Chancellor’s resignation, Teenspace, and AI, and how you can help protect student privacy

Sept. 25, 2024

1.Big news – Chancellor Banks is resigning as of Dec. 31, 2024, to be replaced by Melissa Aviles-Ramos, current Deputy Chancellor for Family Engagement. This follows the announced resignations of other top officials, including the Police Commissioner and Commissioner of Health, in the last twelve days.

The whirlwind of scandals and investigations surrounding the Mayor and his top appointees, including the Chancellor, should give rise to a new call for more accountability, oversight and checks and balances at DOE, but I fear that no lessons will be learned by those in power, because their interests lie in maintaining one-person rule, and ignoring the voices of parents and teachers.

We should recall the false narratives promoted by those including Governor Hochul who insisted on extending mayoral control for two more years last April, with no strings attached: and that any other system invited corruption, instability, and inefficiency. And look at what has happened since. The only minor tweak made to Mayoral control by the Legislature was that the Chair of the Panel for Educational Policy chair would now be appointed by the Mayor from among three nominees put forward by leaders of the Legislature and Board of Regents. And yet the new Chair will be exactly the same man who already held that seat as a Mayoral appointee, Greg Faulkner. The only difference is that now the Mayor will get an extra PEP appointee, to further cement his control over controversial educational policies as well as questionable contracts and spending.

2.     As I reported in my prior message, on Sept. 10 we sent a letter to the Mayor, Chancellor Banks and Health Commissioner Vasan, expressing our serious privacy concerns about Teenspace, with which the city has paid $26 million to provide free online mental health services to NYC students.

Our letter, co-signed by NYCLU and AI for Families, points out that if the Teenspace contract was with the DOE rather than the Dept. of Health, its disclosure of extremely sensitive student data for marketing purposes would be illegal, according to federal and state law. Since then, we discovered that Talkspace, the parent company of Teenspace, has been sued in California for sharing personal information of users with TikTok, including the health data of minors. We also learned that when a NYC student visits the Teenspace website on their phone, their personally identifiable information is shared with 15 ad trackers and 34 cookies, as well as Facebook, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft among other companies, which we saw from using the Blacklight  privacy audit tool,.

And yet the Mayor and the Chancellor continue to promote the use of Teenspace every chance they get, including in the Chancellor’s State of the Schools address on September 17. Whether coincidentally or not, the lobbyist for Talkspace is Oaktree Solutions, run by the Mayor’s close associate and former chief of staff, Frank Carone. It is likely that student privacy will be put at even greater risk by the planned expansion of AI in our schools, which the Chancellor also announced in his State of the Schools address. More about this in our latest Talk out of School podcast.

3.     Speaking of privacy, the State Attorney General has requested public input on how to draft regulations for two new state laws that were passed last spring, the Child Data Protection Act (CDPA) and the Safe for Kids Act. We sent in our comments on the CDPA on Monday, urging that these regulations make it clear that 1-The law should not undermine the stronger student privacy protections already inherent in federal and state law, that require parental consent for disclosures and prohibitions against using the student data for marketing purposes; 2- that the transfer and monetization of children’s data as in the Teenspace example should be barred; and 3- clear and concise Privacy Policies and consent forms must be required.

If you’d like to send it your own comments, we have provided a sample message along with instructions here; the deadline is next Monday, Sept. 30.

Thanks,

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
phone: 917-435-9329
[email protected]