Latest news with #MarkKeierleber
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The ‘Spy High' Digital Dystopia: Amazon Doc Probes Student Surveillance Harms
School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here. It all began when school officials mistook a blurry image of a Mike and Ike candy for pills. Pennsylvania teenager Blake Robbins found himself at the center of a digital surveillance controversy that gave rise to student privacy debates amid schools' growing reliance on ed tech. Spy High, a four-part documentary series streaming now on Amazon Prime, puts the focus on a lawsuit filed in 2010 after Robbins' affluent Pennsylvania school district accused him of dealing drugs — a conclusion officials reached after they surreptitiously snapped a photo of him at home with the chewy candy in hand. The moment had been captured on the webcam of his school-issued laptop — one of some 66,000 covert student images collected by the district, including one of Robbins asleep in his bed. I caught up with Spy High Director Jody McVeigh-Schultz to discuss why the 15-year-old case offers cautionary lessons about student surveillance gone awry and how it informs contemporary student privacy debates. Read the full interview here. How student surveillance plays out today: Meet the gatekeepers of students' private lives. | The 74 Courts block DEI directive: Three federal courts ordered temporary halts on Thursday to Trump's efforts to cancel student diversity initiatives — and demands for states to pledge allegiance to the administration's interpretation of civil rights laws. | The 74President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that called for school discipline models 'rooted in American values and traditional virtues,' taking aim at Obama- and Biden-era efforts to reduce racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions. | Politico 'The history there is deeply, deeply disturbed': Disability-rights advocates have decried plans at the National Institutes of Health to compile Amerians' private medical records in a 'disease registry' to track children and other people with autism. | The 74 Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., faced criticism for recent comments that many kids 'were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they're 2 years old.' | ABC News A new lawsuit filed by students at military-run schools accuses the Defense Department of harming their learning opportunities by banning books related to 'gender ideology' or 'divisive equity ideology,' including texts that refer to slavery and sexual harassment prevention. | Military Times Get the most critical news and information about students' rights, safety and well-being delivered straight to your inbox. California lawmakers are demanding answers after Department of Homeland Security agents visited two Los Angeles elementary schools and asked to speak with five students who the federal agency said 'arrived unaccompanied at the border.' | LAist 'We all deserve reparations': White House aide Stephen Miller said in an interview last week the country 'used to have a functioning public school system' until it was destroyed by 'open borders.' | The New Republic The Justice Department seized thousands of photos and videos in an investigation of a former University of Michigan assistant football coach who was indicted on allegations he hacked into student athletes' private accounts to steal intimate images. | CBS Sports A 48-year-old mother was arrested and accused of bringing a gun to her daughter's Indiana elementary school and threatening the girl's teacher over a classroom assignment about flags. While discussing flags, the teacher reportedly referred to a rainbow flag in the classroom with the words 'be kind.' | NBC News Banning 'frontal nudity': A Texas school district has removed lessons on Virginia history from an online learning platform for elementary school students because the commonwealth's flag depicts the Roman goddess Virtus with an exposed breast. | Axios The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month to weigh Trump's executive order eliminating birthright citizenship, bringing into question a 127-year-old court precedent. | NPR A class-action lawsuit accuses tech giant Google of amassing 'thousands of data points that span a child's life' without the consent of students or their parents. | Bloomberg Law A Florida teacher is out of a job after she called a student by their preferred name, allegedly violating a 2023 Florida law that requires schools to receive parental permission to refer to students by anything other than their legal names. | Click Orlando The vice president of the Buffalo, New York, chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse was arrested and accused of sex crimes against children. | WIVB Supreme Court Shows Support for Parents Who Want Opt-Outs from LGBTQ Storybooks 'There Goes My Son's Help:' Wave of Washington Head Starts Shut Down as Chaos Engulfs Federal Program State Officials Sue Trump Administration for Halting COVID School Aid Protecting Children Online Takes Technology, Human Oversight and Accountability Don't even think about touching Matilda's cactus.
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
School (in)Security Newsletter: Punishing Parents for Chronic Absenteeism
School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here. As educators nationwide grapple with stubbornly high levels of student absences since the pandemic drove schools into disarray five years ago, Oklahoma prosecutor Erik Johnson says he has the solution. Throw parents in jail. This week, I offer a look at chronic absenteeism's persistence long after COVID shuttered classrooms, plunged families into poverty and led to the deaths of more than 1 million Americans. Lawmakers nationwide have proposed dozens of bills this year designed to curtail student absences — with radically different approaches. While a proposal in Hawaii would reward kids' good attendance with ice cream, new laws in Indiana, West Virginia and Iowa impose fines and jail time for parents who can't compel their children to attend class regularly. In Oklahoma, where Johnson has ushered in a new era of truancy crackdowns, state lawmakers say parents — not principals and teachers — should be held accountable for students' repeat absences. 'We prosecute everything from murders to rape to financial crimes, but in my view, the ones that cause the most societal harm is when people do harm to children, either child neglect, child physical abuse, child sexual abuse, domestic violence in homes, and then you can add truancy to the list,' Johnson told me this week. 'It's not as bad, in my opinion, as beating a child, but it's on the spectrum because you're not putting that child in a position to be successful,' continued Johnson, who has dubbed 2025 the 'Year of the Child.' Click here to read my latest story. Books are not a crime — yet: Under proposed Texas legislation, teachers could soon face jail sentences for teaching classic literary works with sexual content, including The Catcher in the Rye and (unironically?) Brave New World. | Mother Jones Mass layoffs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this week could have devastating consequences for the health and well-being of low-income children. | The Associated Press Ten days or else: The Education Department demanded Thursday that states certify in writing within the next 10 days that K-12 schools are complying with its interpretation of civil rights laws, namely eliminating any diversity, equity and inclusion programs, or else risk losing their federal funding. | The New York Times A Texas teen was kneed in the face by a school cop: Now, with steep cuts to the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, her case is one of thousands that have been left to languish. | The 74Students' right to privacy versus parents' right to know: The Trump administration has opened an investigation into a California law designed to protect transgender students from being outed to their parents, alleging violations of the federal student privacy law. | The New York Times A similar investigation has been opened against officials in Maine, where the feds claim district policies to protect students' privacy come at the expense of parents' right to information. | Maine Morning Star 'Parents are the most natural protectors of their children,' Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement after a similar federal investigation was launched against Virginia educators. 'Yet many states and school districts have enacted policies that imply students need protection from their parents.' | Virginia Mercury A little context: In a recent survey, more than 92% of parents said they were supportive of their child's transgender identity. | Human Rights Campaign Get the most critical news and information about students' rights, safety and well-being delivered straight to your inbox. The Student Press Law Center joined a coalition of free speech and journalism organizations in denouncing the recent ICE detention of Tufts University international student Rumeysa Ozturk over opinions she expressed in an op-ed in the student newspaper. 'Such a basis for her detention would represent a blatant disregard for the principles of free speech and free press within the First Amendment,' the groups wrote in their letter. | Student Press Law Center The Turkish doctoral candidate is one of several students who've been rounded up by immigration officials in recent weeks based on pro-Palestinian comments. | The New York Times Florida lawmakers have a plan to fill the jobs of undocumented workers who are deported: Put kids on the overnight shift. | The GuardianMinority report: Following bipartisan opposition, Georgia lawmakers have given up on efforts to create a statewide student-tracking database designed to identify youth who could commit future acts of violence. | WABEA majority of school district programs focused on protecting student data are led by administrators with little training in privacy issues, a new report finds. | StateScoopWashington students' sensitive data was exposed. The culprit? A student surveillance tool. | The Seattle Times New Food Security Threats 5 Years After COVID-Era Effort to Feed All Kids As Trump Shakes Up Oversight of Special Ed, Frustrated D.C. Parents Want Change GOP Bill Allowing Tennessee Schools to Deny an Education to Immigrant Children Advances Annie, who lives with The 74 social media guru Christian Skotte, is the cutest regular at Brooklyn's Prospect Park. You won't convince me otherwise.
Yahoo
08-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's ICE Plan Sows ‘Chaos and Fear' in Schools
School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here. As President Donald Trump reportedly mulls an executive order to eliminate the Education Department, the federal government's role could shift from ensuring children have equal educational opportunities to making it easier to deport them. One closely watched avenue where that could happen is allowing immigration enforcement in schools. Trump last month did away with a longstanding restriction barring federal agents from conducting raids in sensitive locations like churches, hospitals and schools. A protest Thursday against the administration targeting schools in its mass deportation pledge was sparked in part by claims that 11-year-old Jocelynn Rojo Carranza's suicide death last month was precipitated by rampant classroom bullying, with the student's peers claiming the Texas girl's family was undocumented and would get deported. 'The presence of immigration enforcement in our classrooms will not make schools safer, it will actually do the opposite,' Alejandra Gonzalez Rizo, an eighth-grade teacher in Washington, D.C., and a former DACA recipient, said during a Thursday press call organized by two advocacy groups, United We Dream Action and The Immigration Hub. 'It will create chaos and fear, forcing students and teachers to look over their shoulders instead of focusing on learning.' Click here to watch the full discussion. The big picture: To date, I'm not aware of any cases during Trump's second term where immigration officials carried out enforcement actions inside a school. Advocates warned of a greater fallout to come. School police in Texas have opened an investigation into Jocelynn's death. | CNN Now you see it, now you don't: The Trump administration implemented — then walked back just days later — an order that sidelined a federal program that allows nonprofits to provide legal representation to undocumented children who are in the country without their parents. | The Washington Post The young migrants, called unaccompanied minors, have become a central target in Trump's immigration crackdown. | Reuters Prohibiting ICE activities at or near schools or bus stops 'could significantly limit immigration enforcement in Denver,' the Trump administration said in response to a lawsuit from the city's school district seeking to prevent an end to the sensitive locations policy. | Denver Gazette In February, a federal judge blocked immigration officials from conducting raids and arrests at a handful of churches and places of worship that sued to halt the policy shift. Trump's directive, the judge ordered, likely denied religious freedoms protected by the First Amendment. | Politico Get the most critical news and information about students' rights, safety and well-being delivered straight to your inbox. Emboldened states: Decades ago, the Supreme Court ruled that all children in the U.S. are entitled to a free public education regardless of their immigration status. Conservative state officials want that to change — with lawmakers in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Indiana and Texas introducing bills to bar undocumented kids from classrooms. | Immigration Impact The Pinellas County, Florida, police department has reportedly applied for a federal program that deputizes local officers with immigration enforcement powers. | Florida Phoenix On Thursday, Pinellas school officials said they would cooperate with ICE but would stop short of instructing its officers to work alongside federal immigration agents. | Tampa Bay Times Departing gifts: From soccer balls to handwritten letters, educators across the country have been giving heartfelt mementos to multilingual learners whose families have chosen to leave their schools and their homes rather than risk scrutiny from immigration agents. | The 74 R.I.P. ED? Trump is expected to sign an executive order as early as today calling for an end to the Department of Education, throwing into uncertainty an agency that enforces federal civil rights laws and distributes financial support to low-income schools and students with disabilities. But here's the thing: The department was created by Congress — and bringing down a federal agency will take a lot more than a few scribbles on a piece of paper. | The New York Times Now you see it, now you don't (again): The department appeared to walk back a controversial order that threatened to strip federal funding from schools with diversity, equity and inclusion policies. | The 74 In response to the original order, some educators said they had no intention of playing along. In Long Beach, California, for example, school officials moved forward with plans to open the Center of Black Student Excellence despite federal pressure. | The 74 In a lawsuit Wednesday, the ACLU and the nation's largest teachers union alleged Trump's anti-DEI order stifled educators' free speech rights. | Higher Ed Dive In a first-in-the-nation move, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has signed a law that strips state anti-discrimination protections from transgender and nonbinary students. | Des Moines Register A lawsuit has accused a former security guard at a Milwaukee private school of secretly recording underage girls in a campus locker room. | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel More from Milwaukee: City officials approved a $1.6 million plan to station police officers in public schools — more than 400 days after a state law went into effect requiring cops on campuses. | WISN The Senate failed to pass legislation that sought to bar transgender students from participating in school athletics programs consistent with their gender identity. | The 74 Free from gun-free zones: A new Wyoming law has banned 'gun-free zones' in schools and other public spaces. | WyoFile For a recent investigation for The 74 and Wired, I fell down a dark web rabbit hole and chronicled more than 300 school cyberattacks in the last five years — and revealed the degree to which school leaders in virtually every state repeatedly provide false assurances to students, parents and staff about the security of their sensitive information. This week, I highlighted my investigation into a ransomware attack on the Providence, Rhode Island, school district — where educators denied a massive student data breach in plain sight. As a result of that 18-month-long investigation, I was interviewed last week on KARE 11, the NBC affiliate in Minnesota's Twin Cities. Public records I obtained from Minneapolis Public Schools uncovered sharp disparities in what district leaders told the FBI after a 2023 data breach and what it communicated to the public. You can watch the newscast here. To Make Ed Tech More Secure, Software Companies Need to Step Up AI Chatbots Can Cushion the High School Counselor Shortage — But Are They Bad for Students? 1st Confirmed Death in Texas Measles Outbreak Is Unvaccinated, School-Aged Child Oh hey, springtime, is that you? The 74 editor Andrew Brownstein's pup Sagan is already out in the yard waiting for longer, warmer days.
Yahoo
08-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's ICE Plan Sows ‘Chaos and Fear' in Schools
School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here. As President Donald Trump reportedly mulls an executive order to eliminate the Education Department, the federal government's role could shift from ensuring children have equal educational opportunities to making it easier to deport them. One closely watched avenue where that could happen is allowing immigration enforcement in schools. Trump last month did away with a longstanding restriction barring federal agents from conducting raids in sensitive locations like churches, hospitals and schools. A protest Thursday against the administration targeting schools in its mass deportation pledge was sparked in part by claims that 11-year-old Jocelynn Rojo Carranza's suicide death last month was precipitated by rampant classroom bullying, with the student's peers claiming the Texas girl's family was undocumented and would get deported. 'The presence of immigration enforcement in our classrooms will not make schools safer, it will actually do the opposite,' Alejandra Gonzalez Rizo, an eighth-grade teacher in Washington, D.C., and a former DACA recipient, said during a Thursday press call organized by two advocacy groups, United We Dream Action and The Immigration Hub. 'It will create chaos and fear, forcing students and teachers to look over their shoulders instead of focusing on learning.' Click here to watch the full discussion. The big picture: To date, I'm not aware of any cases during Trump's second term where immigration officials carried out enforcement actions inside a school. Advocates warned of a greater fallout to come. School police in Texas have opened an investigation into Jocelynn's death. | CNN Now you see it, now you don't: The Trump administration implemented — then walked back just days later — an order that sidelined a federal program that allows nonprofits to provide legal representation to undocumented children who are in the country without their parents. | The Washington Post The young migrants, called unaccompanied minors, have become a central target in Trump's immigration crackdown. | Reuters Prohibiting ICE activities at or near schools or bus stops 'could significantly limit immigration enforcement in Denver,' the Trump administration said in response to a lawsuit from the city's school district seeking to prevent an end to the sensitive locations policy. | Denver Gazette In February, a federal judge blocked immigration officials from conducting raids and arrests at a handful of churches and places of worship that sued to halt the policy shift. Trump's directive, the judge ordered, likely denied religious freedoms protected by the First Amendment. | Politico Get the most critical news and information about students' rights, safety and well-being delivered straight to your inbox. Emboldened states: Decades ago, the Supreme Court ruled that all children in the U.S. are entitled to a free public education regardless of their immigration status. Conservative state officials want that to change — with lawmakers in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Indiana and Texas introducing bills to bar undocumented kids from classrooms. | Immigration Impact The Pinellas County, Florida, police department has reportedly applied for a federal program that deputizes local officers with immigration enforcement powers. | Florida Phoenix On Thursday, Pinellas school officials said they would cooperate with ICE but would stop short of instructing its officers to work alongside federal immigration agents. | Tampa Bay Times Departing gifts: From soccer balls to handwritten letters, educators across the country have been giving heartfelt mementos to multilingual learners whose families have chosen to leave their schools and their homes rather than risk scrutiny from immigration agents. | The 74 R.I.P. ED? Trump is expected to sign an executive order as early as today calling for an end to the Department of Education, throwing into uncertainty an agency that enforces federal civil rights laws and distributes financial support to low-income schools and students with disabilities. But here's the thing: The department was created by Congress — and bringing down a federal agency will take a lot more than a few scribbles on a piece of paper. | The New York Times Now you see it, now you don't (again): The department appeared to walk back a controversial order that threatened to strip federal funding from schools with diversity, equity and inclusion policies. | The 74 In response to the original order, some educators said they had no intention of playing along. In Long Beach, California, for example, school officials moved forward with plans to open the Center of Black Student Excellence despite federal pressure. | The 74 In a lawsuit Wednesday, the ACLU and the nation's largest teachers union alleged Trump's anti-DEI order stifled educators' free speech rights. | Higher Ed Dive In a first-in-the-nation move, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has signed a law that strips state anti-discrimination protections from transgender and nonbinary students. | Des Moines Register A lawsuit has accused a former security guard at a Milwaukee private school of secretly recording underage girls in a campus locker room. | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel More from Milwaukee: City officials approved a $1.6 million plan to station police officers in public schools — more than 400 days after a state law went into effect requiring cops on campuses. | WISN The Senate failed to pass legislation that sought to bar transgender students from participating in school athletics programs consistent with their gender identity. | The 74 Free from gun-free zones: A new Wyoming law has banned 'gun-free zones' in schools and other public spaces. | WyoFile For a recent investigation for The 74 and Wired, I fell down a dark web rabbit hole and chronicled more than 300 school cyberattacks in the last five years — and revealed the degree to which school leaders in virtually every state repeatedly provide false assurances to students, parents and staff about the security of their sensitive information. This week, I highlighted my investigation into a ransomware attack on the Providence, Rhode Island, school district — where educators denied a massive student data breach in plain sight. As a result of that 18-month-long investigation, I was interviewed last week on KARE 11, the NBC affiliate in Minnesota's Twin Cities. Public records I obtained from Minneapolis Public Schools uncovered sharp disparities in what district leaders told the FBI after a 2023 data breach and what it communicated to the public. You can watch the newscast here. To Make Ed Tech More Secure, Software Companies Need to Step Up AI Chatbots Can Cushion the High School Counselor Shortage — But Are They Bad for Students? 1st Confirmed Death in Texas Measles Outbreak Is Unvaccinated, School-Aged Child Oh hey, springtime, is that you? The 74 editor Andrew Brownstein's pup Sagan is already out in the yard waiting for longer, warmer days.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Yahoo
The Story Behind the Story: How I Investigated More Than 300 Cyberattacks
School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here. It was October 2022 when Los Angeles schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho made a false assurance about a massive ransomware attack on the country's second-largest school district — and the leak of thousands of highly sensitive student mental health records — that set me off. Published reports that the breach exposed students' psychological evaluations, Carvalho said, were 'absolutely incorrect.' The dark web proved otherwise: On a shady corner of the internet, I revealed, hackers used the detailed, very confidential records about Los Angeles children as leverage in a sick ploy for money. After my story ran, L.A. schools acknowledged publicly that some 2,000 student psych evals were indeed exposed by the Vice Society ransomware gang. And so began my descent down the rabbit hole, marking the early days of an in-depth investigation I published Tuesday in partnership with WIRED and supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. What I found is that as educators take steps to protect themselves, their school districts and their reputations after cyberattacks, they employ a pervasive pattern of obfuscation that leaves students, parents and teachers — the real victims of the hacks and subsequent data breaches — in the dark. I spent a year (OK, more than a year) learning everything I could about more than 300 K-12 school cyberattacks since the pandemic pushed students into online learning and educators became lucrative targets for hackers. I reconfigured a crappy old laptop to track ransomware gangs on the dark web and to analyze the reams of sensitive files published to their sketchy leak sites. I obtained thousands of public records from more than two dozen school districts. I used the government procurement database GovSpend to uncover school spending after attacks, including ransom payments made to cyberthieves in Bitcoin. I scoured news reports, state data breach disclosures and district websites for public confirmations and, oftentimes, denials — sometimes even after their students' and employees' personal information had already been published. My reporting documented that educators routinely offered incomplete, misleading or downright inaccurate information about cyberattacks — and the risks that subsequent data breaches pose to students, parents and teachers for identity theft, fraud and other forms of online exploitation. The hollowness in schools' messaging and the mechanisms that leave school communities clueless are no coincidence. Staring down a cyberattack and the prospect of being sued over the leak of sensitive information, school leaders turn to insurance companies, consultants and privacy lawyers to steer 'privileged investigations,' which keep key details hidden from the public. Often contacted before the police, the paid consultants who arrive in the wake of a cyberattack are portrayed to the public as an encouraging sign, trained to handle the bad actors and restore learning. But what isn't as apparent to students, parents and district employees is that these individuals are not there to protect them — but to protect schools from them. School cybersecurity expert Doug Levin had this to say about our investigation: 'For institutions whose mission is to lift up and protect children and youth, it is unconscionable that they are incentivized to cover up the criminal acts perpetrated against them by malicious foreign actors.' Read the full story here K-12 cyberattacks in focus: Now you can fall down the school cyberattack rabbit hole, too! Use our new search feature to read about how incidents unfolded in your own community, complete with investigative reveals you won't want to miss. Get the most critical news and information about students' rights, safety and well-being delivered straight to your inbox. This story was brought to you with invaluable editing and guidance from The 74's Kathy Moore. And Matilda.
