Here is the powerful testimony from Naveed Hassan, public school parent, ed tech expert, and member of the Panel for Educational Policy (the NYC school board) at yesterday's City Council hearing on ed tech and screen time in our schools. Posted with his permission. Naveed is also chair of a new PEP committee on the use of ed tech in NYC schools. The video from this hearing is here. The rally beforehand with several Councilmembers speaking eloquently about the need for the DOE to limit screen time in schools is here. Both are well worth watching.
Sept. 15, 2026
New York City must take a bolder policy stance with regards to technology. New Yorkers should benefit from the size of our budget with tech services that are designed for public benefit. We need to move away from school purchasing choices based on hype and marketing, and develop sovereign municipal tech infrastructure, within which we engage with outside vendors in more private, secure and sustainable way. Protecting our children from harm and exploitation by big tech can only start if lay the proper foundation for this work.
Our school system has been enmeshed in a decades-long process of privatization of core responsibilities, letting outside vendors do the thinking, when we should be cultivating our highly trained in-house professionals, including educators with graduate degrees, to develop the pedagogical stack of how best to teach NYC students. This includes responsive curriculum, appropriate modalities of delivering it, hopefully whole chapter book reading, and properly supported safety and privacy preserving technology. Needs and wants will also vary from borough to borough, neighborhood to neighborhood and school to school and top-down dictates lead to one size fits no one solutions.
With an academic and professional background in Computer Science and AI and BOE graduate, DOE parent and elected member of the PEP for 5 terms now, it is my experience that the DOE unfortunately does not have the will or the appetite to do this foundational work. It's not clear what it means to ask vendors to remove AI from software already in schools and districts when that product is just a thin code wrapper around ChatGPT or Claude.
Even when the tech vendors themselves, for example Google with YouTube, have told government customers their product cannot comply with laws around student data privacy, years later consumer YouTube is still a big part of many ed tech services in DOE classrooms, using loopholes and workarounds that are in violation of the law. A lot of these ed tech products are provided for free, before local, smaller dollar purchasing agreements bypass any PEP oversight on the propriety of these tools.
There is a significant amount the city can do by refusing to buy products or services from companies behind the attempt to privatize intelligence, sell it as a utility and wantonly disrupt society, undermine democracy, all for their concentration of wealth and power. Let's make sure this is not our children's future. Thank you.
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