Former School teacher, Emily Cherkin, has filed a lawsuit against leading educational technology giant, PowerSchool. She filed her class action lawsuit in San Francisco this past spring and claims that the company illegally sells student data to third parties without authorized consent.
PowerSchool is a comprehensive cloud-based software provider used by school districts across the nation. The company offers services to students K through 12th grade. This database stores information on students, their parents and guardians, student grades and transcripts, and also info on student's health and behavioral information. PowerSchool has over 345 terabytes of data collected from over 440 school districts across the nation.
Cherkin’s lawsuit argues that PowerSchool sells anonymized pieces of data on students to over 100 partners that they work with. Among these partners are educational consultants and government agencies.
PowerSchool was acquired by Boston-based private equity company, Bain Capital. The $5.6 billion deal was finalized this past October. The acquisition was made in an effort to expand PowerSchool's offerings including their newest product, a generative AI platform, PowerBuddy.
Cherkin, a Seattle mother of two and author of "The Screentime Solution," a parenting guide, describes PowerSchool as a "multibillion-dollar surveillance-technology empire." She says in her lawsuit that the company should pay back the likely millions of dollars it has acquired from selling student data without prior consent.
The lawsuit details that one of the partners who were sold the data included an educational consulting firm that offered marketing guidance to the military, trade schools, and colleges. The student data acquired for this consulting firm included data from PowerSchool's college planning product, Naviance.
The lawsuit explains, "PowerSchool collects this highly sensitive information under the guise of educational support, but in fact collects it for its own commercial gain," while hiding behind "opaque terms of service such that no one can understand."
The stark accusations are being met with strong resistance. PowerSchool issued a statement that vehemently denied the allegations. In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed in July, attorneys for PowerSchool explain that the days of "spiral-bound grading books" are over.
The motion adds that the company is legally allowed to collect data that was voluntarily submitted by administrators and students. This includes metadata such as "unique device identifiers" and "cookie data."
A spokesman for the tech company, Austin Zerbach, shares that PowerSchool does not sell any form of student data. Zerbach explains, "PowerSchool does not endorse or support any use of student educational records other than as agreed to by our customers, the schools and districts controlling the student education record, nor do we conduct targeted advertising with personal data of students."
The proposed class action complaint, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, is seeking a jury trial and “appropriate relief, including actual and statutory damages, restitution, disgorgement, and punitive damages” along with equitable and injunctive relief, attorneys’ fees and costs, and other forms of relief.
