Education Week - December 10, 2014 - 13

health services, find furniture, and locate
transportation. And the school offers
students after-school programs and
free summer day camps.
The program is more resource-intensive
than many other interventions
for low-income students, said Michael
Power, formerly the manager of educational
programs for the housing authority.
He is now an assistant superintendent
in another district.
"The appeal of the project is that it
was a much more holistic approach to
dealing with the challenges that kids
had, that were much deeper and more
complicated than any test score could
ever show you," he said.
The program's leaders are awaiting
the results of a third-year evaluation.
Then they will work to answer a series
of questions about the McCarver
Special Housing Program. Should it be
extended for additional years with additional
families or replicated at other
schools? Should some elements be
changed to make it more effective?
"If we turn out to be even half right
with our plausible expectations about
this partnership that we're building,
it should be very interesting to other
housing authorities and school districts,
and certainly to the ones that face similar
challenges," Mr. Mirra said.
Energy and Hope
Even as Tacoma leaders await the results
of the pilot, it has already drawn
interest from around the country.
Washington state lawmakers also introduced
bills in the 2013-14 legislative
session to give preference to housingprojects
that involve collaboration with
districts. Those bills did not make it out
of committee.
And national groups like the Washington-based
Council of Large Public
Housing Authorities have explored
ways that housing programs can partner
with schools.
Even small collaborations can make
a big difference, said Mr. Milner of the
Urban Institute.
After one school district saw high
student turnover in April, when families'
housing vouchers expired, the
local housing authority moved voucher
renewals to the summertime so they
wouldn't interrupt schooling, he said.
In Tacoma, the housing authority increased
participation in a public scholarship
program to 100 percent among its
patrons by including sign-up forms in
its housing-enrollment packets. Previously,
many students missed out on the
scholarship, which covers most public instate
college tuition and requires sign up
by the end of 8th grade, when parents
failed to shuffle one more set of papers,
Mr. Mirra said.
Mr. Gantt said the Tacoma program
has brought fresh energy and hope to
his family. He and his wife feel like better
parents now, Mr. Gantt said, because
they have more time to help their children
with their schoolwork.
"Kids, they feel things," Mr. Gantt said
of the family's formerly mobile life. "We
wanted to make sure these kids didn't
carry our burden."
Coverage of school climate and student
behavior and engagement is supported
in part by grants from the Atlantic
Philanthropies, the NoVo Foundation,
the Raikes Foundation, and the California
Endowment. Education Week retains
sole editorial control over the content
of this coverage.
DIGITAL DIRECTIONS > Tracking news and ideas in educational technology
www.digitaldirections.org
Company Sale
Makes Ed. Data
A Market Asset
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
disability, email and home addresses, phone
number, and date of birth-among other information.
The contracts with various education
entities and a trove of individual student records
were a substantial part of the company's
remaining value as it dissolved.
The "company sale" portion of Connectedu's
privacy policy opened with: "Information collected
through our website is considered a trade
secret of ours." In that same policy, Connectedu
had promised its users that they could delete
their personally identifiable records before any
sale.
The Federal Trade Commission's Consumer
Protection Bureau brought this to the attention
of the bankruptcy judge in the case in May.
It asked the court to have Connectedu destroy
all personal data; or to notify users that their
personal information was about to be sold and
that they could have it deleted; or to appoint a
privacy ombudsman to ensure protection of the
users' privacy.
But none of those scenarios happened, because
Connectedu had no employees as of the
filing date, according to Wojciech F. Jung, a
partner in Lowenstein Sandler llp, the New
York City law firm that acted as lead bankruptcy
counsel for Connectedu in the case.
Instead of registrants receiving notice before
the sale, it was left to the acquiring companies
that bought the failed company's assets-Graduation
Alliance of Salt Lake City, and Symplicity
Corporation of Arlington, Va.-to carry out
the notifications after the records had been
transferred.
"This is a significant red flag for the treatment
of student information by education
technology companies," said Joel R. Reidenberg,
a law professor at Fordham and Princeton
universities. "Many ed-tech companies
today are small startups, collecting lots of
data. Many of them are not going to succeed.
What's the protection when these companies
go bankrupt?"
For those that do succeed, grow, and become
part of an acquisition, he expressed similar concerns:
"What's the protection when they merge?"
Seattle Schools' Concerns
Connectedu was sold in pieces. In June, Symplicity
purchased Experience, a Connectedu
company that delivers career services to college
students and alumni. That same month Graduation
Alliance acquired contracts, key team
members, and several of Connectedu's educational
products and services, including the Connect!
college- and career-planning platform and
the Epsilen collaborative learning environment.
Agreements with the Texas Education Agency,
and the Miami-Dade, Fla., and Seattle school
systems were among the contracts conveyed in
the Graduation Alliance sale.
On Oct. 1, 2014, Graduation Alliance announced
that-the day before-students, parents,
and educators who had established accounts
with Connectedu's platform since 2002
had been "informed of their rights to request
all personally identifiable data be removed and
promptly destroyed," and that Graduation Alliance
had "enacted all data privacy measures as
required by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission."
That included the notification of all Connect!
users, past and present, whose post-secondary
accounts had been transferred to the company.
Fewer than 1 percent of those notified by Graduation
Alliance requested that their records be
destroyed, according to Ray Kelly, the ceo of the
company, which was founded in 2007 and has
specialized in dropout recovery and prevention.
But when parents in Seattle received emails
directly from Graduation Alliance indicating
that they could request that all personally identifiable
information be purged from the system,
it raised some questions and concerns, according
to Carmen A. Rahm, the chief information
officer for the district.
Seattle schools had demanded that all records
be deleted under its contract when Connectedu
declared bankruptcy in the spring, but the
district had to wait until Graduation Alliance
received the data for that order to be carried
out, according to a statement from the school
system, which pointed out that it had been assured
that all student data were "fully secured"
throughout the process.
"The Connectedu Chapter 11 story demonstrates
that student data is treated as a marketable
asset," said Sue Peters, a member of
the Seattle school board. "Part of the problem is
that parents have their children's information
transferred around, and it's up to the parents to
actively retrieve and protect it."
Issues of Trust
Possessing data about students is central to
using education technology effectively, and protecting
that information is paramount, industry
leaders say.
To that end, nearly 50 companies that sell products
in the K-12 marketplace have signed a "Student
Privacy Pledge," which goes into effect on
January 1, 2015. Among the pledge's dozen provisions
is one about acquisitions. It states that, in
the case of a merger or acquisition, the company
signing the pledge will "allow a successor entity
to maintain the student personal information ...
provided the successor entity is subject to these
same commitments for the previously collected
student personal information."
Mark Schneiderman, the senior director of
education policy for the Software & Information
Industry Association, an organization that co-authored
the pledge, has said that it is enforceable
by the Federal Trade Commission because the
companies are making a public pledge.
The student-privacy pledge "is a great step in
the direction of having these ed-tech vendors step
up and make a public commitment" about how
they're safeguarding student information, said
Paige Kowalski, the director of state policy and
advocacy for the Washington-based Data Quality
Campaign, whose goal is to help schools harness
data to make better decisions.
She called the Connectedu story a case study in
what can happen when trust is broken, and the
importance of re-establishing that trust with an
acquiring company. "It's incumbent upon the new
organization to establish the same level of trust
that was there when the first company signed up
with them," she said. "They're going to have to
prove by their actions that they are reliable and
worthy of the trust that was placed in them."
"Connectedu was not the first, and certainly
will not be the last, ed-tech company to be sold or
merged or go bankrupt," said James P. Steyer, the
ceo and founder of Common Sense Media, a San
Francisco-based nonprofit that advocates for safe
technology use for children. "You cannot always
leave it up to the industry to do the right thing or
even stand by their own privacy policies."
Mr. Steyer, whose organization pushed for the
passage this year of California's Student Online
Personal Information Protection Act, which will
regulate ed-tech providers in their handling of
student data privacy, called for "clear state and
national regulation of student data and personal
information" to deal with the issue.
EDUCATION WEEK | December 10, 2014 | www.edweek.org | 13
ConnectEDU
Bankruptcy:
A Privacy Timeline
ConnectEDU, a college- and careerplanning
company, gathered data
from high school and college
students, counselors, and parents.
APRIL 28
ConnectEDU files for
Chapter 11 protection in the
U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the
Southern District of New York.
MAY 23
The Federal Trade Commission
announces that it will seek
to protect students' personal
information as ConnectEDU's
bankruptcy moves forward.
JUNE 26
Graduation Alliance, a Salt Lake
City company, announces its
acquisition of key assets from
ConnectEDU.
AUGUST 4
The Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation files a motion in an
effort to get back the unspent
part of a $500,000 grant it
made to ConnectEDU in 2013.
LATE SEPTEMBER
Graduation Alliance notifies nearly
500,000 Connect! users that it
has purchased the ConnectEDU
data. Fewer than 1 percent ask for
records to be deleted.
OCTOBER 13
Seattle school district orders
Graduation Alliance to delete
all student records.
OCTOBER 28
Graduation Alliance notifies
Seattle schools that all student
information related to Seattle
public schools was destroyed.
Source: Education Week
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Education Week - December 10, 2014

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