While we rally for a moratorium on AI, DOE officials mingle in San Diego with ed tech vendors and executives

 

4/20/26 Update:  It appears that at least 18 top DOE officials attended the ASU-GSV conference co-sponsored by Google in San Diego last week, including at least ten district superintendents. 

On Thursday April 16, we rallied in City Hall Park, and called on the Mayor to place  a moratorium on the use of AI for two years.  Parents, students, teachers and advocates explained how AI poses clear risks to student privacy, their cognitive and skill development, creativity, emotional and mental health and the environment.  Here is our coalition's press release, and articles about the rally in Fortune, Daily News, and Politico.  

Serendipitously, the same day as our rally, the national group Fairplay released a letter, signed onto by more than 200 education and childhood organizations, as well as experts on mental health and medical professionals, asking for a five-year moratorium.  Josh Golin, the Fairply Executive Director, attended our rally and he is shown speaking above. 

 

After the rally, a bunch of us walked to the East entrance of City Hall, where students handed the Fairplay letter and our petition to Ailish Brady, Senior Advisor for Education, to the First Deputy Mayor. 

I also handed her a copy of the NYC Kids PAC candidate survey filled out by Zohran Mamdani when  he was running for mayor, in which he criticized "Eric Adams’ cavalier approach" to AI,  and promised to consult parents, teachers and students before implementing careful guardrails. 

Last week, at about the same time, at least seven eighteen high-ranking DOE officials were attending the ASU-GSV [Global Silicon Valley] conference in San Diego, mingling with ed tech vendors and executives, including Dr. Miatheresa Pate, the DOE chief academic officer, who led the aggressive AI expansion in NYC schools during the Adams administration and is still running it now. 

As Sue Edelman in her Substack article points out, the cost of attendee registration ranges from $2,450 to $3,850 per person -- all at a time when the Mayor has asked city agencies including DOE to make big cuts because of the city's billion dollar deficits. In addition, Dr. Pate was named a Google GSV Education Innovation Fellow, the conference itself was subsidized by Google, as was the development of the pitifully weak AI guidance put out by DOE a few weeks ago. 

Recently, the DOE placed Google Gemini, the company's AI platform on its TeachHub site, and is encouraging teachers to assign it to their students, despite the serious privacy and mental health concerns expressed by Fairplay, EPIC, and others. At the rally, I related a story a friend told me about what happened in her ten-year-old son's this week, related to the use of Google Gemini. See my comments below.

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Hi, my name is Leonie Haimson, and I’m the co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.  Guess who wrote the following in response to a question asking him for his position on the use of AI in the classroom, when he was running for office last spring: 

“Eric Adams’ cavalier approach to AI in schools is in keeping with his lack of support for our schools and sensitivities to the needs of teachers, students, and parents. I support regulating Al. AI can be a useful tool if deployed effectively, but it can also harm children’s ability to think critically and to write. It should not be expanded without careful guardrails. As Mayor, I would work directly with teacher, parent, and student groups to establish those guardrails and move forward with any expansion after careful deliberation.”

Yet right now, Mayor Mamdani is continuing the course that Eric Adams begam – rushing ahead with the expansion of AI without careful guardrails or any actual consultation with teachers, parents and students. 

The only group who had input into the awful DOE AI guidance recently released was an AI advisory Council appointed by Chancellor Banks shortly before he left office whose members were primarily DOE educrats and ed tech vendors.  

I was appointed to an AI working group by Chancellor Ramos and though we were repeatedly told that we would be able to give feedback on the guidance before it was released we were never provided with that opportunity.  

In fact, the DOE completely sidelined and stonewalled us, and they refused even to give us the names of AI products currently used in schools along with their privacy policies, saying this would their violate their non-disclosure agreements with their vendors.   

Dr. Miatheresa Pate, DOE Chief Academic Officer, who is leading the push for more AI use in NYC schools is a Google fellow and this week she is speaking at an ed tech conference sponsored by Google.   

Sure enough, a few weeks ago the DOE put Google’s AI  product called Gemini on TeachHub and started encouraging teachers to use it, without any consultation with parents or privacy experts.  

Yesterday a friend of mine told me that her son, a fifth grader in a NYC public school, was assigned to  read a poem together with his classmates.  They were then asked to draw a picture about the poem.  But  teacher also told them if they didn’t want to draw a picture,  they could simply upload the poem into Google Gemini and it would create the image for them.  Is this the sort of education we want for our kids? 

Mayor Mamdani, you recently said that you don’t use AI yourself, so why are you foisting it on our kids, when research shows it will undermine not only their privacy but their creativity, cognitive skills, critical thinking and exacerbate climate change? 

We have a petition here signed by nearly 2,000 parents, educators and others, calling on you to stop before its too late, and impose a two year moratorium on the use of AI in the classroom, so that rigorous protections can be established to protect the quality of our children’s education, their safety, and their future. 

More than 200 education and childhood groups and experts including medical professionals signed onto the Fairplay letter, calling for a 5 year moratorium.  We hope that the Mayor will listen to our voices, stop catering to Google and other ed tech companies, and forge a new and more positive direction for our public schools.

 

Hearings and testimony on need to reform Mayoral control from Diane Ravitch, parents, and advocates

Above is a video of the City Council hearing last week on Mayoral control, also available here.  There were incisive questions from the new Education Committee Chair, Eric Dinowitz, as well as from several other council members.  Also impressive were the oral testimonies of many parents, advocates and former students about how this governance system without any checks and balances  at the local level or community input was inherently undemocratic and had led to unjust and damaging  policies.   

Dinowitz expressed skepticism of claims of learning gains under Mayoral control, given the lagging results in the NAEPs-- the only reliable data on achievement, as opposed to the state test results which are erratically designed at best.  He also pointed out how  graduation rates can be artificially inflated through the use of credit recovery and the like.  He was also critical of HMH Reading, the most commonly used of the mandated box curriculums.

He asked about the DOE contracting process, which over the last 23 years under Mayoral control hashas wasted millions of dollars on useless or corrupt products and vendors, and whether it was true that the Panel for Educational Policy's Contract committee had been dissolved -- which in the past had provided one of the few occasions where the DOE was forced to explain the rationale for proposed contracts before the PEP meeting at which they will be voted upon.  Now PEP members are briefed privately on proposed contracts, and are told they are not to reveal what they haave been told to any member of the public.

DOE officials seemed confused as initially claimed that the Contract Committee still existed, until they conceded that indeed it had been eliminated, but refused to say that they would support such a Committee being restored and mandated in  law.   

There was also some confusion as to whether PEP members were sent resolutions by DOE that CECs had passed on relevant proposals they would be voting on, such as co-locations and school closures.  It turns out they are not, though Katie Jedrelink of DOE  said that CECs could send them directly to the PEP members if they liked. I subsequently pointed out that for years, the DOE website lacked the names of many members of the PEP, and  in even more frequently their email adddresses, making it impossible for the public to contact them.  This lack of information provided for members of the school board of the nation's large school district exists no where else in the country, to my knowledge.  After years of complaining about this matter, I was informed the day before the hearings that they had finally posted all the names and the email addresses of  PEP members, though I have heard from several that it is difficult for them to access their DOE emails, for reasons I don't understand.. 

Other Council Members also asked good questions, including former Education Chair Rita Joseph, who asked them what would be done to improve parent participation, given that only 2% of parents had voted in the recent CEC elections, and also how mistakes had been made in the process, including names of candidates omitted from the voting website.  CM Carmen de la Rosa also had particularly pointed questions related to the lack of adequate space planning by the DOE to allow schools to lower class size in compliance with the state law.  

Below are five of the written testimonies, first from  NYC school historian and education advocate Diane Ravitch, followed with my testimony for Class Size Matters , then  Jonathan Greenberg of the Educational Council Consortium, Naveed Hasan, PEP member and parent leader, and Naila Rosario, President of NYC Kids PAC.

All five of us pointed out the deep inherent flaws with what is essentially dictatorial, one-man rule, and the Mayoral majority on the Panel for Education Policy should be eliminated, to make it less of a rubberstamp.   Each of us also  proposed other reforms.  Check them out! 

 

 

In my testimony, I provide a list of major, multimillion dollars examples of waste and corruption under Mayoral control -- in the text and in the Appendix. Just two days after the hearing, yet another major scandal erupted: Kevin Taylor, the head of the School Safety division was indicted for bribery along with the CEO of the SaferWatch company, who had paid Taylor as well as Terence Banks, the brother of Chancellor Banks to promote the device to DOE, although Terence Banks has not been indicted. 

 See this story here and the indictment here. 

 

Here is the written testimony of Jonathan Greenberg of the Educational Council Consortium, which represents many leaders of Community Education Councils. 

 

Following are the views of Naveed Hasan, a Manhattan parent representative on the Panel for Educational Policy.

 

Finally, last but not least, the testimony of Naila Rosario, the President of NYC Kids PAC, who points out how Mayor Mamdani has left his supporters in the lurch, by reversing his position on mayoral control, one of his central education positions, without explaining why.