Sign up now to hear about the threat to Student Privacy from the city's irresponsible disclosure of student data including via Teenspace

Please join us to learn about the threats to student privacy from breaches and DOE carelessly sharing personal information with ed tech, AI, charter schools, and other unscrupulous third parties, at this briefing on Wed. October  23 at 7 PM EST; you can register here. Co-sponsored with AQE, Class Size Matters and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.

One of the troubling issues we will be talking about is Teenspace.  On Sept. 10, along with NYCLU and AI for Families, NYCLU, PCSP and AI for Families wrote the Mayor, the DOE Chancellor, and the Commissioner of  Health about our deep concerns about the way in which the Privacy Policy of the online mental health company Teenspace discloses the personal information of students to unnamed third parties for marketing purposes in a manner that would be illegal if the contract was signed by the DOE rather than the Dept. of Health. 

The Teenspace parent company, Talkspace, is being paid $26 million over three years by the city to provide free counseling to students, and Mayor Adams, the Department of Health and the DOE have all been aggressively encouraging NYC students to sign up for these services, with no mention of how their personal data could be used for predatory marketing which could further undermine their mental health.   More on this here.

On Sept. 23,  Dept. of Health responded to our letter, arguing that they did not have to abide by the state student privacy law since they were not an education agency, but assuring us that their contract was no less  protective.  On Oct. 8,  we received the Talkspace contract via a Freedom of Information Law request.

The contract did not dispel our concerns.  Since we sent our initial letter, we had discovered that when a NYC student visits the Teenspace website on their phone, their personally identifiable information is shared with 15 ad trackers and 34 cookies, as well as Facebook, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft among others, which we saw from using the Blacklight  privacy audit tool. These findings were later confirmed by a security company that does privacy analyses.  These findings are particularly concerning, given how the city is suing many of these companies for undermining children's mental health and designing their algorithms to be addictive for the purposes of targeted advertising .

Our follow-up letter to the Dept. of Health is below, copied to other city officials.  Please join us at our Privacy Forum to hear more about this issue and other ways student data is being breached and purposely disclosed in ways that undermine student privacy.

Doomed to Fail: High rate of charter school failure nationwide -- & how Success charter schools juke the stats

 

A new report was just released by the National Center for Charter School Accountability and the Network for Public Education on charter school closures and is posted here; it's well worth reading.  It reveals that more than one in four charter schools nationwide close within five years, leading to disruptive churn and instability in children’s  education. Between 1998 and 2022, more than one million students were affected by charter shutdowns. According to their analysis, these closures are most often caused by falling enrollment, followed by fraud and mismanagement, and low academic achievement.

While NY State has a relatively low charter school closure rate, Success Academy charter schools -- the largest charter chain in the state --has been shown to juke these stats.  Success is well-known for frequently opening and closing schools in a particular district and then opening a new school miles away, often with different grade levels, while keeping the same name, which suppresses their official failure rate.  This practice also appears to be a strategy to game the system by continuing to open new schools even after their authorized number under the legal state charter cap has been reached, as once a charter school has closed that does not automatically give them another slot under the law.  One example of this sleazy practice is described on p. 7 of the NPE report and below:

“Closure underestimation also occurs when a charter school closes, and another school opens in the same charter chain using the closed school’s NCES number. For example, as described by New York City public school advocate and Executive Director of Class Size Matters Leonie Haimson below, the Success Academy chain manipulates closures to create new schools and avoid the city’s charter cap. Because the same NCES [National Center for Education Statistics] number is used, the two closures are undetectable in the CCD [Common Core of Data].

Success Academy Fort Greene was the infamous “got to go” school and was originally an elementary school in New York City’s District13. Some years back, apparently due to falling enrollment, this school closed, and yet another school with the same name opened up at another site in District 14, 1.5 miles away, as a middle school.

Success Academy then closed the Fort Greene middle school in District 14, also apparently due to falling enrollment, and opened a new Sheepshead Bay elementary school in District

22 more than 7 miles away. On their own website, this new school is correctly called Success Sheepshead Bay and enrolls K-1 grades.

The listing in the CCD is for the first school (Success Academy Fort Greene), now with the Success Sheepshead Bay address. You can read more about what Leonie Haimson refers to as Success Academy’s three-card monte here.”

High rates of charter failure abandon more than one million students.