On February 26, 2024, nine state and national advocacy organizations, including privacy, consumer and government watchdogs, sent a letter to the Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul calling on him to follow the lead of New York Attorney General Letitia James and end the College Board’s illegal practice of selling Illinois students’ personal data. Full press release below.

MEDIA RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 27, 2024

CONTACT
Cassie Creswell
Illinois Families for Public Schools
773-916-7794

ADVOCACY ORGS TO ILLINOIS ATTORNEY GENERAL: 
STOP THE COLLEGE BOARD FROM SELLING STUDENT DATA

Yesterday, nine state and national advocacy organizations, including privacy, consumer and government watchdogs, called on Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul to follow the lead of New York Attorney General Letitia James and end the College Board’s illegal practice of selling Illinois students’ personal data.

The groups, including Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, Illinois Families for Public Schools, Citizen Action Illinois, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Fairplay, Good Government Illinois, Student Data Privacy Project, and Surveillance Resistance Lab, sent a letter to urge the Illinois Attorney General to enforce Illinois’ student privacy law with respect to the ongoing illegal sales of Illinois’ public school students’ personal data by the College Board, a multi-million dollar state vendor.

Two weeks ago, the New York Attorney General announced a consent decree with the College Board that fined the test vendor $750,000 and prohibited them from any further sale of student data collected via the administration of tests in school, a practice that has been illegal under New York state law since 2014. Now, in the letter to AG Raoul, the nine organizations said, “We hope that you agree that Illinois students deserve the same protections that New York students now enjoy.”

Illinois Families for Public Schools executive director Cassie Creswell said, “As a public school parent, I am appalled that the College Board has been profiting off the sale of Illinois children’s personal data for decades, a practice that has been illegal for school or district vendors ever since our student privacy law was passed in 2017. Student data shouldn’t be commercially exploited at all.”

Leonie Haimson, the co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy said, “Thanks to New York Attorney General Letitia James, the College Board will no longer be able to sell personal data collected from New York students via the PSAT, SAT and AP exams given in school. The College Board made $28 million selling New York student data they collected via in-school PSAT and SAT exams during the years 2018 through 2022 alone—not counting the millions more they likely made from selling the data of AP students. God knows how much they’ve made from illegally selling the data of Illinois students over the last seven years. It is past time for the Attorney General Kwame Raoul to step up and protect student privacy going forward, as Attorney General Letitia James has done.”

Via the administration of its tests during the school day, the College Board has access to the personal data of hundreds of thousands of Illinois students, including their names, addresses, ethnicity and race, economic status, test score ranges, and other personal information, some of which they collect from students before the administration of these tests or online when students create accounts on the College Board’s website. This data is sold by the College Board, for anywhere from $2,575 for 5000 student records up to $540,000 for an unlimited number of records, via their Student Search Service.

Illinois’ student data privacy law, passed in 2017 and known as the Student Online Personal Protection Act, or SOPPA, prohibits school, district and state vendors from selling student data collected in school, but has yet to be enforced in Illinois, one of at least 20 states with a similar prohibition on the books.

The State’s existing almost $55 million contract with the College Board for SAT and PSAT tests was signed in 2018, after the passage of SOPPA, but it explicitly allows the College Board to sell student data acquired under the contract. Illinois also pays the College Board fees for Advanced Placement tests for low-income students, and school districts across the state have individual contracts with the College Board for additional administrations of the SAT, PSAT and AP tests.

Illinois public high schools must give the SAT and PSAT to comply with state and federal law, and students must take the SAT to receive a diploma from a public high school in Illinois.

The current contract between the State and the College Board expires on June 30 this year. The Illinois State Board of Education released a request for proposal in December 2023 for a new contract, and it is likely that the College Board will again be chosen as the vendor for the state high school assessment.

In 2019, eight state legislators asked the Illinois AG Kwame Raoul to investigate the College Board’s data sales and whether they were in violation of SOPPA. Individual Illinois parents also filed complaints with the AG about their children’s data being sold. At the time, the AG’s Office said they were “looking into” the issue, but no actions resulted. In summer 2022, the AG’s Office falsely told the Chicago Tribune they were not “aware of any SOPPA violations being reported to the office.”

In May 2018, the US Department of Education issued guidance specifically warning local and state education agencies about the various legal problems involving potential violations of federal student privacy law surrounding the collection and sale of this personal data, when college admissions exams, including the SAT and ACT, are administered in schools.

About Illinois Families for Public Schools

Illinois Families for Public Schools (IL-FPS) is a statewide, grassroots, non-profit 501c4 advocacy group founded in 2016. IL-FPS is the voice of public school families in Springfield and across the state, advocating to defend and improve Illinois public schools. More at ilfps.org.

About the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy (PCSP) is a national grassroots advocacy organization, founded in 2014, which built on the success of parent advocates to stop the creation of inBloom, a national database of K-12 student data to be used for commercial purposes. PCSP includes parents from nearly every state and assists families in addressing individual and systemic threats to student privacy. More information at studentprivacymatters.org

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