Education Week - October 28, 2015 - 10

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS > Tracking news and ideas in educational technology
www.digitaldirections.org

brewing controversy in California's
73,000-student Fresno Unified school
system, where Superintendent Michael Hanson acknowledged to the
Fresno Bee that he and his senior staff
used the app during a time period for
which the district is now under FBI
investigation over no-bid construction
contracts. A spokesman for the district
said it is cooperating with the investigation and that staff members acted
in accordance with district regulations
when using the app.
Ephemeral-messaging proponents
include billionaire NBA team owner
and reality-TV star Mark Cuban, who
founded Cyber Dust. In an email interview with Education Week, Cuban
argued that new technology allows for
the digital-age equivalent of a confidential face-to-face discussion.
"Hopefully, more school officials will
use Cyber Dust," Cuban said. "It will
allow them to have private conversations where they can be honest and
productive rather than writing every
message ... to protect themselves."

Speech or Text?
But legal experts say it is very much
an open question whether a disappearing message sent by a public
official should be considered speech,
akin to a private conversation, or a
textual record, such as a memorandum or email.
Until there's an established consensus, districts will continue to face a
conundrum, said Phil Hartley, a partner at the Georgia law firm of Harben, Hartley, and Hawkins, which
represents school boards around the
state.
"We have a belief that people have
a right to view their government in
operation, but the law does not guarantee the public the right to sit in
the superintendent's office and hear
everything he says to his staff," said
Hartley, who is also a board member
for the National School Boards Association's Council of School Attorneys.
"This is a case where the technology, and how we use it, has far outstripped our policymakers' thinking
about how to apply these considerations to the [modern] world."
Micheline Golden experienced
Fresno's experiment with Cyber Dust

A NEW BREED
OF APPS
Some of the more popular
ephemeral-messaging apps
on the market include:

firsthand.
During the first six weeks of Golden's recent stint as the head of communications for the district, Hanson
and his four-member cabinet exchanged a steady stream of traditional text messages, she said in an
interview.
But in April 2014, Golden said, she
received a message from Hanson
asking her to download an app she
had never heard of-Cyber Dust-to
her phone.
When she received her first disappearing message from her boss, she
was shocked, said Golden, who has
worked in public-sector communications for three decades.
"I let him know I didn't feel comfortable using it," she said. "In my
opinion, communication between
administrators is public. If you're
intentionally using something that
destroys that, it's like shredding a
hard-copy record."
Golden has since resigned, and
Hanson has since found himself in
hot water. Last month, the Bee reported that a federal grand jury had
subpoenaed district records related
to the use of public bond money,
as well as district officials' involvement in awarding no-bid contracts
for large construction projects.
The paper also first reported on administrators' use of Cyber Dust, as
well as related calls from the local
teachers' union and other groups for
Hanson to step down over the matter.
"Four senior staff members used
[Cyber Dust] for less than a month
on a trial basis in the spring of 2014,"
said the district's chief information
officer, Miguel Arias. "We discontinued it after only a handful of messages
because it was not helpful or useful in
our work. Staff members were within
district regulations in using the app
as ... we do not keep instant or text
messages."
Still, Golden said, district officials
who use an ephemeral-messaging app
are at a minimum creating the appearance that they have something to
hide. "It looks as though you're avoiding the possibility of something being
discoverable," she said. Golden also
warned against use of technologies
that might lead public officials to assume that their professional communications will remain private forever,
saying it "creates a tendency to say

CONFIDE: This self-described
"off-the-record messenger" is aimed
at professionals. Encrypted messages
including text or images are covered
by orange blocks, as though redacted,
and can be read only when the intended
recipient manually scrolls over the
message to temporarily reveal the
contents.

10 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 28, 2015 | www.edweek.org

"

It will allow [school
officials] to have
private conversations
where they can be
honest and
productive."
MARK CUBAN

Founder, Cyber Dust; Owner of
NBA's Dallas Mavericks

"

In my opinion,
communication
between administrators
is public."
MICHELINE GOLDEN
Former Head of Communications
Fresno, Calif., Schools.

Fresno Bee

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Alex Brandon/AP-File

Apps for Private Chats
A Transparency Issue

things that shouldn't be said."
School technology experts consulted
by Education Week concurred, saying
districts have a responsibility to use
technology to promote transparency
and public trust.
But Cuban, the Cyber Dust founder,
sees a different problem.
"Should [school officials] be able to
discuss business at lunch? What about
over the phone?" he said. "There is a
place for public disclosure and transparency. But there is a place for privacy as well."
James Mayer, the CEO of good-government group California Forward,
agreed. The group has not taken a formal stance on the use of ephemeral-

CYBER DUST: Backed by billionaire
Mark Cuban, this app aims to let
businesspeople communicate freely via
text-based messages that vanish within
20 to 100 seconds after being read by
the intended recipient, leaving no digital
footprint.

messaging apps, but Mayer said it
would be a mistake to automatically
attribute nefarious motives to public
officials who seek to use such a tool.
"If you really want good public services, with fewer mistakes, you have
to allow managers to think out loud
and consult with their peers and talk
through issues with their teams," he
said. "Not all communication is public
record."
And when technology makes drawing such lines difficult?
"I don't think it's fair to hold anyone accountable to a standard that is
not yet established," Mayer said.

An Unsettled Question
For districts elsewhere, that may
speak to a deeper problem.
"School [officials] are beginning to
do business more and more through
various kinds of technology, from email
to texting to social media," said Hartley, the school board lawyer. "Policies
haven't kept up, and nobody's quite
sure whether [newer forms of] communication are more similar in nature
to what we've thought of in the past as
conversation, or what we've thought of
as records."
In Fresno, for example, the superintendent and his backers have pointed
out that the district is not required to
store traditional text messages "for
any period of time."
Such messages could conceivably be
subpoenaed from the relevant phone
company, or accessed in other ways,
however. That's what happened to
Richard Como, the former superintendent of Pennsylvania's 7,200-student
Coatesville district, who was forced to
resign after racist and sexist text messages he sent using a district phone
were made public.
And while the makers of apps such
as Cyber Dust say that messages sent
over their platforms are never saved
on a hard drive or server and thus
aren't discoverable, those messages
can in some circumstances be captured
via screenshots and other means, raising a host of messy issues and questions.
What should district leaders make of
all the uncertainty?
"There's a legitimate policy debate to
be had here, and it's silly to think that
no one is going to use these technologies," said Hartley, the school board
attorney.
"But if the choice is between something you're comfortable with, where
you know the rules, and something out
on the cutting edge, where you don't
know the rules, my advice would be to
do what you're sure of."

SIGNAL (IOS) AND REDPHONE/
TEXTSECURE (ANDROID): These
open-source apps from nonprofit Open
Whisper Systems don't make messages
disappear, but they do offer encrypted
voice- and text-messaging services for
users on their existing accounts and
mobile devices.

Schools Prohibit
Use of Snapchat
In Classrooms
Should students be able to use the
popular temporary-photo-sharing
app Snapchat in school?
The 151,000-student Wake County
district in North Carolina is among
the growing ranks of districts saying
"no," according to a recent report in
the Raleigh-based News & Observer.
When officials there recently
blocked the app on their school Wi-Fi
networks, students took to Twitter to
complain.
"@WCPSS blocking snapchat
just makes me dread school even
more, congrats now students are
even more miserable," tweeted high
school student Randi Martinez.
The app allows users to send
photos and videos that disappear
10 seconds after they are viewed. It
has frequently been associated with
"sexting" and other risqué online
behaviors. Proponents attribute
Snapchat's popularity to users'
growing concerns about the massive
digital footprints they leave using
other sites and platforms, as well as
being fun and simple to use.
Wake County isn't alone in
blocking access.
Officials in District 214 in
Arlington Heights, Ill., for example,
say they generally believe in teaching
students to responsibly use new
technologies. Schools in the all-highschool district give every student
an iPad, and teachers use socialmedia platforms such as Facebook
and Twitter to communicate with
students and families.
But Snapchat is different, said
Keith Bockwoldt, the district's
director of technology services.
"It became so prevalent that
it was really disruptive," he said.
"There's no educational value. It's
just students sending messages
back and forth to each other."
-BENJAMIN HEROLD

SNAPCHAT: Boasting a reported
$10 billion valuation and more than
100 million users, this app allows
users to send photos and videos that
disappear 10 seconds after they are
viewed by the intended recipient.
-BENJAMIN HEROLD
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Education Week - October 28, 2015

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