Letter to the members on the Panel on Educational Policy on how they could exercise more rigorous oversight on contracts, privacy and class size

Here is a copy of the letter I sent on August 19 to the members of the Panel for Educational Policy, including the new members recently appointed by Mayor Mamdani, in hope that they will improve their oversight to prevent waste, fraud and abuse, as well urge the DOE to improve their lax
policies on privacy and class size. 

Feel free to send your own message or speak out at the PEP meeting next week on Wed. August 26 at 6 PM at MS 131 at 100 Street.  More info here.

'abogad@schools.nyc.gov'; 'aalicea6@schools.nyc.gov'; 'aong3@schools.nyc.gov'; 'afair3@schools.nyc.gov'; 'ccasaretti@schools.nyc.gov'; 'courtney.rajwani@gmail.com'; 'crystal.montalvo@csi.cuny.edu'; 'madelinefox@brooklyn.cuny.edu'; 'fhannahjones@schools.nyc.gov'; 'gregfaulkner1@gmail.com'; 'JCollins37@schools.nyc.gov'; 'karla.cordero@weact.org'; 'kjefferson@teachingmatters.org'; 'mdienstag@schools.nyc.gov'; 'naveed@cs.columbia.edu'; 'rsrodriguez@cccnewyork.org'; 'smorales@comptroller.nyc.gov'; 'constanc31@gmail.com'; 'kcarbo18@yahoo.com'; 'parentlthompson@gmail.com'; 'primoasher@gmail.com'; 'costa.constantinides@qc.cuny.edu'

Dear members of the Panel for Educational Policy:

Welcome to a new school year and a special welcome for those of you who are new to the Panel, or according to the legal name, the Board of Education of the City of New York.. My name is Leonie Haimson, I am Executive Director of Class Size Matters and the co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.  I wanted to share more information and concerns with you that I was able to express in the two minutes we were allotted at the last PEP meeting.

DOE email addresses

First, apologies in using your personal or work email addresses, but your official DOE ones have not yet been posted.  A word of caution: Several long-time PEP members have told me that the DOE emails are difficult to access, tend to bounce you out, and are impossible to forward to your personal or work emails. This is probably why the DOE uses your work or personal emails to communicate with you, and why long time members like Greg and Naveed have their personal email addressed posted on the PEP website for the public to use.  You might consider doing so as well or creating a new gmail address for the public to use that you can more easily check online and/or forward to your other address.

Fiscal training required by state law

As I’m sure you’re aware, one of your most important roles as school board members is financial oversight.  Because of a Long Island school board contracting scandal decades ago, a state law was passed in 2005 requiring all new school board members  to complete mandatory training at least six hours long within their first year of service and focused on fiscal oversight, accountability, fiduciary responsibilities, and school board governance. The law also requires that an internal audit committee be formed, which must hold regular meetings to address “any indications of suspected fraud, waste or abuse,” and that an independent accountant present the results of the annual district’s financial audit to the full board.    

According to this law, NYC was held exempt as long as the district provided board members with training that met or exceeded these requirements,  and this must be certified annually by the Chancellor to the State Education Commissioner. Yet according to current and past Panel members, whatever training has been provided on the board’s fiscal and legal accountability in the past has not met these requirements,.  In 2022,  I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the State Education Department asking for a copy of any annual certifications sent by the Chancellor concerning this matter between 2019 and 2021, and SED responded that there were none.

I strongly urge you to ask for this required training  and that an audit committee be established.  The DOE has the largest budget by far of any city agency and rigorous financial oversight should be exercised.  There is a list of approved organizations that provide this training here. 

Problems uncovered by recent audits

In April, the State Comptroller released a scathing audit of DOE’s privacy practices that they determined in several ways were inadequate and non-compliant with the requirements of Ed Law 2D, the student privacy law that passed in 2014, leading to more than 100 breaches and thousands of families informed past the legal deadline that their children’s data was exposed .  My comments about the audit’s findings are here, that include additional information about problem areas that the audit did not touch on.

 Then last month, the City Comptroller released another troubling audit, showing how DOE had left over four hundred million dollars in reimbursable Medicaid funds on the table.  In both cases, the audits also reported  DOE had delayed for many months and in some cases over a year in supplying the data and records that had been requested, and rejected many of the recommendations to improve their performance, for unclear or unconvincing reasons.  I urge you to ask  both offices to brief you on the results.

We would also be happy to provide a briefing to anyone interested in regarding the DOE’s ongoing failure to safeguard student data privacy, even as these risks are greatly multiplied by the expanded use of AI in our schools.  I have delivered similar briefings to advocates, parents, and the NYC Bar Association.

Need for more transparency in contracting

A major DOE contracting scandal occurred during the de Blasio administration, involving a computer wiring contract initially  proposed for $1.1 billion expendable to $2 billion proposed to be awarded to a company called Custom Computer Specialists that had been involved in kickback scheme just a few years before. Despite much news coverage and public outcry, the PEP rubberstamped  the contract anyway, but thankfully City Hall later cancelled it  and pushed it back for rebidding, ultimately saving as much as $600 million.  In response to demands from the Public Advocate and City Council at that time, the administration  promised to post the  RAs or Request for Authorization documents at least 30 days before the PEP vote to allow for more public scrutiny. See Dec. 2015 Daily News and March 2016 Gotham Gazette for more on this. Yet for the last four years or so, the DOE has allowed that promise to lapse.  I hope that you ask DOE to once again adhere to that promise.

In addition, the actual proposed DOE contracts should be made available to PEP members on request before their scheduled vote --- not just the RAs, to allow for more scrutiny, and all sections in the contract related to data privacy and security should be publicly posted along with the RAs at least 30 days before the vote.   

While one specific portion of contracts for vendors with access to personal student information related to privacy called the Parent Bill of Rights is legally required to be posted on the DOE website here, many are not posted,  and those that are provided too often include language non-compliant with the privacy law.  When I pointed that out to DOE officials, including the Chief Privacy Officer, they responded that stronger privacy language was included in another part of the contract but refused to make that portion of the contract available. 

Proposed contracts for products and services, especially those related to professional development and consulting, the RA should detail the hourly rate, and whether any evidence exists for its effectiveness. Optimally, that should include independent peer-reviewed research. If such evidence exists, it should link to that research. If no such evidence exists, the DOE should explain why they are proposing that this product or service should be purchased anyway. For consulting contracts, the RA should explain why DOE employees are unable to carry out these services themselves, and a plan exists to train employees to carry out these services in the future. 

Issues regarding this month’s contracts 

Millions of dollars  on professional development contracts are due to be voted upon in next week’s contract agenda.  In many cases, the RAs claims that the vendors were chosen in part on the basis of “Demonstrated Effectiveness” but none of those assessments are provided. They should be. 

Contracts of two of the proposed vendors were tabled at last month’s PEP meeting:  Public Consulting Group, which has been cited by various legal agencies for bid-rigging, violating the Fair Labor Standards, Medicaid fraud, and barred from soliciting any contracts with the state of Illinois from December 31, 2022, through August 1, 2025.

The other vendor, Encore Support Services, was found to have exposed the personal records of hundreds if not thousands of NYC special needs students. I was personally contacted in in 2023 by independent security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, who discovered 50,000 Encore records online, involving invoices for special education services they had submitted to the Special Education Impartial Office, without any password protection or encryption, including students’ names and addresses, parent’s names, the students’ OSIS number, the service provider’s name, and codes related to various diagnoses and disabilities. 

While the RA asserts that the DOE said this breach “did not present any major security concerns,” the families of these students surely disagree.  I would be happy to share the correspondence I received from Jeremiah Fowler about this matter, if that would be of interest. 

Inadequate class size planning   

Our primary issue remains class size, and the fact that hundreds of thousands of the highest need students remain in overly large classes despite a state law passed in June 2022 requiring that classes be reduced over five years in all NYC schools.  Though the Governor gave the DOE an extra planning year to comply, and more recently the Legislature has given the city an extension of another two years for full phase-in by 2029–2030, the city has still not indicated that they have any real plan that would provide smaller classes to all the students who need them, particularly when it comes to the more than 600 schools that do not have the space at their current enrollment.

The latest iteration of their draft class size plan released in June is posted here; they have still not yet released the final revised version that is supposed to take public comment into account before submitting it to the state,  even though this was required by August 17, which was yesterday.  In any case, our letter expressing our concerns as to the lack of any actual plan in the June document  that we and the Education Law Center sent to DOE is attached.  Last year, the DOE exempted about 10,500 classes at more than 120 schools to reach the 60% goal; we believe  that they will be unable to make even the extended deadlines in the law without exempting hundreds more schools in the future.

We would also be happy to provide you with a briefing,  pinpointing some of  the significant flaws and gaps in the DOE’s current planning for class size reduction, and what steps they could take that would be more equitable, practical and cost-effective.  Please let me know if that would be helpful.

Leonie Haimson 

leonie@classsizematters.org 

Contact your Senators today to oppose proposed federal database tracking college grads through life!

 

A bill called the College Transparency Act is being considered by the Senate HELP committee. It would overturn the prohibition against the federal government collecting personally identifiable student information and instead would authorize the creation of a new federal database to track all students enrolled in a higher education institution throughout their lives, including their enrollment status, attendance, age, gender, and race.

This data would then be aggregated with information held by other federal agencies after students leave college, through agreements with the Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration, the Census Bureau, the Social Security Administration, the Office of Federal Student Aid, and potentially other agencies over time as well. An article from Straight Arrow News lays out the pros and cons.

Whatever guardrails to protect student privacy and anonymity in the current bill could easily be weakened over time, or violated, with the data used to target current and former students simply because they are members of a disfavored racial, ethnic, religious, or other vulnerable group.  

This bill has been introduced in Congress several times, and the organization I co-chair, the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, has been opposing its passage since 2017. In our current political situation, it is clearer than ever the serious harm that creating such a database poses.

We have already seen how the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE team have trampled on the privacy rights of individuals for their own political ends, and how the administration is pushing for unprecedented levels of consolidating personal information across federal, state and private databases for purposes of surveillance and retribution.

Please call your Senators today to let them know they should oppose the College Transparency Act as a dangerous and unwarranted violation of privacy, and also email them by sending them this message. If you belong to an organization, urge them to sign onto our letter in opposition here, by filling out this form.

Then share this email with other parents, students, concerned citizens, and organizations concerned about protecting the privacy rights of all of us. Any questions, you can respond to this message and/or contact us at the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy at info@studentprivacymatters.org. But please do this today!

Thanks Leonie

Important dates next week to provide input on the need for smaller classes & a moratorium on AI in schools

 

Dear all:  Hope you are having a relaxing summer. Meanwhile, here are some important dates and events coming up in the next week:

1-     The deadline for families to sign up for a portion of the $17.25M Naviance court settlement for violating student privacy is this Monday, July 27. You can sign up here. Naviance has been used in many NYC high schools for college advising purposes. Any NYC family is eligible if your child logged into the Naviance platform at least once between August 18, 2021, through January 23, 2026. Reminder: if your child is over 18, they must apply themselves.

We are very disappointed that DOE has failed to inform families of this alleged breach or their right to apply for a portion of the settlement.

2-     Another important deadline is on Wed. July 29 – when public comments on the DOE”s inadequate draft class size plan are due. If your school had large classes last year and did not receive funding to lower them next year, and/or the DOE has not announced any specific plan to address your school’s class sizes in the future, you should email ContractsForExcellence@schools.nyc.gov by that date to insist that they develop and articulate such a plan in this document so your children can receive the unparalleled benefits of smaller classes – which according to the state law and constitution, is their right. DOE is supposed to take public comments into account and revise their plan accordingly before it is sent to the State Education Department for their review on August 14.   If you do send a comment, please copy us at info@classsizematters.org

3-     Meanwhile, the DOE has failed to issue any report summarizing the public feedback to their totally inadequate AI guidance, and no improved guidance, despite promises that both would be released last month. Nor have they announced any AI moratorium, which thousands of parents and teachers have urgently called for. The Mayor is also more than a month late in establishing an Office of Algorithmic Accountability, required by a law passed by the City Council last year, supposed to gather public feedback and develop responsible citywide policies on AI, as explained here.

4-     Also on Wed. July 29, the Panel for Educational Policy is meeting at the High School for Fashion Industries at 225 West 24th Street at 6 PM. The AIM coalition will be holding a rally outside the school at 5:30 PM. This is an important meeting as many new Mayoral appointees will be attending for the first time. It is critical to make these new members aware of how many thousands of NYC parents and teachers strongly believe in the need for a real class size plan for the 600 plus schools that DOE admits do not have space at their current enrollment, and for an immediate moratorium on using AI in schools. Here is more information about this meeting, and a link to RSVP.

5-     Finally, an important bill S9051B passed the State Legislature unanimously during the last session which would prohibit the use of unsafe AI chatbots by kids, including in schools. Google Gemini has been rated as one of the most unsafe chatbots by both Commonsense Media and by the independent nonprofit KORA, and yet last year was assigned to many young students in NYC schools. More than sixty organizations have sent a letter to the Governor in support of this bill, including our Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. Please call the Governor today at (518) 474-8390 or email her to urge her to sign this bill!

Thanks, Leonie

The testimony of NYC students on the use -- and misuse-- of AI in the classroom

 

  

Above is a video of the terrific testimonies of four NYC students involved in NYCLU's Teen Activist Project on the use of AI in their schooling, presented at the Joint Hearings of the Education and Technology Committees on June 26, 2026 with also their responses to questions from Chair Eric Dinowitz.

 

Yelani Joseph’s testimony 

Good afternoon, my name is Yelani Joseph, I’m sixteen years old, a sophomore from Brooklyn, New York, and an organizer with the NYCLU’s Teen Activist Project. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. 

When people talk about artificial intelligence in schools, I often hear one assumption: that students either fully support it or don’t care about its impact. But many of us do care — because we’re the ones experiencing these changes in real time. 

My concern is how quickly AI is being normalized in schools without enough accountability, transparency, or guidance on how it should support student learning. 

Recently, my friend and I were reviewing a reproductive health slideshow for class and came across a sentence full of scrambled words, errors and unclear information–our impression was that the teacher created classroom content with NotebookLM, an AI tool and we were shocked. Even though we were eventually able to make sense of it, we shouldn’t have had to spend time guessing what the curriculum was trying to say. Students deserve educational materials that are clear, accurate, and understandable — especially when learning about subjects as important and personal as our own health. 

And that experience reflects a larger issue — so much that it’s something I’ve also heard echoed when talking with my peers about AI in education. 

I had one of my peers recently tell me, “Although AI is helpful in some ways, students often use it to cheat instead of studying… and when exams come around, students can feel lost because they don’t have that sense of security they did before.” 

And another student, my friend, shared with me that her “My school is shutting down… and they’re opening up a school for an AI focused school in its place. I loved my school because everyone was able to get the attention they needed. And taking that away feels like a step in the wrong direction.” 

Even though the plan for an AI school was paused for now, what stood out to me wasn’t opposition to technology — it was a pattern: AI is being normalized faster than students are being taught how to engage with it responsibly. 

AI literacy has to mean something other than filling classrooms with AI products. It has to mean understanding how and when to question these products, and protect against the threat they pose to teaching and learning. Students are asking for accountability — clear standards that protect student learning and ensure human judgment stays at the center of education. 

Thank you.

 

Odin Adeler’s testimony 

Hello City Council, and thank you for spending time out of your busy day to listen to what I am here to say. 

My name is Odin Adeler, and I am a leader at the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Teen Activist Project. I am 18 years old, and have just graduated Urban Academy Laboratory High School this week. I am here to talk about my views on AI and tech products in schools. 

At my high school, we did a lot of writing. Before I went to Urban Academy, I did not feel so confident about my writing skills. We were also not allowed to use AI to write our papers at all. That was not a problem. Without AI, I could do something else. Ask my teachers for help, 

I now feel much more prepared for college. In college, which I will be starting this summer, I am sure there will be much to write. And it will be writing that I am sure I will be expected to come up with ideas for myself. Fortunately, I believe I can now put some of the many ideas I think about onto paper quite well, without AI. That also helped prepare for my high school’s frequent class discussions, where subject knowledge and critical thinking is essential. 

Knowing how to write well without AI also helps creatively. I am not sure I would have had as much fun or learned as much in my playwriting class, where I wrote up a play that got acted out to my school, if I just used AI. My classes felt much richer due to me and others avoiding using AI to replace thinking. 

I have heard that official guidance on artificial intelligence is being sent to schools. Part of the guidance encourages students to use AI for research, exploration, and creative projects–this is unwise. I am concerned that it will guide those in schools how to use software that is not useful in the classrooms. In schools, I believe not just the final typing up of a paper, but more, including gathering ideas, should all be done without AI. At schools, students should be taught to think for themselves. I am sure it is possible as people knew how to do so for a while before AI. That is why I am glad my high school is as restrictive of AI as it is, for both the writing students produce, and the creation of the material used to properly teach students to be critical thinkers. I support that kind of AI restrictive policy throughout the city.  

I am also concerned about risks to student data privacy. It is required by the government for minors to attend school. Students should not be effectively forced to sign away digital rights to big tech companies to fulfill that requirement. 

Instead of spending much taxpayer money on AI and data capturing products which are not what students need, the city should focus resources on actual human education. 

Thank you.

 

Ariana Ahmed Misha's testimony 

Hello Chair Dinowitz, Chair De La Rosa, and members and staff of the Committees on Education and Technology, 

I am Ariana Ahmed Misha. I am a rising junior at the Institute for Collaborative Education,, and a member of the Teen Activist Project at NYCLU.  

This spring, I helped plan a weekend student event,, with over one hundred students, to listen to their concerns about the new AI guidance.  There was a very specific session about AI policy, where the conversation among the students about AI was so deep, that the session had to go overtime. Even after the event, we students could not stop talking about how much we hate this new policy. 

Critical thinking is the whole purpose of education. All we are supposed to get at the end of everything is having the skill to critically think, Ai is something which prevents the students from critical thinking and does the work for them. Ai gets in the way of real learning. 

As students, we want real human teachers to teach us about the world. We want real human teachers to teach us effective human communication.  We want real human teachers to create assignments backed by human expertise, and we want real human teachers,, to provide us feedback,, on how to improve our work,, by reading  our hard worked assignments,, and get to know how we think,, and who we are as human students.  

However, for many students today, they instead have an AI teacher bot telling them how to work on improvements  and how to do assignments. The difference is clear. Not only is an AI bot biased against certain ways of thinking,, it is also highly perfectionist,, which makes the students discouraged about any work they do,, as it tells  them to fix any work  again and again and again until infinity. These AI products simply do not work.  

AI policy at the end of the day pushes us into being a fake and unrealistic world. We do not want a robotic policy, in this already robotic world, where real connection with people has been rare.  

For this reason, I, on behalf of hundreds of students who care, would like to request you,  to push the DOE to make our policy dependent on humans,, rather than AI,, because rearranging the system after AI would destroy it might be possible,, but the lives which would be destroyed in the process cannot ever be fixed. 

 

Selena Wu’s testimony 

Hello city council, thank you for allowing me to speak today. My name is Selena Wu, and I am a rising senior from Francis Lewis High School and a member of the Teen Activist Project 

The field and market of AI is growing at a rapid rate, which is why it starts getting implemented everywhere. First handedly, I know how strong artificial intelligence can be. In fact, I’ve spent my past summers researching and building machine learning models at schools like  MIT and Princeton. This is why I would like to oppose the use of AI technology in the school system. My comments will focus on the use of GenAI products. 

Firstly, the highlights of learning are the interactions and jokes my teachers make when teaching. In my AP Lang class, we start off every day spending 10 minutes discussing different things, whether it is political, philosophical or controversial. These interactions not only creates a bond between the class and makes the classroom more lively, it also sharpens our critical thinking.  It actually makes me look forward to learning and attending class, which is something not many students experience.  Having to think about complicated topics and shaping them into concrete words are a skill needed for the AP Lang curriculum and AP test. Offloading tasks to AI jeopardizes these human relationships, and means me, my classmates, and my teachers understand one another less.   

Furthermore, when GenAI is used in school, it is often incorrect. Last year, I had an English teacher that graded our essays with AI. Not only did his AI incorrectly deduct points from us , it also accused multiple of my classmates of using AI themselves to write their essays. However, we wrote the essay in class on paper, with the prompt given to us the day of. There was no possible way for us to use AI, and we were unfairly getting points deducted despite following the rubric. Compared to my AP Lang class this year, there is a huge contrast between my learning and relationship with a teacher that uses AI compared to one that doesn’t.  

Secondly, I have seen that implementing AI and robots into the education system has made learning even more boring for some students. The rise of AI chat bots like ChatGPT and Claude have encouraged students to cheat, plagiarize and break numerous honor codes. But this issue is much more complicated than adults acknowledge. Rather than implementing AI into schools and allowing students to further rely on such technology, I think that there should be a focus on creating an engaging learning environment that addresses why students use such technology in the first place.  By encouraging curiosity and making learning more interesting, students may feel more confident, less afraid, and find less need for AI.   

In all ways, by bringing AI into schools, it can hinder students' education and growth.  

Thank you!