When Joel Klein was chancellor of the NYC schools in 2006, he agreed to give the charter industry access to the names and addresses of public school students at the urging of his good friend Eva Moskowitz, who wanted to give the appearance of high demand for her schools. To this day, NYC is the only city that voluntarily turns over the names and addresses of its students to charters, which are the competition. In what other realm does one competitor give his “customer” list to his competitor, who will try to poach them and their funding too? Thanks to Arthur Camins, who made this point earlier in the comments.
After years of complaints by public school parents whose mailboxes were stuffed with charter propaganda and who objected to the breach of their children’s privacy, DeBlasio told several parent leaders that he would stop this practice.
The charter association got word of what was about to happen, and it held a press conference this morning, claiming it was “unfair” to stop the practice of turning over this information to them. Apparently, DeBlasio wimped out to placate the charter industry. Shameful.
Activist Leonie Haimson wrote about this confrontation before the news broke that the mayor had been intimidated by the charter industry.
It is unacceptable that this practice has gone on as long as it has. It is also unfortunate that neither the Mayor nor the Chancellor have made an announcement and instead the charter schools were informed first before any parents. See the information about a call from charter school supporters below reprinted in Diane’s blog.
As Shino wrote, parents and advocates have long complained about the privacy violations from DOE allowing charters to access this information for recruiting purposes; see Johanna Garcia’s FERPA complaint that she filed in Nov. 2017.
Moreover, there is not another district in the country that makes this information available to charter schools to help them divert students and funds from their public schools.
In Chicago, after student information was disclosed to Noble charter schools without parent consent, resulting in parents receiving postcards urging them to enroll their children in their schools, this sparked a huge controversy and led to an investigation by the Inspector General. As a result, the Chicago staffer who released the information to Noble was fired and the district apologized to parents in mailings paid for by Noble. And this occurred in a city where the Mayor controls the schools and is charter-friendly..
Right now, Nashville school district is defying a state lawrequiring districts to make this information available to charter schools and is in court, appealing a court order. NY State has no such law of course, and in fact its student privacy law Education 2D bars the use of student data for marketing purposes.
Diane Ravitch's blog 