Gotham Gazette

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Opinion

Expand the School Ban, End the Use of Facial Recognition in New York


NYPD command center

An NYPD command center (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


Schools are safe, but the rest of New York is at risk. This is the reality of facial recognition in the Empire State, where facial recognition is now illegal in schools, but remains all too present in other aspects of life.

The landmark law was lost in the 2020 chaos, signed by Governor Cuomo without any public statement on Christmas Eve. Still, even without the fanfare, it remains the law, and a long overdue law at that. New York may be the first state in the country to ban school facial recognition, but that’s partly because we were set to become the first state to actually use it. Not the whole state of course, just the town of Lockport, New York, which earned the dubious surveillance distinction as the first public school to install the biased biometric tracking system.

Now, it’s time to go further, enacting a comprehensive ban on governmental facial recognition. And we’re not alone in calling for this.

Today, our organization, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, is partnering with Amnesty International and the Privacy NY Coalition to launch Ban the Scan. This global campaign will bring international pressure to bear on passing a facial recognition ban here in New York, New Delhi, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and other cities around the world.

Despite the new ban on school surveillance, we still need to do more. Sadly, the children whose privacy is protected in the classroom are still subject to endless facial recognition scanning as soon as they walk out the schoolhouse door. This is because police officers remain free to use facial recognition technology nearly anywhere else in the state, even to track children. And here in New York City, we’re tracking the public more than ever.

According to a recent NYPD filing in a public records lawsuit I brought against the department, the NYPD has run more than 22,000 facial recognition searches in just the past three years. And as the numbers skyrocket, facial recognition increasingly becomes the tool of choice for low-level offenses like graffiti, shoplifting, and trespass.

Perhaps the most infuriating part of facial recognition is that it simply doesn’t work, at least not as well as advertised. Facial recognition has already led to the false arrests of numerous Black men. And these men aren’t outliers. According to a federal review of facial recognition algorithms, the software is more error-prone for Native American, Black, and Asian faces. At times, the technology can be ludicrously off-base, as when Amazon’s facial recognition technology misidentified Oprah Winfrey as male and misidentified 28 members of Congress as known criminals.

And New York’s facial recognition is particularly problematic. NYPD officers have used celebrity lookalikes for facial recognition searches, a practice that has absolutely no scientific support. In one case, officers failed to get a match for a blurry image of a man stealing beer from CVS, so they searched an image of Woody Harrelson instead. Officers have also repeatedly photoshopped crime scene photos before running facial recognition searches, opening a suspect’s eyes, closing their mouth, or even pasting on the entire jawline.

Even when facial recognition does work, even when it’s not biased, it still remains a potent threat to civil rights and democracy as we know it. With facial recognition, a single photo can capture the identities of everyone taking part at a political protest or attending prayer at a house of worship. Using facial recognition, officers can track New Yorkers across the city, following their every movement for days, and never once getting a warrant.

But even if a warrant were needed, that still wouldn’t be enough. The solution to facial recognition isn’t a check and balance, it isn’t a matter of requiring more procedures. No, the only answer to a technology as dangerous as facial recognition is a complete and categorical ban.

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Albert Fox Cahn is the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) at the Urban Justice Center, a New York-based civil rights and privacy group and a fellow at the Engelberg Center for Innovation Law & Policy at N.Y.U. School of Law. Caroline Magee is a Civil Rights Intern at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and a third-year student at Emory Law School. On Twitter @FoxCahn and @cbam0912.

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Immigrant, Black, and Brown New Yorkers Need Albany to Deliver a Recovery for All


immigrants respect dignity new york

New York budget season has begun (photo: Make The Road New York)


Immigrant, Black, and brown New Yorkers have experienced unspeakable losses and suffered catastrophic economic consequences throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Community members have lost loved ones and lost jobs at disproportionate levels, and struggled week after week to try to pay their rent and feed their families. And they have made very clear that they expect bold, transformational solutions from state government to meet the scale of the need.

Unfortunately, Governor Cuomo has continued to fail to rise to the occasion. As we saw again in his State of the State and budget addresses, the governor keeps responding to this crisis with the politics of austerity. Yet again, he spread falsehoods to dim the prospect of raising taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and throw cold water on efforts to meet the needs of excluded workers, tenants, and more.

Last week, Make the Road New York launched its 2021 Respect and Dignity platform, which counters Cuomo’s politics of austerity with a vision for a true economic recovery for New Yorkers. Instead of merely looking to Washington, our state needs to pass bold and crucial legislation that will benefit all communities and deliver justice.

Our platform begins with raising taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers to meet survival needs of those who are struggling. Hundreds of thousands of community members are currently blocked from unemployment and all income relief, due to their immigration status or recent incarceration. Our most vulnerable neighbors are in mounting rent debt and in constant fear of losing their homes. The demand for food pantries has increased exponentially — working-class New Yorkers are going hungry. 

Meanwhile, New York’s billionaires have become $77 billion richer since the start of the pandemic. While billionaires have profited throughout, immigrant, Black, and brown communities are hurting more than ever. Governor Cuomo must stop shielding the wealthiest New Yorkers and begin putting working-class people of color first. This legislative session, Albany leadership and Governor Cuomo must pass legislation to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and create an Excluded Workers Fund, which will allow for direct cash payments to workers who have been denied economic relief. 

Rebuilding our state also requires prioritizing tenants and canceling rent. Working-class New Yorkers are facing staggering rent and mortgage debt, leaving families on the brink of eviction with bills they will never be able to pay back. We must protect tenants and homeowners by passing the Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act and canceling rent and mortgage payments immediately for those who need it. 

To those who, like Cuomo, say the money’s simply not there, we say: nonsense. Six items of progressive revenue legislation, known as the Invest in Our New York package, would raise $50 billion, more than enough to deliver real relief to excluded workers and tenants, and reverse cuts to vital services like health care and education. With Democratic supermajorities in both chambers of the Legislature, the governor should stop impeding progress and legislators should pass these bills.

A true recovery for New York does not stop there. We must work to rebuild our state to protect trans women of color and our students from over-policing and criminalization. It is imperative we repeal the Walking While Trans Ban, which the State Senate is about to pass, and ensure we put an end to ineffective and discriminatory discipline practices in our childrens’ schools.

The Walking While Trans repeal bill has enough support from legislators to pass — it should be a priority for the legislative calendar in both chambers. And as criminalization of Black and brown youth has continued to run rampant throughout the pandemic, Albany must also pass the Solutions Not Suspensions Act to help dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.

Over the last two years, immigrant and working class New Yorkers have organized and led substantial progress in Albany through vital measures including strengthening the rent laws to restoring access to driver’s licenses for all and limiting ICE’s access to courthouse grounds to the repeal of 50-a’s shield of police disciplinary records. But the pandemic has further exposed the gaping inequalities and vulnerabilities facing communities of color. New York must center equity in ensuring that our communities survive this pandemic and have their basic needs met.

Now, more than ever, we urge Governor Cuomo and the State Legislature to address the needs of our communities, protect and help New Yorkers get back on their feet. 

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Javier H. Valdés and Deborah Axt are the Co-Executive Directors of Make the Road New York, the largest grassroots community organization in New York offering services and organizing the immigrant community. On Twitter: @javierhvaldes & @debaxt.

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Cancel the Gifted and Talented Test Now, Not Next Year


first lady cm

The Mayor, First Lady, & Chancellor at a school (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


Last week, Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carranza announced that they will administer the controversial and problematic test for admissions to “gifted and talented” classes this spring, for perhaps a final year. Then: 

“We will spend the next year engaging communities around what kind of programming they would like to see that is more inclusive, enriching, and truly supports the needs of academically advanced and diversely talented students at a more appropriate age… We will also engage communities around how best to integrate enriched learning opportunities to more students, so that every student – regardless of a label or a class that they are in – can access rigorous learning that is tailored to their needs and fosters their creativity, passion, and strengths.” 

Yet the question arises as to why they will continue to give these exams to children as young as four years old at all. They are exams that few respected researchers believe are either valid or reliable. Why not end the practice now, especially given the risks and considerable cost of administering this test during a pandemic? 

We have posted many critiques of New York City's gifted program over the years on our NYC Public School Parents blog, including this one by esteemed education leader Debbie Meier in 2007, when Chancellor Joel Klein first instituted a standardized, high-stakes testing process for admissions to these classes in the supposed name of "equity."

As Meier wrote, “They are using two instruments we know for a fact provide racially biased results--it's the data that the canards about racial inferiority are based on and comes with a history of bias. Both class and race. Furthermore, we know that psychometricians have unanimously warned us for years about the lack of reliability of standardized tests for children under 7.”

The admissions outcome is clearly racially- and economically-biased, as nearly half of all students who take the test in the wealthiest part of Manhattan, District 2, score as “gifted” (meaning at 90th percentile) while very few score that high in the poorer neighborhoods of Brooklyn or the Bronx. Some parents pay up to $400 an hour for their four-year-old children to take test prep classes. 

About 29,000 children took the gifted test last year, and about 3,600 got offers for seats in gifted classes. Currently, according to the New York Post, Asian students account for 43% of these students, followed by white students at 36%, Hispanic students 8%, and Black students 6%.  

The best article on the unreliability of these tests was published back in 2010 in New York Magazine, which cited a peer-reviewed study showing that most children who are identified as “gifted” by scoring in the top percentiles on ability and achievement tests no longer do a year or two later.

The Department of Education is proposing to renew its testing contract with Pearson, which produces the exam, through Oct. 31, 2021 and at a cost of just under $1.7 million. And that amount doesn’t include the substantial, but undisclosed, cost that the DOE will pay for teachers to give the test one-on-one, which takes about an hour for each child.

Doesn’t the city have anything better to do with nearly $1.7 million – in the midst of an economic crisis and looming budget cuts to schools? Especially when staffing in schools is so constrained that online class sizes have ballooned to 40 or 60 students or more?

See also the negative record of Pearson as reported in the DOE contract documents, including many documented errors in administration and scoring.

Although the list of Pearson misdeeds the DOE offers is lengthy, it omits most of the company’s past performance errors in schools nationwide, and even in New York.

The DOE list leaves out the most famous scandal of the absurd pineapple passage on the 8th grade state reading exams in 2012, which became a symbol of the risible low quality of standardized exams. The nonsensical pineapple passage had been included year after year in Pearson exams, in at least six states and many districts, leading to widespread protest from students and teachers until we called it out.  

The DOE list also unaccountably omits how in 2013, the company mis-scored the results of the gifted exams for thousands of New York City children, after which the DOE said it was reconsidering whether to renew its Pearson contract.

It doesn’t mention how in 2013, Pearson agreed to pay $77 million to settle a case with the New York Attorney General’s office, for improperly taking New York education officials on junkets and developing curriculum materials through its Foundation, which were then marketed and sold at a profit by the company.

The current version of the DOE guide to admissions to “gifted and talented” classes says on page 3: “Why Take the G&T Test? There is no harm in having your child tested.” Really?

It goes on: “The results of the G&T test are confidential to you and will not be shared with current or future schools—these scores are used only to determine eligibility to apply for G&T programs.”

However, data security at Pearson is known to be weak.

The DOE list also omits how, in 2018, there was a huge breach that included personal student data collected through the Pearson AIMSWeb assessments. This breach, which affected hundreds of thousands of students nationwide, including many in New York State, occurred in November 2018. The FBI discovered and notified Pearson about the breach in March 2019, though the company unaccountably failed to inform any district about the breach until the end of July 2019, almost nine months after it occurred. In several of these districts, their contracts with Pearson for AIMSWeb had lapsed years before, but the company had held on to the data.

Contrary to the language and intent of the New York State student privacy law, Education Law Section 2-D, the DOE chief privacy officer has told me they do not intend to ask any company to delete data they hold for New York City students until all their contracts with that company have ended; DOE has several outstanding contracts beyond the G&T test with Pearson for years to come.

The DOE’s incomplete account of Pearson’s problematic record includes several allegations of discrimination, including a still-open investigation of the company by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, based on employee complaints of discrimination on the basis of age, sex, disability, and race.

The contract with Pearson for the gifted exam is to be voted upon on January 27 by the New York City Panel for Educational Policy (those who would like to speak on the proposal can register here). Also on the agenda are changes in the PEP bylaws and chancellor’s regulations related to Community Education Council and Citywide Council elections.

Let’s hope the PEP members vote to reject the contract for this unreliable, unfair, expensive, and racially-biased exam, which should have been cancelled years ago, produced by a company with a deplorable record.

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Leonie Haimson is the Executive Director of Class Size Matters. On Twitter @leoniehaimson.

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