Good news! AI contracts did not get approved last night at the PEP

A pretty amazing meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy happened last night.  The three AI contracts did NOT get approved by the Panel, for EPS/Amira (withdrawn or turned down for the third time!), Lumi and Kiddom., despite the push by the Chancellor and the DOE officials to keep rapidly expanding that risky technology in classrooms around the city.   

Thanks so much to the parent leaders, the teacher and student who spoke clearly and eloquently  in opposition – and also to many of you who sent comments to the Panel about this critical issue. It shows that the AI juggernaut can be stopped with enough organized opposition.

The Brooklyn BP rep, Camille Casaretti, thanked the many people who wrote in with comments.  Mine are posted on the blog below.   If you wrote in and would like to have your comments shared, please send them to me at leonie@classsizematters.org and I’ll post them as well. Soon I’ll post a video of those who spoke so well last night.

Also approved was a resolution urging the DOE and SCA to create more space to relieve overcrowding and allow schools to lower class size, and a resolution against renewing contracts for another five years for the same group of bus companies that have provided such unreliable service for the last 45 years. 

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My name is Leonie Haimson, I am co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.  I was appointed by the Chancellor as a member of AI working group last June, which was tasked with creating guidelines and guardrails for the use of this technology, which is controversial with many privacy experts because of the way AI tools data mine the personal information of students to improve their products, which is illegal under the NY State student privacy law. 

Many parents and teachers are also concerned because of the growing evidence that the use of AI in the classroom hampers the development of cognitive skills, creativity, and critical thinking, all central to learning, while undermining the human connection essential to a quality education. 

Yet since the AI working group was appointed, it has been sidelined.  We’ve been kept in the dark and essentially stonewalled – denied any  of the information we need to move forward, while the DOE goes full speed ahead, expanding the risky use of AI without any of the necessary precautions. 

One of our first requests to DOE was the list of AI products currently used in schools, along with their privacy policies.  Yet the DOE official briefing us refused to provide this list, saying they could not do so because of non-disclosure agreements with the vendors.  

We also asked for materials that DOE has used to train teachers in the use of AI, which the same official claimed had been provided to more than 84,000 teachers and other staff.  Yet these materials were denied us as well.  

I urge you to vote no on the contract for the EPS chatbot and other AI tools until DOE establishes rigorous privacy protections for their use, including independent security audits and privacy impact assessments, along with peer-reviewed research showing their positive impact on learning.  DOE should also explain how the serious risks of AI use related to algorithmic bias andtheir  negative impact on the environment and the climate will be prevented. 

Thank you for your time and consideration.

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.  [Update:  NYSED took down this alert at some point later, but you can find it archived here.]

 

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?

The Terrible, Horrible, No Good $31 million DOE contract with McGraw Hill off the agenda for tonight's PEP meeting!

Update 12/1/22: Daily News has a good article today on how the McGraw Hill contract was pulled from the PEP agenda last night, because of the controversy over huge cost and lack of any discount; the article quotes from comments made at the meeting by teacher Gavin Healy, PEP member Tom Sheppard and me.  

Yet the question still remains whether the contract will be submitted unchanged at a later meeting.  The only comments by  DOE officials about the contract were confusing:  Liz Vladeck, General Counsel, said there would be no loss of "services" during this time, meaning (I suppose) that schools could still order McGraw textbooks at inflated prices.  As the DN quotes her, "We just want to ensure folks understand this means they will be working at risk of financial loss until the contract is resolved,” Vladeck said of the vendor.

The only other DOE official to speak to the issue was Elisheba Lewi, head of DOE procurement, who on Monday had said at the PEP contract committee meeting that the contract "didn't make any sense" to her. Last night she said they "pulled that item from agenda so that we could just ...address concerns that have been raised & we're working very closely with the vendor to get to gain clearer understanding of what the current status is.” Huh?

The Great Minds Foundation textbook contract that also lacked any discount and charged an even higher shipping fee, but at a far lower total amount, was approved.

 

On Sunday night, I perused this month's contract list [ proposals here] and noticed a contract to be voted on during tonight's PEP meeting that was even more ridiculous than usual:  It was a non-competitive contract with McGraw Hill that would authorize DOE to spend $31 million for textbooks at their full list price, plus 7% shipping. 

I tweeted in protest against this ridiculous bid, as surely the DOE, the largest school district in the country could have negotiated a better deal. See, for example, how McGraw Hill textbooks are sold online at this website, with a 30% off for any orders of 25 or more, increasing to a 40% discount for any orders of 1000 or more, with free shipping.  With a discount like this, they could have saved our schools nearly $15 million. 

I also noted a similar, if smaller non-competitive proposal to purchase books by Great Books Foundation,  for  $454,000, with no discount and an even higher cost for shipping: 11

My tweets were quickly retweeted, with many parents and teachers expressing their outrage, and others surprised, given the fact that their schools had never provided textbooks to their students.  Possibly this is because they are too expensive, even as schools are only provided  $58 per student to purchase textbooks. 

On Tuesday morning, the issue was discussed during the PEP contract committee meeting.  See the transcript of the meeting here.  

PEP members Sheree Gibson and Tom Sheppard both spoke out against the contract.

PEP parent member Tom Sheppard said: "$31.6 million over seven years is a lot of money. Right? And I'm wondering, is this mostly online materials is a print material as well. And I guess the reason why I'm asking that question because, you know, my kids are seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th grade, and I think I've never seen them carry a textbook home. So if they've never had a textbook, and we're spending $31.6 million over seven years for a contract with McGraw Hill, I want to know what we're getting for that."

 Sheree Gibson, Queens borough appointee asked, "Is there a discount in there because we did some looking, online advocates reached out to us...what negotiation what percentages are we getting for booking and dealing with McGraw Hill? I am taking into consideration that McGraw Hill is the big behemoth and has taken over a lot of other companies but still if we're doing this type of amount of business with them. I want a deal, I want a break, a discount."

Tom also raised the larger point, that these huge contracts month after month are proposed with little justification or even explanation from administrators, and for this school year already amount  to more than $3.5 billion:

I look at our schools, for example, that have had their budgets cut. And I look at environments where, you know, schools have to make choices about programming right, and what we can keep and what we can get rid of, but, you know, here we are kind of business as usual, over the course of a year voting to approve almost $4 billion in contracts, right? Like there's nowhere in all of this where we can figure out how to save some money so that we don't have to let go over 1000 teachers and get rid of like arts programs and after school programs like I think about that every month. And you know, I would love to know how or what the DOE is doing on an ongoing basis. To evaluate these contracts, the necessity of them, and how we can use cost savings from these contracts to actually keep teachers in classrooms and pay for librarians and those kinds of things.  

Even Elisheba Lewi, chief procurement officer,  admitted that the lack of any discount “doesn’t make sense.You guys have a very, very strong point.”

Yesterday, the Daily News ran a story about the no-discount,  no-good McGraw Hill contract. Reporter Cayla Bamberger quoted math teacher Bobson Wong: ""Someone needs to look into the terrible deals that NYC DOE makes for schools."  Deborah Kross of the CCHS said, "So much money is getting wasted because there are no competitive processes,” and “yet cuts in the classroom hurt our kids and teachers.”

According to yesterday's article,  the DOE said that they planned to ahead anyway with the vote tonight. Then this afternoon, they emailed PEP members that the vote will be postponed, though the other no-discount $453, 966.11 no-discount contract with Great Minds Foundation is still on there.    Here they both are on the latest RA list:

In 2012, McGraw-Hill was acquired by private equity firm Apollo Global Management, for $2.5 billion in cash and debt.  In 2021, it was purchased from Apollo by Platinum Equity for $4.5 billion. Clearly there are gold in them thar hills. 

I urge people to provide comments anyway, urging the DOE to do a far better job in negotiating these contracts, now and in the future. The meeting begins at 6:00 p.m. via zoom. You can log-on and sign up to speak from 5:30 PM to 6:15 PM at: https://www.learndoe.org/pep/nov30/.