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Please send a message to the FTC today: do not weaken student privacy!

Update: On December 9, the FTC Extended the Deadline for Comments on COPPA  until December 11 because the regulations.gov website was down.  You can also send your comments to [email protected] with “COPPA comments” in the subject line.

The Federal Trade Commission is seeking public comments before “updating” their regulations on COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the law that was originally passed in 1998.  The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy is concerned that the FTC may be considering weakening the law, by allowing for the collection of personal data from kids under 13 by school vendors without parent consent.  The deadline for comments is next Wednesday, Oct. 23.  A sample, brief message you can send is below, along with instructions.  Below that and here are the detailed comments submitted by our Parent Coalition.

Given all the breaches of student data in recent years, the widespread use by schools of surveillance software, data-mining apps, digital programs that deliver so-called “adaptive learning” and behavior modification tools, as well as the ubiquity of sites and apps that display advertising to children, the FTC should be strengthening the COPPA regulations rather than weakening them.

Moreover, we agree with this bipartisan group of Senators, who sent a cautionary letter to the FTC on October 4th, pointing out that the FTC isn’t obligated to issue new regulations until 2023, and urging them not to weaken the law through rewriting the regulations.

If the FTC is going to go ahead with issuing new regulations anyway, it should:

  1. Continue to require parental consent for any digital collection of data from children under 13, in and out of school. The need for parental consent is especially critical for personal data collection in schools regarding student behavior, biometrics, geolocation, disability and health conditions.
  2. Reconfirm that parents have the right to access any personal data collected by ed tech programs assigned to their children, challenge it if is incorrect, delete it and opt out of any further disclosure.
  3. Emphasize that the use of student data for advertising purposes in any form should be strictly prohibited, as well as any other commercial uses of this information, including employing student data to improve products and services or develop new ones.
  4. Use its authority to investigate and audit schools, districts and their vendors, and analyze their data practices to see if personal student information is being inappropriately redisclosed, repurposed and/or used for non-educational purposes.

A sample message you can copy and paste is below, and please feel free to modify it with your own personal views and experiences. But remember to send it no later than the deadline of Dec. 11!

________

https://www.regulations.gov/comment?D=FTC-2019-0054-0001

Sample comment to be posted:

To the FTC:

As a concerned parent [or teacher or citizen], I strongly urge you to strengthen rather than weaken the COPPA regulations and your enforcement of the law to ensure children’s privacy, in and out of school, especially given the increased number of breaches and the inappropriate use of personal student data in recent years.

Any collection of data from children under 13 should continue to require prior, informed parental consent, as well as make it possible for parents to exercise their rights to access the personal data collected from their children by schools or their vendors, challenge it if it is incorrect, delete it and finally, opt out of any further disclosure.  The need for parental consent is especially important in the case of extremely sensitive student data regarding children’s behavior, biometrics, geolocation, disabilities, or health conditions.

The FTC should also continue to prohibit the use of student data for advertising purposes or to improve or develop new products or services.  Finally, to ensure that the law is fully enforced, the FTC should use its authority to investigate schools, districts and their vendors for excessive collection, redisclosure and repurposing of children’s personal data and its use for non-educational purposes, which is occurring in too many classrooms every day.

Yours sincerely, Name, address

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Privacy warning to parents whose kids will be taking the ACT or College Board (PSAT, SAT, AP) exams

Here is a one-page pdf flyer you can distribute to parents or post in your schools.

Both ACT and College Board sell personal student data to colleges and universities, as well as to other non-profit and for-profit organizations to help them recruit students and/or market their products and services.

The College Board makes an approximate $100 million per year from its “Student Search” program, for which it charges organizations 47 cents per student name. [1]  Last year, ACT was sued via a class action lawsuit, because they allegedly included student disability information in the data they sold to customers.[2]

 If your child is taking a College Board exam, and you don’t want any of their personal data sold, which may include their race, ethnicity, self-reported grades, religion and/or test scores within a certain range, as well as other confidential information, urge them NOT to fill out any of the optional questions that are included online or in the Student Questionnaire given before the administration of the exam.  They should also be sure not to check the box that indicates they want to participate in the College Board “Student Search” program.

If your child is taking the ACT, you and your child should also refrain from filling out any of the extraneous information asked for in the  ACT Student Profile Section, unless you want that data also sold and/or used for marketing purposes.

In May 2018, the US Department of Education’s Privacy Technical Assistance Center warned schools and districts that have agreements with these companies to administer their exams during the school day that their practice of allowing these companies to gather confidential information directly from students and sell it without parental consent may be illegal under several federal laws.[3]

In addition, New York as well as Illinois and 21 other states prohibit school vendors from selling student data under any circumstances. [4]  Illinois legislators have now asked the State Attorney General to investigate the College Board’s practices for that reason. [5] NY Times has reported that this data often ends up in the hands of unscrupulous for-profit companies that use the information to market dubious products and services to families; in some cases, the information may end up in the hands of data brokers. [6]

Some districts now refrain from giving these voluntary surveys to their students or tell them not to answer any of its questions, because this takes considerable time and can add stress to an already pressure-filled situation.

Districts also should be aware that these companies disclose personal data that may be illegal.

Here are some questions parents should ask their children’s school or district ahead of time:

  1. Is any survey or voluntary list of questions going to be asked of their children before the administration of these exams?
  1. If so, can they give you a copy of these questions? Prior parental notification of any such survey is required under the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA), passed by Congress in 1978.[7]
  1. If any highly sensitive questions are included, such as those involving religious preferences or affiliations, will the school notify parents of their right to opt their children out of the survey ahead of time, as is required under PPRA?
  1. Does the district have a contract with the testing company that prohibits them from selling any of this personal student data, as is required by NY state law as well as student privacy laws in 21 other states?
  1. If not, why not? And can they share a copy of this contract?

Sources

[1] https://collegeboardsearch.collegeboard.org/pastudentsrch/support/licensing/pricing-payment-policies

[2] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180807005834/en/Students-Disabilities-File-Class-Action-ACT-Test

[3] https://studentprivacy.ed.gov/sites/default/files/resource_document/file/TA%20College%20Admissions%20Examinations.pdf

[4] https://studentprivacymatters.org/state-privacy-laws-re-selling-student-data-_act-sat-exceptions/

[5] https://news.wttw.com/2019/10/10/lawmakers-urge-ag-raoul-investigate-college-board-selling-student-data

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/29/business/for-sale-survey-data-on-millions-of-high-school-students.html

[7] https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ppra/parents.html

 

For more information, please email us at [email protected]

___

 

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How NY State Ed Department is trying to weaken student privacy by allowing the selling & marketing of personal data

Update 10/10/19: This post was reprinted with the title Is New York state about to gut its student data privacy law? in the Washington Post Answer Sheet on Sept. 11,  along with responses from ACT and College Board.

As a result of the comments and concerns expressed by many parents and privacy advocates, the NY State Education Department decided to omit the provision they had added to the proposed regs to allow for the sale or commercial use of student data with parent consent.  Yet a third version of these regulations will be posted shortly for public comment, and will be voted on in January by the Board of Regents.

The New York Board of Regents is currently considering whether to approve a radical weakening of the state student privacy law, which would allow the College Board, the ACT and other companies that contract with schools or districts to use the personal student information they collect for marketing purposes – even though the original New York law that was passed in 2014 explicitly barred the sale or commercial use of this data. Parents and all others who care about protecting children’s privacy should send in their comments to the state now, by clicking here or sending their view to [email protected]. Deadline for public comment is Sept. 16. More on this below.

Starting in 2014, many states, including New York, approved legislation to strengthen the protection of student privacy, due to a growing realization on the part of parents that their children’s personal data was being shared by schools and districts with a wide variety of private companies and organizations without their knowledge or consent. The US Department of Education had weakened the federal student privacy law known as FERPA twice over the past decade, rewriting the regulations during the Bush and Obama administrations to allow for non-consensual disclosures for different purposes.

At that time, few parents were aware how federal law had been altered to allow their children’s information from being passed into private hands. Then controversy erupted over the plans of nine states and districts to share personal student data with a comprehensive databank called inBloom, developed with more than $100 million of funding from the Gates Foundation.

InBloom Inc. was designed to collect a wide variety of personal student data and share it with for-profit vendors to accelerate the development and marketing of the ed tech industry, to facilitate the adoption of online instruction and assessment. As a result of widespread parental activism and concerns, all nine states and districts that had originally intended to participate in the inBloom data-sharing plan pulled out, and 99 new state student privacy laws were passed across the country between 2014 and 2018.

New York was one of the first to pass a new student privacy law. In March of 2014, our State Legislature approved Education Laws § 2-c and §2-d , which among other things, prohibited the state from sharing student data with inBloom or another comprehensive databank, and also regulated the way schools and vendors must secure student data, including imposing a complete ban on the sale of personal student information or its use for marketing purposes .

As a result of these provisions, New York received a grade of A- in the category of “Limitations on the Commercial Use of Data” in our State Student Privacy Report Card, released last January by the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy (PCSP), which I co-chair, and the Network for Public Education. In turn, this high mark raised New York’s overall grade for protecting student privacy in our rating system to B-, the second highest grade of any state after Colorado. (You can check out the interactive map that grades every one of the fifty states on its student privacy laws, overall and in seven different categories).

Yet to the frustration of many parents and privacy advocates, it would be nearly five years before New York State Education Department drafted any regulations to implement its 2014 student privacy law. In October of 2018, NYSED finally released proposed regulations for public comment. In March 2018, PCSP along with the statewide coalition New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE), submitted recommendations on how to strengthen and clarify those regulations, as did more than 240 parents and privacy advocates.

After the initial period of public comment had ended, instead of strengthening the regulations, the NYSED gutted them, and now proposed allowing student data to be used for commercial purposes as long as there was parental “consent” – a huge loophole that would create the opportunity for districts, schools and vendors to misuse this data in myriad ways.

In their rationale to the Board of Regents, posted here, NYSED officials were frank about their reasons for revising the proposed regulations in this way: to allow the College Board and ACT to offer “college search services to students and parents who consent to the release of college entrance test data to colleges and higher education institutions by college admissions testing companies.”

Yet the College Board and ACT do not just share the test score data in the ordinary ways that parents expect, that is, send these scores to whatever specific colleges that their children have applied to attend. They also sell personal student data to many unspecified organizations and institutions which then re-sell it to unscrupulous for-profit companies.

In particular, the College Board makes untold millions of dollars from marketing personal student data through their “Student Search Service”. Much of this confidential data is deceptively harvested through surveys administered to students right before they take the PSATs and SATs, or when they register for the test online, a practice that we have written about previously and more recently has been criticized by the US Department of Education.

In May of 2018, the Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) of the US Department of Education released guidance that if states and districts contract with the College Board or ACT to give these exams to students, as is increasingly the case across the country including in New York City, they may be violating federal privacy laws in several different ways.

First of all, as PTAC officials pointed out, the supposedly “voluntary” surveys given to students before taking the PSAT or SAT may include questions relating to highly sensitive issues including their religion, grade point averages and/or family income. Often, it’s not clear to these students that they have a choice not to offer this information, and since they are already feeling high levels of anxiety before taking these exams, they may feel pressured to do so. They certainly are not told that the data is sold will be sold at a profit by the College Board. In any case, some questions relating to sensitive issues cannot be asked legally of students who are under 18 without the prior notification and opt out or consent of their parents, according to the federal law known as the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA).

As the PTAC guidance document also makes clear, “the testing companies then sell [personal student] information to colleges, universities, scholarship services, and other organizations for college recruitment and scholarship solicitation.” If students are asked to take these exams by their districts, and the data is offered to third parties without explicit parental consent, this widespread practice also likely violates both FERPA and IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the latter which has special provisions to protect the private data of students with disabilities.

To make things worse, the College Board is deceptive about whether this data is actually sold. In the College Board privacy policy for the “Student Search Service,” they falsely reassure parents that “The College Board does not sell student information.“

Yet on another page on their website, they hedge this claim by saying they don’t “sell information about participating students to any third party without the student’s permission.” [Never mind that many of these students have not reached the age of consent.]
On a different, third page on their website designed for potential commercial customers, the purchase price of this data is made clear: 47 cents per student name.

The College Board is just as cagey and at times contradictory about what specific student data is shared with third parties through their “Student Search Service.” On their privacy policy page, they say the data may relate to the students’ “academic and extracurricular interests, career and field of study interests, family income, and religious preferences.”

A longer and more specific list of data is listed on the Student Search webpage, revealing that, depending on the test taken, it may include student email addresses, ethnicity, GPA, sports, or “educational aspirations.” On that same page, the College Board affirms that “we never share” information through this service relating to a student’s “disability status, self-reported parental income, Social security number, phone numbers, or actual test scores.”

Parents are forced to dig even deeper into a SAT registration booklet, to discover that while their child’s “actual test scores” may not be sold to third parties, “Colleges participating in Student Search … can ask for names of students within certain score ranges[emphasis mine].”

So unknowingly, students who are asked to answer questions from a survey before the administration of these exams may at the same time be unknowingly giving their permission to sell their data to a variety of institutions and organizations, who in turn, may then redisclose the data to other organizations and/or for-profit companies.

Last summer, in July of 2018, in an explosive article entitled “For Sale: Survey Data on Millions of High School Students,” the NY Times exposed how the College Board sells the personal information they collect via these surveys to various “partners,” who in turn may re-sell the data to for-profit companies, allowing them to use the information to market their dubious products and services to unsuspecting families.

The article described how thousands of students attended a “Congress of Future Science and Technology Leaders” costing $985, run by the for-profit National Leadership Academies. The company had bought their names and other data from an unnamed university, which in turn had purchased it from the College Board: “In filling out those surveys, the teenagers ended up signing away personal details that were later sold and shared with the future scientists event.” Once the data is sold by the College Board, it is nearly impossible to monitor any other use or redisclosures of the data.

College Board is far from the only untrustworthy actor in this regard. ACT has been similarly surreptitious about what personal student data is collected and sold to colleges and other third parties, through the survey on the online ACT Student Profile Section that students are asked to voluntarily fill out when registering or before taking the exam.

Without their knowledge, ACT allegedly identified student disability status through this information on the score reports sent to colleges and sold this information to colleges and other third parties. After this practice was discovered, a class action lawsuit was filed in August 2018 in the US District Court in Los Angeles. In a recent legal filing, ACT informed the court that it will no longer sell student disability status in the data collected voluntarily by students, but refused to admit to flagging its regular score reports with this information.

As Joel Reidenberg, a professor at the Fordham University School of Law, the head of the Center on Law and Information Policy told the NY Times, “The harm is that these children are being profiled, stereotyped, and their data profiles are being traded commercially for all sorts of uses — including attempts to manipulate them and their families.”

A research report co-authored by Professor Reidenberg found that there exists a thriving marketplace in student data, in which brokers offer a wide variety of sensitive student information for sale, including their ethnicity, income, religion, and interests, and that this data could “be used for a range of malicious purposes, including discrimination and identity theft.”

In 2014, after both New York and California passed laws prohibiting the selling of personal student data or their use for any commercial purposes, College Board and the ACT stepped in, realizing how these laws represented a severe threat to their thriving business in student data.

In Colorado, the College Board stepped in to persuade legislators to provide a special exemption from the law for their benefit – to allow school vendors to “sell, rent, or trade” personal student information for the “purpose of providing the student with information about employment, educational scholarship, financial aid, or postsecondary educational opportunities “ – as long as parents or students over the age of thirteen gave their consent.

In Arizona, Nebraska, North Carolina, Texas and Washington D.C. as well, their student privacy laws incorporated these exemptions, to allow the College Board and ACT to continue selling personal data for these purposes.

Now, these same companies, College Board and ACT, have apparently persuaded the NY State Department of Education to rewrite our state law by creating an expansive new loophole that would allow these practices to continue, by redefining the term “marketing” in the following way:

“Where a parent or eligible student requests a service or product from a third-party contractor and provides express consent to the use or disclosure of personally identifiable information by the third-party contractor for purposes of providing the requested product or service, such use by the third-party contractor shall not be deemed a marketing or commercial purpose prohibited by this Part.”

As PCSP and NYSAPE wrote in a letter to NYSED after the new draft regulations were revealed,

“To create a new, huge loophole in the law that would allow the College Board, ACT or any other contractor or subcontractor to sell student data and/or use it for marketing purposes, by making the untenable claim that such sale or marketing purpose is not truly marketing if there is consent, is a drastic weakening of the law which should NOT be contemplated….

If the College Board lobbyists or its supporters would like to eliminate the prohibition of the sale or marketing of student personal data in the law, they should go to the Legislature and ask that it be amended. This should not be done through regulations or by attempting to redefine the meaning of the term “marketing.”

In fact this loophole could benefit many other vendors, and even perhaps schools or districts that may want to profit off the use of student data, by asking for parental or student consent in surreptitious ways, for example requesting that they click on a button to signal their “consent” without carefully reading the privacy policy. Even if students or their parents knowingly consented to the initial marketing use or sale of the data, once the transfer of information has occurred, it is nearly impossible to track how it will be commercialized from that time on.

This wholesale rewriting and evisceration of the New York student privacy law should not be allowed. The deadline on public comment on the new regulations is September 16, and the Board of Regents are due to vote on the new regulations during their monthly meeting on October 8-9. Parents and all others who care about protecting children’s privacy should send in their comments now, by clicking here or sending their view to [email protected].

They should also call their Regents members, to urge them to reject these regulations which would violate the original intent of the law, and would open a Pandora’s box of an unfettered marketplace of personal student data, with potentially damaging results.

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Inordinate delays into US Dept of Education response to FERPA complaints lead to more blatant violations of student privacy by Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy

Update:   On May 31, 2019, the  US Dept of Education finally released their findings after waiting 3 1/2 years, showing that indeed Eva Moskowitz had violated FERPA by posting online the details from the files of  Fatima Geidi’s  son and sending them to reporters, and then again when she included them in her book.  Yet they didn’t penalize her or the school or even require that she omit theses details from her book, merely schedule some trainings in FERPA.  The Daily News covered this story and reported that Eva Moskowitz plans to appeal the decision.  The story was also reported in Education Week and Politico.  More here.


This is cross-posted at the NYC Public School Parents blog.

On  May 4, 2019 , the NY Daily News ran an article about the plight of Lisa Vasquez and her autistic daughter Jazmiah who was pushed out of a Success Academy charter school; Success also repeatedly threatened to call the city’s Administration of Child Services on Ms. Vasquez.  Her daughter has now been out of school for 18 months. The NYC Department of Education has failed to place her in any setting that provides her the services she needs, and refuses to pay for the private school that an impartial hearing officer has agreed would be appropriate.

The same day, the media outlet Chalkbeat  ran a longer story about this family’s predicament. While answering questions from Chalkbeat reporter Alex Zimmerman,  Success school officials showed him detailed confidential records from the student’s files, including “including progress reports, contemporaneous notes from multiple educators and psychologists, and a copy of her learning plan.”

This is a clear violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act,  also known as FERPA.  Though Success Academy officials claim they had the right to “rebut false claims without violating FERPA when a parent has chosen to go the press,”  there is no such provision in FERPA.

I contacted Ms. Vasquez through her attorney, and offered to help her file a FERPA complaint.  She accepted and on May 9, she sent it to the US Department of Education.  The complaint is below.  We also filed a complaint with the NY State Education Department Chief Privacy Office, as this disclosure also violates NY State Education law 2D, the student privacy law passed in 2014 as a result of the controversy over inBloom.

What’s especially infuriating about these events is that Success Academy and its CEO, Eva Moskowitz, have been using these same illegal tactics for years to retaliate against families who dare criticize the way her schools treat students.

In October 2015, after Fatima Geidi was interviewed on a PBS News Hour show by John about how her son was mistreated by the principals and teachers at Success Academy, Eva Moskowitz sent a letter with details of his records, full of trumped up offenses, to every education reporter in the nation, and posted it on the Success website.

Fatima filed a FERPA complaint on Oct. 30, 2015, more than three years ago, a complaint that she is still waiting for the US Department of Education to respond to, though the Director of the Student Privacy Policy Office  Michael Hawes told me the investigation into her complaint was essentially complete months ago. What is worse is that because of the long delay in responding, Moskowitz subsequently wrote a book in 2017 published by Harper Collins, containing many of the same false allegations against Fatima’s son, a book that is still sitting on the shelves and in libraries throughout the nation.

Moreover in at least five Success Academy  charter schools, SAC Cobble Hill, SAC Crown Heights, SAC Fort Greene, SAC Harlem 2, and SAC Harlem 5, FERPA violations were noted by the SUNY Charter Institute during 2016 site visits, as noted in their Renewal reports.  In each of these Renewal Reports, the same observation is made:

“The Institute and school worked cooperatively to correct minor infractions at the site visit regarding Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (“FERPA”) wherein the intent of the school was laudable but technically a violation…”

I wouldn’t necessary assume that the intent of these school officials was laudable – especially given the SUNY Institute’s tendency to rubberstamp renewals and ignore all the many federal and state lawsuits against Success Academy, but I do find it interesting that they felt compelled to note these violations in their reports in any case.

Clearly Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy officials remain intent on ignoring federal law and violating the privacy of students  – and continue to get away with it because of inaction from the federal government.

Last October, the Inspector General’s office released a scathing audit of the US Department of Education’s record in responding to FERPA complaints.  The IG office reported that there were 344 open investigations as of May 2018, with many more pending complaints including some two years old for which no decision had yet been made as to whether to investigate or not.  No that no systematic process existed for even tracking and calculating how many complaints went unresolved over time.  They wrote that “The Privacy Office is not meeting its statutory obligation to appropriately enforce FERPA and resolve FERPA complaints,” and they required a corrective action plan.   This audit was reported on in Ed Week and other publications.

The US Dept of Education wrote a response to the audit, detailing how they would reform their process. Michael Hawes was appointed the new Director of Student Privacy Policy to clean up the mess.

On Friday, Michael Hawes left the Department of Education to join the Census Bureau, but before he left he told me that the active investigations into Fatima’s two complaints had been completed for some time, and a “findings letter” written, but that the letter could not be released because it had not yet been approved by senior leadership at the Department of Education.  A timeline of these events is below.

October 12, 2015: PBS News Hour runs a segment with an interview of Fatima Geidi and her son.

October 19, 2015: Ann Powell, VP of Public Affairs and Communications at Success Academy Charter Schools, sends out a media release to reporters, which includes a long letter from Eva Moskowitz to Judy Woodruff of PBS that includes personally identifiable information from the child’s education records.  The letter is also posted the same day on Success Academy website.  The letter by Ms. Moskowitz includes an email from John Merrow of PBS, in which he writes that Fatima “was unwilling to release [my] son’s records.”  Eva Moskowitz herself admits in her letter that Fatima  was “refusing to waive her son’s privacy rights.”

October 22, 2015: Fatima sends a cease and desist letter to Eva Moskowitz, demanding that she remove the letter to PBS from the Success website containing false disciplinary charges against her son,as well as a second follow up letter she had sent concerning her son on October 21.

October 23, 2015: Eva Moskowitz responds with a letter to Fatima, saying she had a “constitutional right to speak publicly to set the record straight about the reasons that your son received suspensions.”

October 29, 2015:  NY Times reports on the infamous “Got to go” list composed by a principal at a Success charter school, specifying the children he would try to push out of the school.

October 30, 2015: Fatima files her initial FERPA complaint, which is covered in several publications, including Slate.

November 19, 2015:  Along with Zakiyah Ansari of the Alliance for Quality Education, Fatima meets with Ebone Woods and David Krieger from the Office of Civil Rights of the US Dept. of Education in NYC to deliver a petition with thousands of signatures about Success Academy’s excessive suspensions and disparate treatment of black and Latino students which contributes to the school to prison pipelines.   They urge the federal government to stop funding the charter chain, which received $37 million in federal grants since 2010, including $13.4 million this past year.Fatima also submits a formal civil rights complaint about her son’s treatment by the school.

December 1, 2015:  Fatima receives a letter from  OCR confirming that Success Academy is under investigation. At about that time or shortly thereafter, Eva Moskowitz removes the details of Fatima’s child’s records from the Success website

January 22, 2016: Many more parents file a federal complaint with the US Department of Education Civil Rights office, accusing the Success network of charter schools of discriminating against students with disabilities. Officials in that office tell them Success is already under investigation.  This new complaint is reported in the NY Times and elsewhere.  .

September 2016:  SUNY Charter Institute notes unspecified violations of FERPA at several Success charter schools.

October 20, 2016: A full year has gone by without any response from the US Department of Education to Fatima’s complaint.

November 16, 2016:  President-elect Donald Trump interviews Eva Moskowitz for a job as Secretary of the US Department of Education. The next day, she says she would decline the position if offered it but that she supports Trump’s “strong support for school choice.”

November 18, 2016:  Ivanka Trump visits a Success Academy charter school.

September 12, 2017: Eva Moskowitz publishes the same chronicle of trumped-up allegations against Fatima’s son in a book published by Harper Collins.

September 28, 2017:  The US Department of Education awards  $6,130,200 to Success Academy charter schools to further expand their schools.

December 7, 2017: More than two years later, Fatima receives a letter from the US Department of Education, saying they are now ready to investigate her FERPA complaint from Oct. 31, 2015.

December 14, 2017: Success illegally releases information to a reporter  from another child’s records, a first grader after his mother files a lawsuit against his being suspended for forty-five days without a hearing .

December 20, 2017: Fatima files another FERPA complaint with the US Department of Education, having just discovered that many more details about her child’s records, some of them falsified, are contained in the new Moskowitz book.  In her new complaint,  she references her earlier complaint, and writes that because of the inordinate delay of more than two years, the harm to her child ‘s privacy has been seriously aggravated.

February 16, 2018: Fatima receives a letter from Frank Miller of the US Department of Education saying they had now received information from Success regarding her first complaint, filed more than two years ago, and in a few weeks would let her know the results.  He doesn’t mention the second complaint, though Fatima responds with the information about the Moskowitz book that has since been published.  She doesn’t hear back anything.

October 20, 2018:  Three years have lapsed from the date of Fatima’s original FERPA complaint,  without any action taken by the US Department of Education.

November 26, 2018: The Inspector General’s  audit is released, showing the Department is years behind in responding to FERPA complaints, and demanding a corrective action plan.

December 13, 2018:  I have a conversation over the phone with Michael Hawes, who by then has been appointed  Acting Director, Family Policy Compliance Office, and is about to be named  Director, Student Privacy Policy Office.

Hawes says they will soon release a “findings letter” about Fatima’s FERPA complaints. He points out that his office had already posted a 2015 “technical assistance” letter to the Virginia Attorney General, saying that a school’s desire to defend itself against accusations by parents or students is NOT a legal justification to disclose confidential information from their records without their consent.   As that letter points out, “the Department has declined on previous occasions to extend the doctrine of implied waiver of the right to consent when parents or students have shared information with the media or other members of the general public due to the harm that this would cause to students’ privacy interests.”

December 20, 2018: The US Dept of Education responds to the IG audit, promising to take various steps to speed up its responses to complaints.

January 2019: Michael Hawes is appointed Director of the Student Privacy Policy Office.

January 9, 2019: Rachael Stickland, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, and I have a conversation with Michael Hawes about the many positive changes he plans for the office, including making their response to FERPA complaints more speedy.  I suggest that they post more of the results of their investigations and findings letters online, so that the public can see they’ve made progress and can better understand what sorts of actions violate FERPA; this  might also help prevent future infractions of the law. I again bring up Fatima’s complaints, which are still waiting for resolution more than three years later they were initially sent to his office. He assures me that the results of their investigation into both of her complaints will be within a few weeks or months.

April 16, 2019: The US Department of Education awards $9,842,050 to Success charter schools.  According to Success, this will help fund the opening of four new elementary schools, one new middle school, and one new high school, and help them expand four existing middle schools. By this point, there are at least four different pending federal lawsuits against the Success chain for violating the rights of students with disabilities.

April 22, 2019:  Another lawsuit is filed vs Success Academy, for forcing a special needs student out of its schools, as well as calling Children’s Services on the mother, and forcibly removing the student to a Brooklyn police station.  In this case, Ann Powell, Success Academy spokeswoman, writes in an email,  “the lawsuit is completely without merit and contains numerous factual inaccuracies” but said she could not go into detail due to federal privacy laws.”

May 2, 2019: Michael Hawes announces he is leaving the US Dept of Education to join the Census Bureau.  He writes me, “Re the Geidi case, it’s cleared my office, but is being held for review by my leadership.  I’m hoping I’ll be able to issue it before I depart.”

May 4, 2019:  In response to the allegations made by Lisa Vasquez, Success Academy releases details of her child’s file to reporters, and claims that they have the right to do so in order to “rebut false claims without violating FERPA.”

May 9, 2019:  Lisa Vasquez files her FERPA complaint against Success Academy. (see below).

May 10, 2019: Michael Hawes’ last day at the US Dept. of Education.  Needless to say, the results of the investigation into Fatima’s complaint against Success Academy violations of her son’s privacy have still not been released.

May 9, 2019

U.S. Department of Education
Family Policy Compliance Office
400 Maryland Ave, SW
Washington, DC 20202-8520

By postal mail and email to: [email protected]

My name is Lisa Vasquez and I reside at the following address: [redacted].  I am the mother of Jazmiah Vasquez, my daughter who has been diagnosed as autistic and is seven years old.  Jazmiah was a student at Success Academy Prospect Heights, 760 Prospect Pl, Brooklyn, NY 11216 from September 2017 to November 2017.

The principal of the school at that time was Sydney Solomon.  The principal now is Darielle Petrucci.  The  CEO (or Superintendent) of the Success Academy Network is Eva Moskowitz, whose office is located at the following address: 95 Pine Street, Floor 6, New York, NY 10005.

On  May 4, 2019 , the NY Daily News ran an article about the fact that my daughter was pushed out of this charter school and still has not  received a placement in a school that can provide her with the intensive services that she needs. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/ny-18-month-wait-school-disabilities-20190505-kfmsidunyjhzfmmkfvve2ylsv4-story.html   The same day, the media outlet Chalkbeat also ran a longer story about her predicament. https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2019/05/04/how-special-education-failed-jazmiah/

As the Chalkbeat reporter Alex Zimmerman wrote, Success officials showed him confidential records from my daughter’s file: “Success officials provided detailed records of Jazmiah’s time at the charter network, including progress reports, contemporaneous notes from multiple educators and psychologists, and a copy of her learning plan.”

On Twitter, the reporter exclaimed at the level of detail he was provided: “The way Success responded to my questions shocked me. They turned over detailed records of Jazmiah’s time at the school, including progress reports, contemporaneous notes from multiple educators and psychologists, and a copy of her learning plan.” https://twitter.com/AGZimmerman/status/1125405362709049344

At no time did I provide my consent for the school to release any of this information – and yet Success Academy officials claim that it was their right to do so.  Here is an excerpt from the Chalkbeat article:

Ann Powell, Executive Vice President of Public Affairs & Communications at Success Academy Charter Schools, defended this  disclosure. “It is our position that we are allowed to rebut false claims without violating FERPA when a parent has chosen to go the press but our critics don’t accept that position,”

As also noted in the article, Success Academy is a serial violator of students’ privacy rights; see the FERPA complaint filed by Fatima Geidi , submitted on Oct. 30, 2015, more than three years ago, about how Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz shared details of her son’s disciplinary records with reporters:  https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2015/10/ferpa-complaint-from-fatima-geidi-to.html   Here is an article about this:   https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/10/success-academies-eva-moskowitz-published-a-students-disciplinary-record.html   In that article, Ms. Moskowitz was quoted as follows:

“The First Amendment limits a person’s ability to use privacy rights to prevent others from speaking. When somebody chooses to make statements to the press, they waive their privacy rights on the topics they have discussed, particularly when, as here, those statements are inaccurate.”

Yet there is no such waiver or provision in FERPA.  Ms. Geidi’s complaint still has received no response from your office though it was submitted three and half years ago, even though she has heard that an investigation was launched and completed.   Because of this undue delay, Success Academy officials apparently assume that they do not have to follow the law.

This disclosure by Success Academy of my daughter’s education records  is an egregious and willful violation of both FERPA and IDEA.  I urge you to take action in an expedited fashion to alert school officials to these repeated violations of the law and to exact punitive damages.

I certify that this information is accurate and true to the best of my knowledge.

Signed Lisa Vasquez, May 9, 2019

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McPherson KS students join the rebellion vs Summit and depersonalized learning and win the right to opt out

Yesterday, in a NY Times front page story, the reporter Nellie Bowles explored the many problems experienced by Kansas students and parents when the online Summit Learning program was imposed on their schools, including health problems, poor curriculum and lax privacy. “It sounded great, what they sold us,” said one parent. “It was the worst lemon car that we’ve ever bought.”  Please read the article and if you’re a Summit parent anywhere in the country, share your experiences in the online portal at the end of the article.

I’ve written about the resistance to the Summit platform since 2016, here, here, here  and here, including my visit to a Summit charter school here.  Though the NY Times article gives short shrift to the issue of privacy it does contain a quote from me about the tremendously intrusive wealth of personal data that Summit and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are collecting. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly broken every promise he’s made about keeping personal data private and neither CZI nor the new nonprofit that will take over Summit headed by Zuckerberg’s wife have provided any reason that parents should trust them any more.

What’s particularly moving about the article is that while Summit and its funders, including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and  the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative all claim Summit students are able to demonstrate ” “greater ownership of their learning activities,” the McPherson Kansas students are actually taking ownership of their education by walking out of school and engaging in sit-ins.  Though of a very different demographic, they resemble the remarkable Brooklyn students who earlier this year walked out of the Secondary School of Journalism in protest against Summit, and who followed up by writing an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, saying “We refuse to allow ourselves to be experimented on in this way.“ 

This is a growing phenomenon.  Note the thousands of Ontario students who organized a mass walk-out earlier this month of schools throughout the province,  against rising class sizes and the requirement that all high school students  take online courses.  All of these students are showing courage and agency by resisting the narrow technocratic and ultimately dehumanizing policies that threaten to fatally damage their education.

It was just announced that at as a “compromise” at the McPherson middle school that the NY Times reported on, up to 225 students will be allowed to opt out of Summit next year.

Five years ago yesterday, inBloom closed its doors after parents rebelled against this Gates Foundation $100 project, designed to collect and share the personal student information of nine states and districts with for-profit ed tech companies.  At that time I asked, does that mean government officials, corporations  and  foundations have learned their lesson? The continued invasion of ed tech into our classrooms, including the expansion of Summit, sadly shows not.  But as parents are increasingly joined with students in rebellion against depersonalized learning, perhaps we have a chance to beat it, once and for all.

Our updated fact sheet on Summit, including questions that parents and students should ask before the program is implemented in their schools is here: Summit fact sheet 4.22.19 and below.