The multi-billion-dollar Education Technology (EdTech) industry has easy access to children’s personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive academic, psychological, and behavioral data. Today, these EdTech “data factories” scoop up terabytes of sensitive PII, create dossiers on our children, and sell them to eager advertisers and anyone else willing to pay.

• One of the biggest Ed Tech ‘data factories’ is Virginia-based Naviance — the platform students and counselors use to send student records to colleges. Naviance, advertises itself as a “college, career and life readiness program,” and parents are told it is vital to the college application process.
• Recent investigative reporting by The Markup (January 13, 2022) revealed that Naviance vacuums up sensitive PII on our children, then sells it to colleges and universities so they can “target students with paid advertisements,” allowing college admissions officials to use race to “select what kinds of students will see their recruiting messages.” Additionally, several schools have used Naviance’s platform “to target students of all races in some states but only White students in others.”
• According to an investigative report by the Times Higher Education Supplement (Apr. 27, 2022), for many years Naviance offered the nation’s colleges the option of targeting their “recruitment efforts using a Caucasian-only option for choosing applicants,” until a single executive at the company stumbled upon it by happenstance and removed the option. Naviance was unable to offer any "estimate of how many institutions had used the whites-only applicant filter, or how many students had been directly affected by it," nor were they able to explain why they would have designed such a blatantly racist option in the first place. But with no oversight nor accountability, there have been no repercussions for Naviance.

Naviance’s parent company, Folsom, California-based PowerSchool, is the engine behind many school information systems (SIS’s) and, according to The Markup (Jan.11, 2022), holds data on more than 75 percent of North American K-12 students. This data includes health information, specialized learning plans - or IEPs - financial information about students and parents, directory information, email addresses, student IDs, account credentials, and course enrollments. PowerSchool uses this data to feed its predictive analytics tools, enabling the tracking, targeting, profiling of, and marketing to those very students. Some of the surveys used to collect PII from students may also violate the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA). 

In March 2021, the Education Advisory Board (EAB) announced “an agreement with PowerSchool that makes EAB the exclusive provider of the Intersect student recruitment platform,” which “connects with Naviance . . . to help you build affinity with millions of high school students on a platform they use every day.” Notably, EAB has been the subject of a number of national exposés, regarding EAB’s use of predictive analytics as an invasion of student privacy and reinforcing of racial stereotypes, including a 2021 report in The Markup and a 2019 write-up in The Hechinger Report.

Naviance, PowerSchool, and EAB are all now owned by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, which has built “an educational software empire that wields unseen influence over the educational journeys of tens of millions of children.” The PII gleaned through Vista’s EdTech holdings “fuel a suite of predictive analytics products that push the boundaries of technology's role in education and, in some cases, raise discrimination concerns."

In short, the entire suite of products used to “prepare for college” — beginning in grade school and extending post high school — is part of a massive campaign to compile dossiers on our children, steer their educational and career pathways, and market them like commodities.

We the undersigned parents and community members therefore demand greater protection for our children’s privacy and petition the Attorneys General of Virginia and California and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to immediately open an investigation of Naviance, PowerSchool, EAB, and Vista Equity Partners to determine whether these entities engage in:

1. Deceptive trade practices
2. Violations of FERPA, COPPA, the PPRA and/or The Student Data Privacy Act of 2015
3. Violations of contractual promises regarding the protection of student data privacy, and/or commitments to restrictions on the collection, use, sharing and/or retention of student PII
4. Ethical violations pertaining to the acceptance of payments, benefits, and/or in-kind donations from Naviance, PowerSchool, EAB, and/or Vista Equity Partners

Our goal is:

1. Transparency for Parents: Immediate release of contract(s) with Naviance, PowerSchool, EAB, and Vista Equity Partners, as well as all related documents discussing access to or use of student data
2. Cessation of Student Data Transfers: Immediate cessation of the transfer of student PII to Naviance, PowerSchool, EAB, and Vista, until the conclusion of an investigation
3. Disclosure of Potential Ethical Conflicts: A full and comprehensive accounting of all direct and indirect payments, benefits, and in-kind donations made by Naviance, PowerSchool, EAB, and/or Vista Equity Partners to school district staff, including meals, travel, honorariums, gifts, and non-monetary benefits (e.g., paying for a membership or other expense, waiving a cost/fee, etc.), indexed by job title and school department (without PII)