Navid Hassan of PEP testifies on need for municipal tech infrastructure and vendor oversight

Thank you, Council Members.

My name is Navid Hassan.

I'm a parent elected to the panel for educational policy, which is the New York City School Board.

Here's my testimony.

New York City must take a bolder policy stance with regards to technology.

New Yorkers should benefit from the size of our budget with tech services that are designed for public benefit.

We need to move away from school purchasing choices based on hype and marketing and develop sovereign municipal tech infrastructure within which we engage with outside vendors in a more private, secure, and sustainable way.

Protecting our children from harm and exploitation by big tech can only start if we lay the proper foundation for this work.

Our school system has been enmeshed in a decades-long process of privatization of core responsibilities.

Letting outside vendors do the thinking when we should be cultivating our highly trained in-house professionals, including educators with graduate degrees, to develop the pedagogical stack of how to best teach New York City students.

This includes responsive curriculum, appropriate modalities of delivering it, hopefully whole chapter book reading, which I don't know what happened to that, and properly supported safety and privacy preserving technology.

Needs and wants will also differ from borough to borough, neighborhood to neighborhood, and school to school.

So top-down dictates lead to one-size-fits-no-one solutions.

With an academic and professional background in computer science and AI, and a board of ed graduate,

a DOE parent of two students in public schools uptown Manhattan, and an elected member of the PEP for five terms, it is my experience that the DOE unfortunately does not have the will or appetite to do this foundational work.

It's not clear what it means to ask vendors to remove AI from software already in schools and districts when that product is just a thin code wrapper on ChatDPT or Claude.

Even when tech vendors themselves, for example, Google with YouTube, have told government customers that their product cannot comply with laws around student data privacy, years later, consumer YouTube is still a big part of many ed tech services in DOE classrooms,

using loopholes and workarounds that are in violation of the law.

A lot of these ed tech products are provided for free before local smaller dollar purchasing agreements bypass any PEP oversight on the propriety of these tools.

There is a significant amount the city can do by refusing to buy products or services from companies behind the attempt to privatize intelligence,

sell it as a utility, and wantonly disrupt society, undermine democracy, all for their concentration of wealth and power.

Let's make sure that this is not our children's future.

Thank you.