The College Board, the organization behind the SAT, has been illegally gathering and selling private student data to boost the already enormous salaries of its executives, according to an explosive civil-rights lawsuit filed last week. Over 5 million students apparently had their data sold.
Among the private data that was obtained and sold by the ostensibly “non-profit” College Board were students’ names, home addresses, gender, ethnicity, grades, citizenship status, religious views, and much more, the suit alleges. It was collected through the so-called “Student Search Survey.”
To collect the data, the scandal-plagued College Board used “unfair and deceptive means,” the attorneys said. Those means included marketing its data-collection scheme as a tool to help students get accepted into a college or university.
According to the complaint, the outfit then sold the data to third parties without obtaining legally required consent. The price of the data, per student, was between $0.42 and $0.47, the complaint said. The group rakes in over $1 billion per year and pays exorbitant salaries, including $1.5 million to the president.
The students who were affected have suffered an invasion of privacy, the deprivation of the right to control and choose how their identities are used, and a diminished value to their personal information, the attorneys involved in the case said in a statement.
In all, the lawsuit includes almost a dozen counts. These include allegations that the College Board violated the Illinois School Student Records Act, the Right of Publicity Act, the Children’s Privacy Protection and Parental Empowerment Act, and the Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act.
The lawsuit, filed by the civil-rights law firm Loevy & Loevy on behalf of a Chicago parent whose child was affected, is now seeking nationwide class-action status. If the plaintiffs win, the College Board could end up paying enormous damages, experts said.
The College Board has not yet issued a response. It claims online that it does not sell student information, but adds in the fine print that the data is shared with various organizations that “pay a license fee to use the information.”
This is hardly the first major scandal to rock the College Board in recent years, however. In fact, the group came under nationwide scrutiny after hiring fringe activist David Coleman — the non-educator architect of the politically toxic “Common Core” standards — to serve as CEO.
By aligning its standardized tests with the dumbed-down standards imposed on America by the Obama administration, the College Board has been instrumental in facilitating the ongoing destruction of education and the massive data-mining. But it is hardly alone in that endeavor.
This lawsuit and the allegations contained in it should serve as a valuable wake up call to parents everywhere. Not only is the government lawlessly spying on children and stealing their personal data for nefarious purposes, but so are government cronies such as the College Board.
It is time for the American people to say, “Enough!”
