• PowerSchool is selling student data without informed consent from parents, a federal lawsuit claims.
• The edtech giant calls the lawsuit’s allegations “baseless and inaccurate.”
• Oral arguments on PowerSchool’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit are set for Thursday in San Francisco.

It’s been 10 years since Emily Cherkin helped her son log on to the school computer on his first day of kindergarten.

“He can’t even write his name. Why am I teaching a five-year-old control-alt-delete?” he remembers asking himself.

Cherkin, a Seattle mother of two, former teacher and author of the new parenting guide “Screentime Solution”, is now the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit alleging that education tech giant PowerSchool sells student data, including health and disciplinary records, to its third-party “partners” and does so without the informed consent of children or parents.

The lawsuit, filed in May in federal court in San Francisco, concerns the world’s largest provider of software for K-12 schools.

PowerSchool, based in Folsom, Calif., manages data and analyzes it into what it calls “analytics and insights” for more than 60 million students and their educators, including in 90 of the top 100 US school systems by enrollment.

Boston-based private equity firm Bain Capital acquired PowerSchool for $5.6 billion in a deal completed on October 1. PowerSchool CEO Hardeep Gulati said the merger will help the company expand its award-winning products including PowerBuddy, its new generative AI platform.

With two parents and their children as the sole plaintiffs, the Cherkin lawsuit may seem like a small effort by comparison, but it throws big stones.

The process limits Cherkin’s decade of concern for children and screen time. It calls PowerSchool a “billion dollar surveillance technology empire.” It requires the company to repay the millions of dollars it made by selling student data “products” to more than 100 of partnerincluding educational consulting firms and government decision makers.

A partner, an education consulting firm, provides marketing guidance to colleges, trade schools and the military based on data from the 6 million high school students who use PowerSchool’s Naviance college planning software, the suit claims.

“PowerSchool collects this highly sensitive information under the guise of educational support,” the suit claims, “but in fact collects it for its own commercial gain,” while hiding behind “opaque terms of service that no one can understand “.

PowerSchool throws big stones back.

The days of “spiral notebooks” are long gone, edtech advocates argue in the a motion to dismiss filed in July.

The motion alleges that PowerSchools is legally permitted to collect data voluntarily submitted by students and administrators, along with metadata about “unique device identifiers,” IP addresses, and “cookie data.”

PowerSchool also claims it “appropriately discloses” the data it collects.

PowerSchool spokesman Austin Zerbach told BI that no PowerSchool product sells any form of student data.

“PowerSchool does not endorse or support any use of student education records other than as agreed to by our customers, schools and districts that control the student education record, nor do we engage in targeted advertising with personal student data,” the spokesperson said. of PowerSchool, Zerbach. a written statement.

A data warehouse of 345 terabytes

The information PowerSchool collects from students is “virtually unlimited,” the lawsuit says.

It lists more than 50 types of data that PowerSchool says in public disclosures it “may” collect, including “extracurricular program affiliation” and “student evaluations.”

PowerSchool also tells users it may collect “data about student behavior” and information about “physical and mental disabilities,” according to the lawsuit.

PowerSchool’s “data test” totals about “345 terabytes of data collected from 440 school districts” and includes information from nearly 20 edtech companies it has acquired since 2015, including Schoololgy and Kickboard, a “management software and reporting of student behavior,” process. claim.

What is done with the data?

The lawsuit alleges that, in addition to being aggregated into profitable analytics “products” for third parties, it is used to “train its AI technologies,” including a PowerBuddy The chatbot was marketed not only to educators but also to “state employees” for the purpose of “workforce planning,” the suit claims.

The data is anonymized

Data shared with third parties is anonymized, but the process raises concerns that it is so “granular” that it can be reverse-engineered to identify individual students.

“There are data brokers — they’re called identity resolution companies — that collect information from Internet users, re-identify the data and then sell it,” said Austin, Texas-based attorney Julie Liddell. EdTech Law Center represents Cherkin in suit.

Technology can easily re-identify anonymous student data, said Chad Marlow, senior policy adviser at the ACLU, where he focuses on privacy, surveillance and technology issues.

“A generation ago, the most private student data was kept in a locked steel cabinet in the principal’s office, and it was very difficult to share that information,” Marlow said. “Nowadays, the ability to share and redistribute that data can be as easy as pressing a key on a keyboard.”

PowerSchool’s “products” to educators, policy makers, and government agencies include: “P20W Cradle-to-Career State Data Systems.”

Its data are presented as “longitudinal,” capturing the same students from K-12 through postsecondary education and into the workforce.

“It says to state and local governments, ‘You’re not going to get a more robust picture of children, starting in their earliest days,'” Liddell said.

“And this is not just for education services,” she told BI. “It’s for workforce planning, it’s for health care planning, it’s for juvenile justice planning and it’s for law enforcement planning,” she said.

PowerSchool’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, including on the grounds that it misapplies the law and fails to state “actual damages,” will be argued in San Francisco on Thursday before U.S. District Judge James Donato.

“The allegations made in the complaint are unfounded and inaccurate,” Zerbach, a PowerSchool spokesperson, told BI.

The Company “strictly and proactively complies with all legal, regulatory and voluntary requirements for protecting student privacy,” the statement said, pointing to PowerSchool’s online “commitment to protect the privacy of student data.“

“No PowerSchool product, including the Connected Intelligence P20W, sells any form of student data,” the spokesperson said. “Connected Intelligence P20W provides a unified, secure and integrated platform for education and government agencies to unify, integrate and securely access their own source system data in a state-specific data cloud. As with all PowerSchool products, only authorized users have data. access with strict data governance as defined by the state agency.

PowerSchool began selling software to help schools track grades, attendance and enrollment in 1996.

Apple acquired the company for $62 million in 2001, then sold it to Vista Equity Partners in 2015. Vista Equity retains a minority stake, as does Onex Partners, according to PowerSchool’s Bain merger announcement.

When the deal closed on Oct. 1, shares of the edtech leader, which had traded as PWSC, were delisted from the NYSE.

The Bain-PowerSchool deal follows the acquisition by global investment firm KKR & Co. Inc.’s $4.8 billion acquisition of Salt Lake City-based edtech firm Instructure Holdings, Inc. announced in July.

“It’s no surprise that private equity firms are increasingly interested in acquiring companies that have access to a lot of very valuable data,” Liddell told BI.

As a private company, “they will no longer be legally required to make even the minimum disclosures required of a public company,” she said.

A Bain Capital spokesman did not respond to a request for comment for this story.