Naveed Hasan's testimony on how NYC must extricate our schools from the primacy of ed tech & privatization of core responsibilities

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 full video from the hearing is here and the rally beforehand here.  Both are well worth watching. My account of these important hearings is here, and my written testimony here.

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.

 

This year's drop in NYC state test scores: sound and fury, signifying nothing

 

When the state test scores were released a couple of weeks ago, they showed sharp drops in proficiency for NYC students, particularly in reading.  This led to commentators to speculate what this drop in scores may or may not mean.  Critics of the mandated curriculums like the organization Racially Just Public Schools used the results to question the value of the pre-packaged NYC Reads program, and insist on the need for more culturally responsive programs. 

The NYC Reads intitiative required NYC schools and districts to choose between three scripted curriculums for elementary schools, EL Learning, Wit & Wisdom, or HMH Into Reading.  Many teachers, parents and students have found these programs to be overly rigid and formulaic and lack sufficient time alloted for students to be able to read and enjoy wholel books.  The administration nevertheless plans  to be expand these programs at 102 middle schools  this fall.

With the drop in the state scores, Michael Mulgrew the  President  of the NYC teachers union, , who up to now has been mostly supportive of these mandates,  came out swinging: “The Department of Education is completely incompetent and irresponsible in its implementation, and we are not going to stand by." he was quoted as saying.  Without reforms, he said, “we’re going to just have to pull our support for it.”

Indeed, there is little or no evidentiary support for these three particular curriculums, except for the fact that they were cited as “high quality” by Ed Reports, an organization  funded mainly by the Gates Foundation which bases  their evaluations not on actual studies showing they result in student learning gains, but only whether they are aligned with the Common Core standards. 

At the same time,  when the drop in test scores was announced, Gates-funded groups like Educators for Excellence refused to moderate their support for NYC Reads,  even though last year the group celebrated an increase in state test scores  by  saying that “today’s state test results deliver another resounding proof point of the impact of NYC Reads."

Chancellor Samuels and Mayor Mamdani insisted that the expansion of NYC Reads will continue, and Mamdani was quoted as saying, “NYC Reads marked a turning point in our commitment to ensuring every child gets the evidence-based instruction they deserve. Across the nation, we’ve seen transformative literacy rates using the pedagogy we know works, and we will continue to pursue that same approach,” without citing any evidence for these specific programs. 

At the same time, the Department of Education press release put forward the contrary results of the i-Ready and MAP assessments that students are required to take several times a year, supposedly for diagnoistic purposes, claiming they showed continued improvement in reading, though screeners were never designed for that purpose.

The release linked to a powerpoint depicting the upward trend of NYC student results in reading on these screeners compared to national norms.  Yet  in very small print beneath the charts, one can glimpse a disclaimer: ”Recent updates to MAP and iReady norms may have contributed to an increase in the percentage of students above the national median in 2026.”

To make any claims based on the results of these screeners is even more questionable given how the MAP tests are owned by HMH, the most commonly employed and most criticized program used by the schools. The i-Ready screeners have also been widely criticized as having no  independent studies that attest to their validity, and the company was recently sued iin DC on consumer protection grounds, alleging that the company engages in false advertising about the value and effectiveness of its product. 

Amidst the hullabaloo on both sides,  little attention was paid to the fact that the ups and downs in  NY state exams have rarely if ever been replicated in the results of the far more reliable national exams called the NAEPs, which are given by the federal government to a sample of students in NYC every two years, in 4th and 8th grade reading and math.  They show no significant change in the city’s 4th grade reading scores since 2003.  

Here is a chart produced by analysts Fred Smith and Robin Jacobowitz for a forthcoming study.  It illustrates the stark contrast between the rollercoaster results of the state tests in 4th grade reading, as contrasted with the flat line NAEP scores over the last  23 years. 

As I was quoted in the Queens Chronicle,  “Unfortunately the state has been unable to develop and administer properly scaled tests with reliable results for many years that would allow anyone to gain insights about what is working or not in our schools.”  

We will have to wait for the NAEP results  to see if whether there has been any real change in reading or math achievement in the last two years. These exams were given last spring with the results expected in early 2027.

Even after the NAEPs are released, if the scores have significantly changed it will be difficult to ascribe this to any one factor such as a particular set of curriculums, when so many demographic changes and other developments have occurred  over the last two years, including a  decline in average class sizes in many schools.

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