Online Forum: No More Student Data Sales!
WHEN
May 06, 2024 at 7:00pm - 8pm
Test
companies like College Board and ACT, Inc. are illegally profiting from
the sale of student personal data when their tests are assigned to students to take in school. Learn how this were
stopped in New York State, and what we can do to push other states to
end this practice too.
Virtual Forum
No More Student Data Sales!
How Test Companies Profit from Illegal Student Data Sales & How We Can Stop Them
Monday May 6 2023
8pmET - 7pmCT - 6pmMT - 5pmPT
Register online at: bit.ly/5_6_24_webinar
Sponsored by Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, Illinois Families for Public Schools and Class Size Matters
Join us on Zoom on May 6th for a webinar where we'll cover:
- How colleges and companies are buying students' data including their test scores from College Board & ACT
- How New York's Attorney General signed a consent decree with the College Board to stop this practice;
- How you can help prevent your child's personal data being sold;
- And what we can do to push other states to end this practice altogether—just like New York has done!
This webinar will answer your questions, help you protect your
child's data, and connect you to other student privacy advocates. Register online here.
A week ago, the NY Post featured an article about a new AI program call Yourai sold by a company called LINC, or The Learning Innovation Catalyst, that the DOE is piloting in some Brooklyn schools. The product is supposed to help teachers develop their lesson plans. On Twitter last week, I pointed out the idiocy of the DOE administrator who claimed this would help teachers "think creatively."
I went on to point out that two of the three testimonials on the website from NYC teachers appeared to be fake, as I couldn't find their names in a list of DOE employees.
Today, the NY Post followed up with another article, pointing out that there were apparently eight fake testimonials from NYC teachers on the website, and that after being asked about this, the company said their names "were anonymized for compliance purposes," and have now been taken down.. Apparently, the co-CEO of the company, Jason Green, is a close pal of the Chancellor, and he and his family vacationed with the Chancellor's family on Martha Vineyard last summer. The article added that LINC has received $4.3 million from DOE since 2018 for "professional development and curriculum," including $2.3 million so far this
school year. What they did not mention is that, aside from the likely shoddiness of the product and the fake hype surrounding it, there are real concerns about these sorts of products including the risk to student privacy, as I pointed out on twitter. AI products are well known for gobbling up huge amounts of personal student data, and then using it to improve their products and create new ones. Yet this is specifically prohibited by the regulations of NY State's student privacy law, Ed Law § 2-d. These regulations clearly state that "Third-party contractors shall not sell personally identifiable information nor use or disclose it for any marketing or commercial purpose" and that "Commercial or Marketing Purpose means the sale of student data; or its use or disclosure for purposes of receiving remuneration, whether directly or indirectly; the use of student data for advertising purposes, or to develop, improve or market products or services to students [emphasis added]." I also pointed out that any district vendor or other third party with access to personal student data by law is supposed to have a specific privacy addendum to its contract. This addendum is supposed to be posted on the DOE website here, but none can be found for LINC or YourAi. Sadly, DOE continues to flout the law when it comes to protecting student data and the transparency required by Ed Law § 2-d, as we have noted in the past. On twitter, I highlighted specific weaknesses in LINC's online privacy policy, including that they allow other companies to track user behavior, including “3rd parties that deliver content or offers” meaning marketing.
I also noted that the Privacy Policy said that the company reserved the right to change it at any time for any reason without prior notification to users by changing wording online. This violates FERPA, because then, districts are not in control of how student data may be used or disclosed.
After noting these red flags on twitter, the co-CEO Jason Green DMed me: We are a minority company that has been partnering with NYCPS for years. Our mission is to help teachers better support learners. I am also recently married and a dog-lover. Would you be open to learning more about us? I would love to better understand your perspective as well. I said sure, and then asked to see his contract with DOE, to ensure that it contained the required data privacy and security protections. I didn't hear back until yesterday, when he said he was "working with his team" to get the contract, but assured me that they don't "directly" collect or use student data. When I asked what "directly" means, he said they don't collect student data at all. Then, later that day, on Friday March 22, I went back to look at the company's Privacy Policy and noticed it had been updated that very day:
Low and behold, there was a bunch of new sections added, including that the company indeed "may have access to student data" or "teacher or principal data" as defined under Ed Law § 2-d :
They had revised the section that previously said the company may change the Privacy Policy without prior notice. It now says "We will send advance notice of any upcoming changes to our Privacy Policy via e-mail." The section about allowing other companies to use user data for marketing purposes was taken out, but this passage that replaced it is not much more reassuring: Also, Third Party Companies may want access to Personal Data that we
collect from our customers. As a result, we may disclose your Personal
Data to a Third Party Company; however, we will not disclose your
Personal Data to any Third Party Company for the Third Party Company’s
own direct marketing purposes. The privacy policies of these Third-Party
Companies may apply to the use and disclosure of your Personal Data
that we collect and disclose to such Third-Party Companies. Because we
do not control the privacy practices of our Third-Party Companies, you
should read and understand their privacy policies. So what does it say in the actual, DOE contract with LINC, that legally binds their use and protection of student data? Sue Edelman of the NY Post FOILed the contract from the NYC Comptroller and sent it to me on Friday. To make a long story short, the only LINC contract the Comptroller's office had was this one from 2020, which never mentions Ed Law § 2-d, though law was passed in 2014, and doesn't contain its required provisions. Instead, the contract glosses over the entire issue of student privacy, and says instead that it complies with Chancellor’s Regulations A-820 "governing access to and the disclosure of information contained in student records." Yet Chancellor's Regulations A-820 has not not been updated since 2009. In his blog today, Peter Greene has one of his excellent take downs of the whole notion of AI producing better lesson plans than actual living teachers. He includes this quote from Cory Doctorow: We’re
nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past
the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing
you with a bot that fails at doing your job. But beyond the lamentable mechanization and degradation of education that is being promoted by NYC and other districts nationwide, in the name of mindless innovation, the DOE apparent lack of interest in protecting student privacy and following the law remains appalling.
Check out the latest Talk out of School featuring a discussion of NYC's most widely used reading program, HMH Into Reading, with NYU researcher Flor Khan, Brooklyn parent Alina Lewis and teacher Martina Meijer. Below is a short summary of Alina's concerns, along with some comments from fifth and 6th grade students at the Brooklyn School of Inquiry. Below that are some newsclips related to the reading curriculum as well as other news items mentioned on the show.
____ In
May of 2023 we were informed that our school, the Brooklyn School of Inquiry,
would need to replace our existing literacy curriculum with HMH’s Into Reading
for grades K-5, and that our middle school would need to adopt HMH’s Into
Literature for grades 6-8.
The
Brooklyn School of Inquiry is founded upon progressive education principles,
and has a long standing tradition of student centered, inquiry driven pedagogy.
Our literacy curriculum, honed by teachers over many years, was developed with
our specific students in mind and embodied the spirit of inquiry and
progressive education embedded in our mission. It is this tradition of inquiry
that draws parents from all over Brooklyn to our school, and the curriculum has
served our community extremely well.
Students
are highly engaged in meaningful learning, well prepared to succeed in rigorous
high school classrooms, and 91% of our students are at or above proficient (ELA
state test, 2022-2023). We have been forced to abandon our curriculum and adopt
HMH, a scripted, test prep style literacy curriculum that does not include real
books, only excerpts from passages.
Instead
of engaging deeply with the themes embedded in rich literature such as A Raisin in the Sun, our kids now read
three and a half page articles about Instagrammers. Instead of reading the Diary of Ann Frank at BSI, our students
read bland two page excerpts such as “Challenges for Space Exploration,” from
the HMH workbook. There is simply no way that such a curriculum will prepare
our students to be the thinkers, change makers, and citizens that we want them
to be.
It's
unconscionable that HMH is being pushed onto students, teachers and families in
the name of “literacy” when it contains no substantive literature. It's
unconscionable that HMH is being billed as “research backed” with no extant,
rigorous data to support its effectiveness and quality (Wexler, 2024). Below,
please see some qualitative data about Into Reading and Into Literature,
gleaned from students direct experiences. Please consider if this is the type
of literacy education we dream of for our public school kids in New York City.
I have always loved reading. You can ask anyone in my
family, and they will tell you that. And I can also tell you that this
curriculum has no real reading.
-
Will,
5th grade
Overall, the Into Literature book has you repeat what it
just stated, feeding you words to the answers and saps your writing of
creativity and self expression. This is why I don’t think I am learning very
much.
-
Penelope,
6th grade
In years past, ELA was fun! We would read real books and
short stories. Now we read mostly excerpts in our HMH workbooks or online…Next
year I will be in 7th grade. I was so excited to hear about Ms. Mia and some of
the things that she does in her ELA classes, such as a unit where students put
Christopher Columbus on trial. I am a Native American/Puerto Rican girl with
Taino ancestry - what a unique and
personal experience this could be! I would be so disappointed to have this
learning opportunity with my classmates taken away and replaced with excerpts
and assessments from HMH.
-
Kira,
6th grade
In the fifth Harry Potter book, the Ministry of Magic
installs a mundane curriculum for the students of Hogwarts in Defense against
the Dark Arts. In this curriculum, you study defensive spells, think about
defensive spells, and write papers on defensive spells, but you do not actually
get to do defensive spells. In my opinion, this curriculum is not unlike the
HMH curriculum. We are thinking about books, and we are reading excerpts, but
are we are not actually reading books.
-
Isabel
Carlos, 5th grade
So, to sum it all up, it's just not challenging, fun or
exciting. It feels like I’m getting half of the ELA sixth grade experience.
Half of a story, half of a piece of writing, only half of a curriculum. I
really hope you will let my school keep teaching me and my classmates in a way
that is both educational, exciting and fun.
- Carlo, 6th grade
I miss reading whole
novels and discussing them in class like we did in elementary school. Now in
middle school we read excerpts from the books and are asked simplistic
questions about them…You can't get to the point and the idea of the book
through reading just a part of it. You need to read books in their entirety and
if you have a teacher to guide you and your friends to discuss the book with,
it makes you want to read more.
-
Ethan,
6th grade ____
Note: Gary Rubinstein writes about this issue on his blog as well.
UPDATE, 3/5/24: Yet another wrinkle to the story below. A Brooklyn parent sent me the following info:
SA
Fort Greene was the infamous "got to go" school and was an elementary school in D13, at 101 Park Avenue, co-located with a public middle school. My guess is that it was sited where it was to draw from some of the
low-performing District 13 schools in the general area, as well as
others in District 14. But as those neighborhoods have gentrified and local
schools have drawn more parents with fundraising capability, SA has looked less
appealing to elementary school parents. There are also a couple of charters in
the neighborhood, Compass and Community Roots, that have drawn a diverse and
more affluent base of families. I have
no idea when it closed, but it's not on the SA website. The school's still listed on Inside
Schools, however, and the parent comments on that site will give you an
idea of the controversy.
So Success Fort Greene was originally an elementary school in D13 with a terrible reputation, that was was somehow transformed onto a middle school in D14, nearly two miles away, and now is magically turned back into an elementary school once again, and transported to Sheepshead Bay, eight miles away -- all without somehow changing its actual identity, according to the State Education Department, or SUNY, its authorizer. What a shell game!
___ About a month ago, teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein sent me an email, asking if I knew that Success Fort Greene Middle School had closed, and asking me if I knew where to access their test scores and past enrollment. I sent him some data showing their declining enrollment, and then went on a search myself to try to find out more information about this school, but what I discovered was very confusing and contradictory.
It is true that Success Academy seems to have quietly closed their Success
Academy Fort Greene MS last year, located at 700 Park Avenue in Brooklyn
in D14, even though they were actively recruiting more students to the school as recently as last March, according to their Facebook page. According to their state
report card as of 2022-2023, Fort Greene had a sharply declining
population of 5th-8 graders.
But Success is still intent on expanding the number of its schools, despite a cap on charter schools. This year, they opened up a new elementary school in
Sheepshead Bay HS complex at 3000 Avenue X, in Brooklyn. Last year, a lawsuit was filed to block this charter co-location, focused primarily on the fact that the DOE's Educational Impact Statement did not even mention the new class size law, and instead its analysis that there was available space in the building for the co-location relied upon an assumption that current class sizes in the existing schools would persist forever, even though many of their classes were far above the levels mandated in the class size law. I
wrote an affidavit in support of the lawsuit. The Judge ruled that this lawsuit should have been filed as an appeal to the Commissioner instead, and now the plaintiffs, including the UFT, intend to appeal his decision to
the Appellate court.
But to go back to the journey I embarked on when looking into the mysterious disappearance of Success Fort Greene school:
- Strangely enough, the SED charter school directory still has Success Fort
Greene open and located in D13, despite the fact that last year it was in D14
and is now closed anyway. See the Excel
spreadsheet of the NYS Charter School Directory (As of October 17, 2023)
- On the DOE website,
they also list Success Fort Greene still open, but instead of a middle school, they describe it as including grades K-1, and
located at the Sheepshead Bay address in D22 at 3000 Avenue X in Brooklyn.
- The DOE
charter report from December 2023 similarly lists Success Fort Greene
as still open, but also located at the Sheepshead Bay address at 3000 Avenue X,
Brooklyn. The spreadsheet shows it as
enrolling mostly K and 1st graders; but also one 6th grader and one 8th grader
– which is very peculiar, unless this is to maintain some sort of fiction that it is still partially a middle school.
- Its authorizer, the SUNY
Charter center, also still lists Success Fort Greene as open, but sited at two different locations: first, at the now-closed address at 700 Park Ave., with both K-1
grades and 5th-8th grades and in D13. This is despite that its last location was in D14, and the school enrolled no K or 1st graders as far as I know, and is now
closed.
Even more weirdly, under the same
heading of Success Fort Greene, SUNY also lists it as Success Sheepshead Bay in a subheading, located at the 3000 Avenue X address - and at both locations having the same principal, Shannon Beatty.
Clicking on the original proposal as listed at the bottom of the list above, one can see that Success
Academy Fort Greene as originally approved by SUNY was
for an elementary school in either District 2,4, 13, 16 or 17 ---to open
in 2013-2014. No middle school is mentioned, and no school in either D14 where it was last year, or D22 where it is supposedly now.
Even more confusingly, I cannot find any authorization by SUNY or the Regents of a Success Academy
Sheepshead Bay, after doing a search on their websites. However, in October 2023, SUNY authorized a revision
to Success
Fort Greene charter, to lower its enrollment at the address where it no
longer existed by that point: at 700 Park Ave. Brooklyn. This revision says the school was originally
chartered to serve both grades K and 5-8 and can now expand to a K-4
school but with a lower enrollment, to serve 126 students in K-1. It mentions no new Success Academy at Sheepshead Bay, even though that school had already opened in September, the previous month:
Success Academy Charter
School – Fort Greene is located at 700 Park Avenue, Brooklyn, New
York 11206 in CSD 14 and is chartered to serve 296 students in grades K and 5-8
for the 2023-
24 school year growing to serve 552 students in grades K-8 for the 2026-27
school year, the
final year of the current charter term. The school requests an enrollment
decrease to serve
126 students in grades K-1 for the 2023-24 school year and 538 students in
grades K-4 for the
2026-27 school year.
Now, if one takes a look at the Success Academy website instead, there is no longer any listing for Success Fort Greene, but
it does list
Success Sheepshead Bay , an elementary school with K-1 students at 3000
Avenue X in the Sheepshead Bay complex, which is far more accurate than the other fictional listings on the DOE, NYSED and SUNY websites. This
new elementary school, Success Academy Sheepshead Bay is also cited in their Federal
replication grant application, as one of four new elementary schools that Success was
planning to open this year with 180 seats.
So on its own website, and in order to get a funding through a federal grant, Success portrays this as a new elementary school. But to DOE, SED, and SUNY, its authorizer, it is a but a branch of an already defunct middle school. What is the explanation for this confusing three-card monte game? I suspect that Success is trying to maintain the fiction to New York authorities that their
new Success Academy elementary school in Sheepshead Bay is the very same school as
their now-defunct Middle school more than seven miles away, because they are bumping up against the charter cap and do not want to use up one
of their valuable slots– and SUNY is actively involved in helping them participate in this scam.
| Assemblymember John Zaccaro Jr. and Senator Luis Sepulveda
|
The Bronx Times reports a new bill that would supposedly provide more "equity" by making NYC DOE cover the rental costs for all NYC charter schools.
A law passed the Legislature in 2014
required NYC to provide space in DOE schools for all new or expanding charter schools
or help pay for their rent, while getting 60% reimbursement from the state. NYC is the ONLY district in the state and even the
country with this unfair obligation, where we have some of the highest
rental costs in the nation. Even with state reimbursement, charter rent is costing DOE more than $100M this year, with this amount expanding annually. The DOE estimates the cumulative cost of charter leases to their budget at nearly a billion dollars since the law was passed.
Now Senator Luis Sepulveda & Assemblymember John Zaccaro Jr. have submitted a bill that would
make DOE pay rent for ALL NYC charters. Meanwhile, Bronx charter schools are
springing up in new developments throughout the borough, subsidized by DOE and thus
taxpayer funds.
How much would this new bill cost the
DOE budget- $1B or more per year? The reporter doesn’t say; nor does she point
out that NYC is the only district in the state or nation with this financial obligation. Nor does she quote any opponents to this new bill.
Why do these two Bronx legislators
advocate for more funding for charter school facilities, while not mentioning
that not a single new Bronx public school is specified to be built in new
five-year SCA capital plan? Could it be because of the deep pockets of charter
lobbyists perhaps?
According to Follow the Money, and the NY
State Board of Elections, Dan Loeb, billionaire charter school supporter
gave Sepulveda $11,800 in 2020 and $11,000 in 2018, with his wife
Margaret Loeb matching both donations, along with another $15,000 from John
Petry, another billionaire charter school supporter. Sepulveda also
received $7,000 from DFER and $37,300 from Students First, both charter
lobbying organizations, plus a lot of real estate money, which is not
surprising as developers profit off charter expansion, as DOE’s
rental payments guarantee them a steady source of income when they finance
buildings with charter schools as anchor tenants.
John Zaccaro’s three biggest contributors in 2023 were
charter school supporters Joel Greenblatt ($6000) Greenblatt’s wife Julie
(another $6000), plus Students First NY (yet another $6000). Greenblatt, Loeb
and Petry are also on the board of Success Academy charter schools.
In our report
on charter rent, we pointed out that some charter management organizations that
own or sublease the space for their own charter schools like Success Academy have sharply
raised these rents, apparently to gouge more funding out
of DOE.
After we released our report, Senators Liu and Jackson and City Council
Education chair Rita Joseph wrote a letter to NYC Controller two years ago, asking
for an audit; but we haven’t yet heard that there is any such audit yet in
process.
Instead of this awful new bill, public
school parents and advocates should support Sen. Liu’s bill, S2137, and A5672, sponsored by AM Benedetto, that would
remove the unfair, expensive and onerous obligation for DOE of having to pay
charter rent.
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