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
