Comments on the SHSAT and the Chancellors Privacy regulations

Dec. 13, 2024

On Wednesday, night, the new Public Engagement Committee of the Panel for Education Policy, NYC’s school board, met to hear from the public on two controversial issues, a contract for Pearson to produce a new computerized version of the SHSAT, the entrance exam for the Specialized high schools, and also  DOE’s  proposed revisions to the Chancellors regulations A- 820, that govern student privacy.

The proposed Pearson five year contract for the SHSAT at cost of $17 million took up most of the time, with many parents concerned that any further delay in a vote to approve the contract that had already been postponed twice would threaten the ability of their children to attend one of the eight elite schools that decide admissions solely by means of that one exam.  

My comments follow, suggesting that the PEP only renew the contract for one year, and base any further renewal on specific conditions.  I also include my comments on the Chancellors regulations.  Shannon Edwards of AI for Families also offered excellent comments on this critical issue; you can read them here.

A video of the proceedings is here. Whatever happens, it’s real progress that the Panel for Education Policy seems interested in hearing from the public on these critical issues, rather than merely rubberstamping whatever the Mayor wants them to do.

 Statements on SHSAT

Thank you for holding this public session this evening.  As the American Psychological Society, the American Education Research Association, the National Academy of Sciences, and the testing companies themselves proclaim, no high stakes decision such as admissions to any school should be based upon test scores alone.

In fact, NYC is the only district in the nation that uses this unacceptable method for admissions to any single school, and yet we do it for eight schools, with a test that is non-transparent, scored in a highly unusual way, and is designed by Pearson, a company that has been shown repeatedly over more than a decade to engage in improper behavior and to  administer faulty tests and score them erroneously, year after year, starting with the infamous Pineapple questions on the 2012 state exam that not only  made news nationwide but  became a symbol of everything wrong about standardized testing.

 We have offered a timeline of these issues on our NYC Parent blog – none of which, by the way, did DOE report on in their Request for Authorization, as they should have been. .

We understand that the state requires a standardized exam, but we urge you to amend the terms of the contract so that it is renewed for only for one year, and condition any further renewals in the years to come on the following  three demands:

• DOE should use this test for admissions only for the three schools that are required to use a standardized exam by state law. 

• Consider whether another standardized test could be used instead for these three schools at lower cost or even for free, such as the state exam, as the law only says that a standardized exam should be used, and doesn’t specify which one, and also given how Pearson has a long history of errors and misdeeds;

• Finally, require full test transparency, including an independent analysis of the SHSAT for racial and gender bias, a formal validity study that shows whether the scores predict HS performance, and an analysis of how the results of the new computer-based adaptive exam compared to the earlier paper-based, non-adaptive exams.  

This sort of transparency has been requested for at least 16 years by researchers, but has not been provided.

 The importance of independently analyzing the exam for gender bias is paramount, as girls are accepted to the specialized HS at far lower rates than boys, and there is peer-reviewed, published research showing that those who are accepted do far better than boys who received the same scores.

 On the Chancellors A-829 proposed privacy regulations

Hi again, my name is Leonie Haimson and I am the co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.   We helped get a new  state student privacy law passed in 2014, Ed Law 2D, when we realized how ineffective the federal privacy protections for student data were in an era of ed tech expansion. 

I was appointed to serve on the state education department Data Advisory Committee, and  have  been advocating for years for the DOE to update their  Chancellors regulations A820, but was horrified to see that when this was finally done, they weakened rather than strengthened the existing privacy regulations, despite  widespread breaches and misuse of data that has occurred over the last few years. This includes the Illuminate breach that exposed the personal data of over one million current and former NYC students.

According to these regs, DOE and individual schools could disclose a huge range of student and parent info with anyone they please, and without any enforceable privacy or security protections, including but not limited to: their names; addresses; telephone numbers; e-mails; photographs; dates of birth; grade levels; enrollment status; dates of enrollment; participation in officially recognized activities and sports; weight and height and more.

They propose doing this by designating this info as “Directory Information”  -- an outmoded provision of FERPA from the 1970’s that allowed the disclosure of any information that would not be considered too risky  to divulge.

Yet this ignores the fact that there is NO mention in Ed Law 2D of Directory Information nor any language that would exempt any personally identifiable info from its mandated privacy protections.

Moreover, in this day and age, a child’s name, birth date and home address is sufficient for identity theft, as the NY Dept of State warns, which is especially valuable to fraudsters given that minors do not already have credit ratings.

Personal student data can also be used for predatory marketing by ad tech and social media companies, bombarding them with ads, and undermining their mental health, as noted in recent lawsuits launched vs Facebook, Instagram & TikTok by New York City and the State Attorney General

This data including photos could  also be used to threaten student safety, leading to sexual harassment, Deepfake porn or even abduction.

Providing student names, photos & addresses could also aid in the Trump administration’s efforts to deport migrant students, based on their residence in hotels or shelters.

As a result of over 3,000 emails sent by parents and teachers to DOE and  Panel members, as well as letters from several elected officials and UFT President Michael Mulgrew, the vote on the regs was repeatedly delayed, and on Nov. 19, the Chancellor held a meeting during which she promised to form a Working group that would collaborate on the regs. Yet we have not heard back from the DOE about this Working Group, [Note: The next day, on Thursday at a CPAC meeting, the Chancellor and her team confirmed that a Data Privacy Working Group would begin meeting next month to strengthen these regulations].

We hope that in the meantime, the PEP will refuse to approve any regulations such as these which so seriously threatens the health, safety, and privacy of NYC students.  Thank you for your time.