Facebook profile, if you're not a friend, all you can see is my name and profile pic, nothing else. I'm curious if teachers would be required to make more available to their superiors under this rule.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
And that doesn't apply to just teachers - your right the responsibility for professionalism applies to everyone, teachers, politicians, doctors, police, you, me, every single person.
But at what point to we need to make rules/laws and punish people? Normally the limit is placed at the point where the person crosses the line and has legitimacy done something wrong, but i feel in this case you may have far less than 1% of the time that this action is inappropriate, and therefor they are at the point of punishing people for doing something that isn't wrong. Now i saw there is wording for it being on a "personal" account vs a "official" account, and in that respect i might agree with this. It is along the same lines as a personal/corporate e-mail and the ethical behavior of using them. But even then the problem i see is the every legit and not unprofessional friendships that can form between students and teachers, hell i ended up going to work for one of them for a short bit and i know people that where their students that still do 15 years later.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Yes god forbid that they should not be indoctrinated into the hierarchical order. They might get to thinking that all men are equal or some other such stupidity. And it would be a truly terrible thing if a younger person develops a friendship with a more mature person and as a result they picked up some of the maturity themselves.
Provided these relationships are not secret, where is the harm? If you do not trust students and teachers to behave responsibly then what do you see happening when the world is run by the students that have been taught by those teachers. If you think you can't trust anybody to act responsibly and think that more authority is the answer to this then who do you envisage administering this authority and why do you think you can trust them any more than anyone else?
and everyone from the teacher unions to the ACLU started to file law suits until it was repealed. I work for a Missouri school district IT department and this is a big issue right now. The two biggest issues is what counts a social networking site, a lot of the web classroom programs share social networking aspects. The other issue is it is impossible to enforce unless someone rats them out or its discovered after the teacher did something else.
The actual guidelines for personal social media are far too strict.
The guidelines say no DOE employee my have any social media contact with any DOE student who they are not related to. This effectively means that ALL DOE employees may not user personal accounts to communicate on social media sites with ANY student under 18 living in their district boundaries.
So, if you're a kindergarten teacher with a 17 year old son, it is not appropriate to use social media to (for instance) plan a birthday party for your son.
While I understand why the district might want the rule to be so broad (read: simplicity and lawsuits), it is so broad as to be nearly meaningless, and will likely be ignored in many cases where it shouldn't be. Much more sensible would have been guidelines such as:
"It is inappropriate to use personal social media to communicate with any student for which the employee has a direct supervisory role or has had a direct supervisory role in the preceding two(2) academic years. For example, teachers may not use personal social media to communicate with their students or students of other teachers in their teaching team. School administrative employees may not use personal social media to communicate with students who attend their school. It is strongly recommended that any DOE employee using personal social media to communicate with a student not subject to the above guidelines receive prior consent from the student's parent or guardian and review their communication with the student's parent or guardian regularly."
While my set of guidelines seems strict, it should be sufficient as the consent and review provisions did not specify "in writing" and so can be done verbally. It also isn't so broad as to outlaw usage that is clearly reasonable. More importantly, such rules are more likely to be followed when it appears that the administrators made an attempt to really codify the appropriate and inappropriate uses, and didn't just take a "personal use of social media is evil" stance.
Parents don't trust these teachers to not molest their children through the internet, yet they leave their children in classrooms physically inches away from these teachers for hours 5 days a week. If you do not trust these people completely, why would you leave your child with them?!
A teacher and student still at the same are not appropriate friends until either leaves the school.