Alert: PowerSchool data breach at (at least) four NYC schools

 As reported in tonight's Daily News (free link here), contrary to previous DOE assurances, four NYC public schools were likely affected by massive PowerSchool breach:  . 

Fordham HS for the Arts

Long Island City High School

Lower East Side Prep 

                                                             Westchester Square Academy

About 3,000 students are currently enrolled in these schools, but former students may also have been affected if the school used the Student Information System in years past. 

Please let parents, students and former students at these schools know to ask questions at their schools as soon as possible.  They should then check for ID theft and sign up for free credit monitoring and ID theft insurance, offered by PowerSchool.  More info here.

What's unacceptable is how DOE still refuses to confirm to reporters the names of affected schools, or announce this publicly, as hundreds of other districts have done.  The information came instead from the NYSED Privacy office. 

NYSED has also put out guidance to districts, suggesting that PowerSchool may not be telling the whole story and that the data breach may affect not only former students, but also schools that no longer use the School Information System but once did.  

 

Yet I can find no mention anywhere on these schools websites nor on the DOE website where they alert parents to data breaches - or as the DOE euphemistically like to call them, "Data Security Incidents." 

Also very problematic is how the PowerSchool contract with DOE for seventeen data-hungry products implies the company will only comply with state and federal privacy laws when they consider them "commercially reasonable." I shared my concerns with DOE over a year ago about this and got no response.

Though up to now, only the PowerSchool SIS has been reported as breached, such lax privacy language applies to all these products and is unacceptable. As has not been widely reported, PowerSchool failed to take the most simple security protections such as two-factor authentication for user access, and instead, the hacker just obtained the password of a single employee.

By the way, according to many reports, teacher personal data was also exposed. Have teachers at the affected schools been informed?

Letter to the Mayor, Chancellor & Commissioner of Health: serious privacy concerns with the city's promotion of Teenspace online mental health services

  

Last Tuesday, Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, NYCLU and AI for Families sent a letter to the Mayor, Chancellor Banks, and the Commissioner of Health, expressing our deep privacy concerns with the city's contract with  Talkspace, and their promotion of their online mental health services for teens, called Teenspace.  Both the Mayor and Chancellor Banks have repeatedly hyped the great quality of these services and encouraged students to sign up, including Banks at a town hall meeting last weekend.  There are also links to Teenspace on the DOE website and on the websites of individual NYC public schools. 

The city is paying $26 million for these services, despite the fact that Teenspace collects a huge amount of very sensitive personal information from students before they even create an account  or are given access the company's privacy policy – and much of this information would be barred from collection by the federal student privacy law PPRA without parental knowledge and opt out, if DOE had contracted for these services rather than the city's Department of Health.  The list of these extremely sensitive questions is included in an appendix to our letter. 

To make things worse, the Teenspace privacy policy says students' personal data can be used for marketing purposes, which would be prohibited by the NY Ed Law 2D, again if the DOE had signed the contract. In 2022, several US Senators wrote to Talkspace, pointing out how the company also appeared to be taking advantage of a “regulatory gray area” in HIPAA, to exploit the data of their clients for profit. 

Especially with all the breaches and misuse of student data by DOE contractors, the privacy of NYC students should be better protected than this. As the letter notes, there has also been widespread consumer complaints about Talkspace’s inadequate counseling services and the overcharging of clients.  Our letter was covered by  Daily News , Chalkbeat , State Scoop  and K12 Dive.

After sending the letter, we additional learned that Talkspace has been sued in California for sharing the personal information of website visitors and those who signed up for accounts with TikTok, including the personal information of minors, only adding to our concerns. 

 

Dangers of DOE plans to expand online learning and ed tech

Last night I gave a presentation on the ways in which DOE is failing to protect student privacy at a meeting of CEC 15; today I'm testifying on the dangers to both privacy and the quality of education of DOE's plans to expand the use of online learning.  Both presentations are below.  

We are looking for NYC parents and teachers who are concerned about these issues to join a new working group to investigate and advocate on this issue.  If you're interested, please let us know at info@studentprivacymatters.org  Thanks! 

Make your voice heard: how should the DOE be reducing class size?

Update:  You can also email your suggestions and comments to ClassSize@schools.nyc.gov by Wednesday, October 4th at 12 midnight.

The Class Size Working Group appointed by the Chancellor to help develop a plan to lower class size citywide in accordance with the new state law is holding public engagement sessions online and in person starting next week to present their preliminary proposals and get feedback:  

Tuesday, September 26th - 5- 7:30pm online (Manhattan/Brooklyn);  

Wednesday, September 27th - 5- 7:30pm online (Queens/Bronx/Staten Island) 

Monday, October 2nd – Citywide from 5- 7:30pm in person at the MLK Campus Auditorium, 122 Amsterdam Ave,  Manhattan.

Registration links for each of these sessions are here: https://learndoe.org/class_size/  

Please register, attend, and let your voice be heard, especially as those few vocal parents who opposed the law and urged the Governor to repeal it are already doing outreach. 

More information about these hearings and a summary of the draft proposals are on the Infohub website here.

Full disclosure:  I am a member of the Working Group and Class Size Matters along with many other advocacy and parent groups advocated for the passage of the law.

Letter to the Panel on Educational Policy about DOE's unnecessary spending on contracts

Let us know if you'd like your organization to sign onto this letter by noon tomorrow 4/23/20, by sending your name, position and organization to info@classsizematters.org.  Thanks!

Dear members of the Panel on Educational Policy:

We wanted to make sure you saw this attached letter sent by the NYC Comptroller to the Chancellor, asking him why he intends to spend up to $700 million for busing services this year that are not being used, before you’re asked to vote to approve these contracts next week, on Wed. April 29.

The proposed spending on busing is especially egregious given the city’s fiscal crisis, and the more than $800 million that the DOE has proposed in budget cuts to education next year.  We can envision no legal or programmatic reason to extend these contracts at this time.  Even if these were existing long-term contracts, they contain provisions known as Force Majeure, which allow either party to cancel any financial obligations in case of unexpected emergencies such as epidemics, as the NYC Comptroller’s letter points out. 

We also urge you to  ask the DOE about other contracts and pending to be voted upon, that if eliminated, along with these busing contracts, could obviate the need for any budget cuts to schools next fall:

• Why should DOE be authorized to spend $4.5 million for additional nurses now, when we have about 1400 nurses already on staff and only about 70 Resource Enrichment Centers operating at the current time?  What are the existing nurses on staff doing, and how would these additional nurses be deployed this year?
• How much is the DOE paying for each iPad, for sim cards to access the internet, and for all of this collectively?  And why was the decision made not purchase laptops instead, which are more useful to students?  According to the NY Post, a City Council source said that the DOE is paying  $625 for each iPad – unclear if this included the sim cards.  Assuming this is the price and they are purchasing 225,000, if laptops were bought instead at about $200 each, this might have saved as much as $100 million, about equal to what the DOE proposes to cut Fair Student Funding from school budgets next year.
• Why does DOE want to spend an additional $40.5M for IBM to “stage” these iPads; why is this necessary?
• What is the per hourly rate charged by  Accenture for consulting during the COVID crisis, amounting to $1.2 million, and exactly what will they be doing?
• Why is the DOE asking the PEP to approve an additional $3.4 million for professional development for the current school year, considering it will likely go unused and the Chancellor is proposing to cut $98 million from PD next year?
• Why is there still a need for $40.8 million in custodial supplies, although the vast majority of schools closed more than three months early? With it still uncertain as to whether schools will be open this summer either, it would appear that custodial supply needs should be reduced significantly this fiscal year and into the summer months.  
•  At the contract committee meeting that happened last week, Lindsey Oates, the DOE CFO, stated that most of these contracts were decided upon 45 days ago when schools were still open.  Why then haven’t they since been reconsidered and taken off the list for this year?

We hope if you ask these questions of DOE, you can obtain responses in writing, so they can be shared with the public.  If any of these questions are not answered to your full satisfaction, we urge to vote not to approve these contracts.

The PEP is supposed to be an independent voice that can represent the public interest, and provide checks and balances on the Mayor’s unilateral authority.  In August of 2009, the state legislature amended the school governance law to require that the PEP vote on every contract over a million dollars, to ensure that every dollar spent on education in NYC is not wasted.

We hope you fulfill that intended role, which given the city’s fiscal crisis and proposed budget cuts, is more important than ever.

Additional information about these proposed contracts is contained in two NY Post articles, here and here, as well as two posts on the Public School Parents blog, here and here. 

Yours sincerely,

Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters

Naila Rosario, NYC Kids PAC

Community Education Council District 3

Community Education Council District 4

Community Education Council District 6

Disappointing budget as far as our public schools and class size are concerned

Some  news links: NY Times, NY Post, NY Daily News, Chalkbeat and Brooklyn Eagle. 

The new NYC budget deal was announced between the Mayor and the City Council on Friday.

In terms of our public schools, it included $41M more to hire about 200 new social workers for schools, especially those with lots of homeless kids and $857,000 for seven additional Title IX Coordinators to handle complaints of gender discrimination and sexual harassment.  The budget will also put $250M into an overall city budget reserve to be used during economic downturns that now totals $6 billion. 

The education budget will  include  another $25 million  for the Mayor’s top education priority: 3K expansion into 14 new districts, bringing the cost to around $100M.  If the pattern of previous years holds, the DOE will continue to draw kids out of existing preK centers run by Community Based Organizations  and pushing them into already overcrowded public schools, which in turn will contribute to higher class sizes for kids in grades K-5.

What the education budget doesn't include: any increase in Fair student funding (with many schools are currently at only 90%), no dedicated funding for class size reduction, and no amount to achieve CBO pay parity for preK teachers -- though the Council says they got a commitment from the Mayor to address this disparity though negotiations by the end of the summer.

The only elementary school initiative that I know of is the 2nd grade literacy coach program in high needs schools, which is  now in its third year, funding 242 coaches in 305 elementary schools, according to the DOE website.  The program is supposed to produce two-thirds of students reading on grade level by the end of second grade by 2022, and 100 percent of all second graders reading at grade level by 2026 (long after de Blasio has left office.)

Yet the first year of the program showed no positive impact and the administration has not yet released data from either its second or third year - which suggests it may have had disappointing results as I predicted. Though the news of the budget deal didn't mention this, it is likely that the initiative will continue to be funded next year at the level in the Mayor's executive budget of about $90 million per year.  (There are job listings for this position here.)

In any case we aren't giving up on our campaign to reduce class sizes.  More counselors are great but there this will do little to improve achievement in grades K-5 where class sizes in many schools are still sky high.