This private equity firm is amassing companies that collect data on America’s children

“We are paying these vendors and they are making money on our kids’ data,” said Ellen Zavian, whose son was required to use Naviance, college preparation software recently acquired by PowerSchool, at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md.

We found that the companies, collectively, gather everything from basic demographic information—entered automatically when a student enrolls in school—to data about students’ citizenship status, religious affiliation, school disciplinary records, medical diagnoses, what speed they read and type at, the full text of answers they give on tests, the pictures they draw for assignments, whether they live in a two-parent household, whether they’ve used drugs, been the victim of a crime, or expressed interest in LGBTQ+ groups, among hundreds of other data points.

Some of those data fields were recorded in the traffic between students’ computers and PowerSchool servers when students used their accounts.

Other data fields were listed in districts’ data privacy agreements with PowerSchool and the data library—a list of all available data fields—for one district’s PowerSchool database.

According to its contracts with school districts, PowerSchool has the right to de-identify the data it holds on their behalf—by removing fields such as names and social security numbers—and use it in any way it sees fit to improve and build its own products.

In some districts, such as Miami-Dade County Public Schools, recent PowerSchool contracts have exceeded $2.5 million for a single year, according to copies of the deals obtained through public records requests.

“It’s hard for me to understand how PowerSchool would not be paying for the privilege” of extracting so much student data, said Alex Bowers, a professor of educational leadership at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

“At PowerSchool, ensuring student equity, privacy, and access to good quality education is our top priority and is foundational to everything we do,” Darron Flagg, the company’s chief compliance and privacy officer, wrote in a brief statement to The Markup.

PowerSchool customers own their student and school data.

We do not sell student or school data; we do not collect, maintain, use, or share student personal information beyond what is authorized by the district, parent, or student.”.

Consider School District U-46 in Elgin, Ill., which was the only district—out of 27 we submitted public records requests to—that provided a complete list of the data PowerSchool warehouses on its behalf.

U-46’s PowerSchool database contains nearly 7,000 data fields about Elgin students, parents, and staff, according to a copy of the data library The Markup obtained.

Learning analytics experts told The Markup that the use of demographic data like gender and free and reduced lunch status—attributes that students and school officials can’t change—to predict student outcomes is bound to encode discrimination into the predictive models.

“Unified Insights does provide the option for school districts to include free and reduced lunch status to enable districts to reduce dropout risk associated with economic hardship and identify additional social service supports that may be available to impacted students,” Flagg, from PowerSchool, wrote in an email.

Raimondi said U-46 has chosen not to use many of the predictive models PowerSchool makes available because of their reliance on immutable student characteristics.

Since 2015, when Vista first purchased PowerSchool from Pearson for $350 million, Vista has been on a spending spree, acquiring other ed tech companies that collect different kinds of student data.

Illinois, for example, has a state law that requires school districts to post specific information about the ed tech vendors they use, including all written agreements with vendors and lists of the data elements shared with those vendors

“Each school district owns and controls access to its students’ data, Flagg, from PowerSchool, wrote in an email to The Markup

“Any requests from parents for access to their children’s data must be managed through their respective school districts

Deborah Simmons, a Texas parent, said she began looking into the Vista-owned companies after discovering that her school had automatically uploaded her child’s data into Naviance

She filed public records requests and grievances with her school but still doesn’t know the full extent of the data the companies hold or who else it’s been shared with

“These tech companies want to eliminate the data silos and merge and streamline all of this stuff, but no, our children aren’t products,” Simmons said