Social media platforms. Smartphones. Artificial intelligence. As technology evolves at an increasingly rapid rate—affecting classroom learning and stirring concerns about student well-being—schools inevitably stress lists of digital “dos” and “don’ts.”
But technology experts increasingly recommend an approach that has been harder for schools to execute: Helping students weigh more holistically how technology fits into their broader lives with lessons that will outlive today’s platforms and trends.
It’s a position they’ve stressed in the 15 years since a very significant don’t—"sexting"—first appeared in Education Week’s pages, giving school and district leaders an early taste of how smartphones would change conversations about responsible student technology use, bullying, and school climate.
It may be easy for today’s administrators, who deal with digital safety and privacy issues on a daily basis, to forget just how much educators were caught flatfooted by the emergence of sexting. But that story, published in June 2009, still has resonance today.
“Students’ sharing of nude or otherwise sexually provocative photos of themselves or classmates via messages over digital devices might be dismissed as just the latest fad in out-of-school adolescent expression—or be deemed the criminal distribution of child pornography,” Education Week wrote at the time. “And the attitudes among principals, superintendents, and school boards have ranged from inattention to overreaction, education and child-safety experts say.”
As early cellphones with the ability to take pictures grew in use and faster data speeds made it easier to share images, students passed around their own naked photos to actual or potential romantic partners, often not anticipating that those photos might spread far beyond those intended recipients, leading to bullying and harassment.
Continued innovations intensified the trend: Apple released the first iPhone two years prior to that 2009 story, contributing to the eventual ubiquity of smartphones. Instagram, a photo-rich social media site, launched in 2010, and Snapchat, an app that allows users to exchange photos and videos that disappear after being viewed, launched in 2011, making it easy to quickly share and access photos without much thought.
“There was this accelerating factor of social networks and even text chains,” said Amanda Lenhart, the head of research at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization that studies the impact of technology on young people. “Suddenly, something you would have [previously] had to whisper to 10 people, and that they’d have to whisper to 10 people, and they’d have to whisper to 10 people; you can now accelerate that and transmit something within seconds to hundreds of people.”
The result was that teens’ use of technology—both in and out of school—began to have an even greater effect on their relationships and engagement in the classroom.
How ‘sexting’ caught administrators flatfooted
State laws prohibiting possessing or distributing explicit images of minors predated the emerging trend. That meant students—including some who did not ask to receive sexual images—could face steep legal penalties for sexting. Because those laws didn’t account for the age of consent, a pair of students who were legally old enough to have sex could be criminally charged for consensually sending sexual photos to each other.
Administrators were also caught up in the laws. Months before EdWeek’s 2009 story, a Virginia assistant principal described his arrest by his school’s on-site police officer (under charges that were later dismissed) for following a principal’s directions to obtain a faceless, partially nude image students had shared as part of a disciplinary investigation.
Then & Now is an ongoing feature that explores stories from Education Week’s rich archive of more than 40 years of journalism. We aim to examine what has changed, what hasn’t, and how those shifts inform today’s education conversations.
From Education Week’s Archives: Administrators Confront Student ‘Sexting’
Published: June 16, 2009
The Takeaway for Today’s Educators: Because technology will keep evolving, lessons on responsible use need to help students make thoughtful decisions and consider how new platforms and devices will affect their lives, on and off the screen.
“Although all the charges against me were recently thrown out of court, my experience is a warning for all educators who find themselves trying to negotiate the slippery terrain where rapidly advancing technology intersects with risky adolescent behavior,” he wrote in the Washington Post.
Schools responded to sexting, and to swells of related media coverage, with everything from automatic suspensions for students who shared images, to lessons on how quickly photos could spread, to “scared straight” discussions on potential legal consequences.
“Unfortunately, we’re in reaction mode right now, where school districts are interested in the topic, but they’re not doing anything until something happens,” an executive of I-Safe, an organization that created lessons on digital privacy, told Education Week in 2009.
What schools have learned about sexting in 15 years
What has happened since then? As the technological landscape has gotten more complex, schools’ practices—and the legal landscape—have grown more nuanced.
Research suggests an increase in sexting alongside an increase in smartphone use over the last 15 years.
In 2009, 4 percent of cellphone-owning teens reported they had sent sexually explicit or suggestive photos of themselves to someone else via a text message, and 15 percent of teens said they had received such a message, Lenhart found in her former role as the director of teens and technology research at the Pew Research Center.
Later, a 2022 metanalysis published in the journal Adolescent Health estimated that about 20 percent of teens had sent a nude or semi-nude image, about 35 percent had received one, and about 15 percent had forwarded an image without the consent of the original sender.
At least 23 states now have laws that address sexting with more nuance, according to the Cyberbullying Resource Center. Those laws include measures like the exemption from liability if a recipient who didn’t request an image deletes it without sharing it; diversion programs that teach about the harms of sending explicit images or sharing them as “revenge porn;" and the incorporation of states’ ages of consent.
“I do think we have evolved in our initial thinking around sexting,” Lenhart said. “There was a real initial push to throw the book at these kids.”
Some researchers have said that consensual sexting—hardly a universal practice among teens—can be viewed as a part of normal teen development or even a way to explore attraction while delaying physical sexual activity.
Some have advocated for schools to reject the “just say no” approach with lessons on “safe sexting” that teach students to minimize harm by cropping faces out of images to make them less identifiable, only sharing images with people they’ve met in person, resisting pressure to share if they don’t want to, and deleting metadata.
“The truth is that adolescents have always experimented with their sexuality, and some are now doing so via sexting,” researchers wrote in a 2020 commentary in the journal Adolescent Health. “Recognizing this, it is time to move beyond abstinence-only, fear-based sexting education (or, worse yet, no education at all).”
Today, more schools also incorporate lessons on trust, consent, and digital communication into sex education classes.
Schools explore broader approaches to digital citizenship
Today’s administrators have to see both the forest and the trees.
The trees: Schools must contend with the specific harms that come negative online behaviors like cyberbullying, sharing explicit images, and spreading gossip on anonymous messaging apps. And the early panic over sexting has evolved as AI image platforms can now generate “deepfakes,” falsified sexually explicit images that use a person’s likeness without their permission.
The forest: The focus has expanded beyond how students use their phones to broader concerns about how much they use them.
A growing number of district leaders have proposed banning cellphones from K-12 classrooms, concerned about the way the devices—and a growing number of time-consuming apps—have altered students’ social lives and attention spans.
While one encouraging message from a friend may be a healthy way to stay connected, dozens of constant alerts and notifications make it difficult to focus, they say.
Teenagers receive a median of 273 notifications a day, with nearly a quarter coming in during school hours, Common Sense Media found in a 2023 study. One in five students—20 percent—receive more than 500 notifications a day, the study found.
“Another big, mega effect of these phones, is it’s changing expectations of availability and what it means to be a good friend,” Lenhart said. “Social media creates stresses for young people, and that’s exacerbated by having it in your pocket all the time.”
Lessons on responsible technology use should help students form a personal ethic, weigh potential unintended consequences, and consider how their screen time affects their relationships and attention spans, she said.
And it’s especially important that students can transfer that learning to new platforms and use cases as technology evolves, Lenhart said, and as new questions arise.
How should a student respond if a friend shares a “deepfake” of a classmate? Is it ethical to use AI to help with a math problem? How can teens manage expectations of constant social contact? Will increasingly sophisticated algorithms make it even more difficult to unplug and engage in real life? When is it time to shut off the screen?
And for school administrators, what technology ethics problem will stump them 15 years from now?
“Tech changes really rapidly, and that rapid change is ramping up,” Lenhart said. “It has to be about how your personal beliefs and value system interacts with the opportunities that that tech provides you.”
