Hey, NYC public school parents: Worried about how your kid is engaging with social media, AI and tech in general? Fear not: Online platform Kalshi is here to . . . help?
Ugh: While its business technically is running prediction markets, Kalshi is far too close to a gambling outlet to just wave into our schools.
The company will dump north of $7 million over three years into its just-announced partnership with city-approved edtech company EverFi.
Hmm: That comes atop $3 million Kalshi gave to fund a Housing Works health-care center — even as state Attorney General Tish James in July filed suit against the mega-valued startup seeking $36 billion.
We’re no fans of James, but this looks like a bid to buy a better image.
Thing is, Kalshi looks like it needs addicts to power its success.
Per survey data gathered this summer, more than half of “prediction market” bettors fund their bets with credit cards or loans; among that group, close to 90% end up losing.
So Kalshi seems an odd candidate to fund content presumably teaching kids to get offline and touch grass, i.e., cutting into its pool of eventual customers.
EverFi, meanwhile, won a spot last summer as one of two city-vetted financial-ed resources for high schoolers, putting its content into more than 100 schools.
It provides its lessons free to kids and teachers, paying its bills by relying largely on philanthropic sponsorships from banks and other financial institutions — having already worked with retail bank Truist, digital payments titan Block and other big names.
The content it produces is basic and uninspiring, but not especially noxious on its own.
Yet EverFi’s entree into the city school system plainly helped it lock in this new, lucrative partnership — a deal apparently struck with no real involvement from parents or local communities.
That should ring alarm bells: A digital bookie shadowing your kid’s school day is something every mom and dad should at least know about beforehand, especially one at the center of a highly public lawsuit conducted by the same state government that significantly funds the city schools.
All this, when that public-school system is in crisis, with cratering enrollment, ever-increasing costs, ever-decreasing results.
That the city Department of Education gave Everfi its imprimatur only to see it link up with a questionable outfit can’t boost parents’ confidence in an environment already oversoaked with gambling ads.
Imagine, say, Marlboro cigarettes sponsoring “healthy heart” classes in the 1980s.
Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels should step up and make clear that the city won’t allow Kalshi to slipstream in behind EverFi.
It’s an easy, wise win: Keep kids as far from anything even commercial-betting-adjacent as you possibly can.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
