#LAUSD

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Maggie Vascassenno

“Free Palestine!” and “Stop the genocide!” chants rang out from the steps of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) headquarters on Aug. 8. LAUSD employees, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) Human Rights Committee, Association of Raza Educators, Teachers for Justice in Palestine, Unión del Barrio, the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice, and other community-based organizations demanded an end to the harassment, intimidation and doxxing of teachers who teach their students about Palestine and the ongoing U.S.-funded Israeli genocide.

[feminist-space]

"Just weeks before the implosion of AllHere, an education technology company that had been showered with cash from venture capitalists and featured in glowing profiles by the business press, America’s second-largest school district was warned about problems with AllHere’s product.

As the eight-year-old startup rolled out Los Angeles Unified School District’s flashy new AI-driven chatbot — an animated sun named “Ed” that AllHere was hired to build for $6 million — a former company executive was sending emails to the district and others that Ed’s workings violated bedrock student data privacy principles.

Those emails were sent shortly before The 74 first reported last week that AllHere, with $12 million in investor capital, was in serious straits. A June 14 statement on the company’s website revealed a majority of its employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position.” Company founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles district said, was no longer on the job.

Smith-Griffin and L.A. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho went on the road together this spring to unveil Ed at a series of high-profile ed tech conferences, with the schools chief dubbing it the nation’s first “personal assistant” for students and leaning hard into LAUSD’s place in the K-12 AI vanguard. He called Ed’s ability to know students “unprecedented in American public education” at the ASU+GSV conference in April.

Through an algorithm that analyzes troves of student information from multiple sources, the chatbot was designed to offer tailored responses to questions like “what grade does my child have in math?” The tool relies on vast amounts of students’ data, including their academic performance and special education accommodations, to function.

Meanwhile, Chris Whiteley, a former senior director of software engineering at AllHere who was laid off in April, had become a whistleblower. He told district officials, its independent inspector general’s office and state education officials that the tool processed student records in ways that likely ran afoul of L.A. Unified’s own data privacy rules and put sensitive information at risk of getting hacked. None of the agencies ever responded, Whiteley told The 74.

...

In order to provide individualized prompts on details like student attendance and demographics, the tool connects to several data sources, according to the contract, including Welligent, an online tool used to track students’ special education services. The document notes that Ed also interfaces with the Whole Child Integrated Data stored on Snowflake, a cloud storage company. Launched in 2019, the Whole Child platform serves as a central repository for LAUSD student data designed to streamline data analysis to help educators monitor students’ progress and personalize instruction.

Whiteley told officials the app included students’ personally identifiable information in all chatbot prompts, even in those where the data weren’t relevant. Prompts containing students’ personal information were also shared with other third-party companies unnecessarily, Whiteley alleges, and were processed on offshore servers. Seven out of eight Ed chatbot requests, he said, are sent to places like Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Australia and Canada.

Taken together, he argued the company’s practices ran afoul of data minimization principles, a standard cybersecurity practice that maintains that apps should collect and process the least amount of personal information necessary to accomplish a specific task. Playing fast and loose with the data, he said, unnecessarily exposed students’ information to potential cyberattacks and data breaches and, in cases where the data were processed overseas, could subject it to foreign governments’ data access and surveillance rules.

Chatbot source code that Whiteley shared with The 74 outlines how prompts are processed on foreign servers by a Microsoft AI service that integrates with ChatGPT. The LAUSD chatbot is directed to serve as a “friendly, concise customer support agent” that replies “using simple language a third grader could understand.” When querying the simple prompt “Hello,” the chatbot provided the student’s grades, progress toward graduation and other personal information.

AllHere’s critical flaw, Whiteley said, is that senior executives “didn’t understand how to protect data.”

...

Earlier in the month, a second threat actor known as Satanic Cloud claimed it had access to tens of thousands of L.A. students’ sensitive information and had posted it for sale on Breach Forums for $1,000. In 2022, the district was victim to a massive ransomware attack that exposed reams of sensitive data, including thousands of students’ psychological evaluations, to the dark web.

With AllHere’s fate uncertain, Whiteley blasted the company’s leadership and protocols.

“Personally identifiable information should be considered acid in a company and you should only touch it if you have to because acid is dangerous,” he told The 74. “The errors that were made were so egregious around PII, you should not be in education if you don’t think PII is acid.”

Read the full article here:

https://www.the74million.org/article/whistleblower-l-a-schools-chatbot-misused-student-data-as-tech-co-crumbled/

[ropoidii]

so they didn’t block tumblr

Somehow, the LAUSD school system forgot to block tumblr from our iPads, the best part is that they blocked the live feature, but not the rest of tumblr lol

[aberjona]

[impermanent-art]

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A post shared by Impermanent Art (@impermanent_art)

‘Going Places’

Work by Bumblebeelovesyou in West LA. 🐝

[abs0luteb4stard]

This is the page of the book, "The Great Big Book of Families" that got the homophobes all mad.

[fightforthesoulofthecities]

A National call to Defend the Black Student Achievement Plan and the Civil and Human Rights of 50,000 Black Students in the Los Angeles Unified School District

A National call to Defend the Black Student Achievement Plan and the Civil and Human Rights of 50,000 Black Students in the Los Angeles Unified School District #BSAP #DefendBSAP #EndWarOnYouth #PoliceFreeSchools

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] A National call to Defend the Black Student Achievement Plan and the Civil and Human Rights of 50,000 Black Students in the Los Angeles Unified School District Media Contact: Channing Martinez, co-director LSCS and member of BSAP steering committee channing (AT) thestrategycenter (DOT) org Akunna Uka, LSCS director of volunteer programs and member of BSAP…

[erebusvincent]

Kids are bringing multiple phones to school to get around the bans. A) what type of shitty parents buy their children not just one, but multiple smartphones? B) that’s addict behavior.

It’s child abuse to give your children smartphones or tablets. Lazy parents have given a generation of children screen addiction, and addiction destroys the brain. The DOC doesn’t matter.

I’m surprised to see the legislature acting to protect children for a change. It’s usually in the business of irreparably harming them. A rare W for the state. Good for us.

[gabrielerner]

Escuelas y la falta de espacios verdes

Con el cambio climático llegaron veranos con temperaturas que en California fácilmente superan los 100 grados Fahrenheit. Un fenómeno que también afecta a los estudiantes que pasan gran parte de su vida en escuelas en las que, en algunos casos, casi no hay espacios verdes. La falta de árboles, grama, arbustos, flores, no solo representa un problema estético en escuelas en las que la temperatura…

[jimbotimes]

LAUSD 2024 MARCH PRIMARIES: RECAP

With L.A. City Council recapped, let’s place LAUSD elections from March into perspective. LAUSD has a board of seven members, each of which is elected every four years. The board meets regularly on Tuesday afternoons, and by a long shot, its most important job is managing L.A. Schools’ annual budget, which in the 2023 – 2024 fiscal year was nearly $19 billion dollars. You can also watch this…

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Scott Scheffer

Jailynn Butler-Thomas is a student at Dorsey High School in Los Angeles. She spoke with Struggle-La Lucha about support for the recent Los Angeles Unified Public School District (LAUSD) strike and opposition to armed police in public schools.

There’s so much backlash that myself and my peers and those who are fighting for police-free schools have to deal with. The main factor that rallies students behind UTLA and Local 99 is that they’re struggling, and we’re struggling, and that unites us.

[randomaccessmike]

Jukebox heroes and $20 fiddles...

Dive into this week's "10 Things" newsletter - Jukebox Heroes and $20 Fiddles - where I share my musings on the transformative power of arts in education, the magic of sharing ideas, and explore the potential of virtual learning and relive the thrill of uncovering hidden radio gems.

This newsletter is your gateway to a world where education, creativity, and cultural exploration intersect.

[k12academics]

Available Nationwide | Anti-Bullying Tour 2024

SPECIAL EARLY-BOOKING RATES | Limited Time Only!

[softspud]

VIVA LA ALEGRE REBELDÍA

Los Ángeles, 2024

Completado Enero 2024 en la primaria Dr. Owen Lloyd Knox Elementary School

Painting assistance: Mari Ramirez

[aberjona]

We did a thing. At our new place. And raised some money for students.