A whistleblower inside the DOE in New York City told me the Bloomberg administration plans to eliminate all emails. I assumed they were reacting to the Indiana scandal, where Tony Bennett’s emails showed that he engaged in grade-fixing and assembling lists of campaign donors.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
But what we learn from this story is that the Bloomberg administration plans to delete emails in many agencies, not just the Department of Education.
The Bloomberg administration could let an important part of its legacy end up in a digital Dumpster.
Currently, the city only has plans to retain the emails of a finite number of agencies from the Bloomberg era — and those are mainly being saved to protect itself in the event of future litigation, DNAinfo New York has learned.
But the city still hasn’t decided whether to preserve the emails of major agencies like the mayor’s office, NYPD, the Department of Education andFDNY, sources said.
If the emails are not saved, an unvarnished window into the decision-making and thoughts of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and top deputies likeSchools Chancellor Dennis Walcott and NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly could vanish.
When DNAinfo New York asked the mayor’s office and the city Law Department about the possibility that these agencies’ emails would eventually disappear, both called that account “incorrect and inaccurate” but wouldn’t elaborate.
This is unfortunate, as emails are now the public records that future city officials and historians will need to understand how policy was designed and implemented.
It seems to be akin to burning public records. This should not happen.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How is it even legal NOT to save emails? Law firms are private entities, yet they are subject to extensive regulations about how, what and when they can get rid of electronic and paper records. If we delete something we shouldn’t, not only will we be fired, but we can potentially face criminal prosecution.
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all this information needs to be kept and analyzed very closely, look at the tapes of conversations between Nixon and Kissinger and you’ll see why.
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Surely the NSA has all of these emails saved in their quest to protect the best interests of the American people?
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If governments are required to save email, nothing will be said in an email that the parties do not wish to be made public. That will reduce the effectiveness of using email to understand how a policy is designed and implemented.
Many administrators at my university keep notes in a handwritten diary rather then recording thoughts and information electronically to preserve confidentiality.
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Leave it to you to defend this horse hockey. Maybe they could just not say the things they don’t want publically known that they said? They are, after all, public officials.
BTW, those emails aren’t theirs to delete – they belong to the public which paid for the equipment to make them possible.
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I am not defending it, I am making a forecast. If emails are the functional equivalent of a public broadcast, emails will be as informative about the foundations of public policies as news conferences. No one with anything that might be controversial to discuss will do it via email.
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It was years ago that we were told not to put anything in emails at school that we wouldn’t want to be public. I had a school administrator refuse to answer me by email after he wrote an email that someone told him he should not have sent to me. He learned his lesson. I doubt he has ever written anything even slightly incriminating since. I was just an annoying fly that he wanted to squash anyway. He did.
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Public school teachers have also been told to avoid e-mails concerning students or any other communications which should be kept private. This a part of Ferpa. However Bloomberg is a government agent. Deleting e-mails may be illegal in light of freedom of information laws, I would think.
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It is not a a question about deleting emails, the emails will not be written. From the politicians view, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. If all emails from an administration are preserved, they will not provide any more insight into the process of policy formation than the official press releases. Actually there will little perceived differences between the two.
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Do you really think that people will start wasting travel and other time intensive resources in order to be off the record due to emails being saved? In cases where some kind of dialog has to happen to move forward? “I can’t have this in an email so just fly into NYC from DC so I can spend 5 min telling you this thing I have to share” ” No we can’t do it over the phone either.” Maybe snail mail will bounce back due to this and save the USPS from their 75 year pension funding requirement debacle. Or maybe everything will be encrypted. Bottom line is this sounds illegal and unless they use NSA grade shredding, merely deleting the emails will provide them with only the illusion of privacy which they are just dumb enough not to realize.
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We probably have large scale violations of the Elementary and Secondary Act here. NYC’s records, and e-mails to and from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Fed. Dept. of Ed. need to be seized by the FBI. But what are the chances of the DOJ or the FBI conducting an independent investigation without huge public pressure?
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This is why cyberspace is spooky.
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Surely there must be some hackers following these issues who could lend a hand…
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Can anyone say, “computer forensics”… Bloomberg’s trail of destruction can never be TOTALLY eradicated. There surely will be slip-ups and MANY people looking for them. Lies do rise to the surface.
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These are PUBLIC records that belong to the taxpayers on whose computers the information was recorded. City records don’t belong to the Mayor.
Aside from preservng history, there is considerable on-going business of the city that does not automatically end one day and start fresh the next with a new Mayor. Government employees need to be able to honor governance and legal precedents and to connect the dots of city decision-making in all agencies and across time.
Bloomberg wanted schools and others to be DATA DRIVEN in their decisions. That’s pretty hard to do if he erases all the data. Would he agree to everything being erased at his business empire whenever the CEO or Chairman of the Board changes?
Of course not. This sounds like another example of one set of rules for himself and a different set for everyone else.
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The data they use is cherry-picked to justify political, financial and ideologically-based decisions that have already been made, and the riff-raff has no rights the so-called reformers are bound to respect regarding their conduct.
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Believe it or not, there is a Paul Vallas angle even to this nonsense. Vallas worked hard to erase the public memory — the history — of public education in Chicago so that he could re-invent it to his own ends (and the ends of mayoral control and the corporate agenda).
One of the most dastardly acts of erasure came when Vallas moved Chicago Public Schools headquarters from 1819 W. Pershing Road (a block-long complex of six-storey buildings on the city’s South Side) to 125 S. Clark St. (the former headquarters of Commonwealth Edison, which was trying to unload it because it wasn’t ready for the 21st Century, so naturally the public purse was opened to that).
At Pershing Road, there was enough space to store everything, and most of the records were on paper, going back into the mid-19th Century. Since even student records can be needed up to nearly 100 years later, CPS had always paid human beings to maintain those files, and most of them were dedicated to those important jobs. I know because I used to work with many of them.
But when CPS moved out of Pershing Road, the “bureaucrats” who were moved were only allowed to take four boxes with them. Everything else had to be thrown away. Security guards rolled those huge bins down the “halls” and forced many of the mid-level technicians to dump tons of history for shredding and termination. These included, among other things, all the inspections for asbestos, thousands of building records (do you know where the wiring is in a 90-year-old building?), etc., etc.
Some of us saved stuff. Some of that stuff is now being donated to the Chicago Teachers Union, which is slowly planning a research library that will utilize many of the public records that corporate school reform, under Vallas and since, has tried to erase.
One of my favorite examples just happened. We called it the WHITE OUT of Black History.
When Rahm Emanuel’s minions on the Chicago Board of Education voted to close 49 of the city’s real public schools on May 22, 2013, they didn’t even allow the names of the schools to be spoken. Instead, they voted en masse on 49 “Board Reports” which had numerical indicators, but which didn’t provide the names of the actual schools.
During the public participation part of the meeting, which I covered for Substance, Erica Clark of “Parents 4 Teachers” (one of the many Chicago groups now active) tried to read the names of all the schools about to be destroyed.
She got to the “Ps” when her time (two minutes) was up. They told her to shut up. She kept reading, and four burly security guards dragged her away from the podium and out of the meeting — still reading the names after “P”.
That particular moment in Chicago-style democracy was edited out of the official videotape version of the May 22 Board meeting (which is available on line).
So we worked with friends to make a You Tube version of the meeting, showing the dragging of Erica Clark and Shannon Bennett. It’s available, and can serve as a historical corrective to the official lies available at cps.edu.
Now to the WHITE OUT.
Since all of the current “cabinet” of Chicago CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett consists of out of town mercenaries who know nothing about Chicago, there are any number of small things that add to the irritation.
When they voted to close 49 schools, one they voted to close was named after Jesse Owens, who was an early hero in the fight against Nazism, thanks to his victory at the 1936 Olympics. Jesse Owens was black. After CPS closed the school named after him, his family began to protest, and the protest caught the attention of the Chicago Tribune. So that bit of historical WHITE OUT is being corrected.
But the joke is still on CPS, and the ignorance that we can count on from the seven dwarfs who sit on Rahm’s Board, plus the Broad Academy alumni and alumnae who are currently the CEO’s “cabinet.”
Most of the schools they closed are named after famous black Americans.
The history is part of the history of segregation in Chicago, and that’s another story for another time I’ve been writing for decades.
But on May 22, the Chicago Board of Education not only closed Jesse Owens, but also Arna Bontemps and Matthew Henson and lots of others. They spared Mahalia Jackson, but had already closed Crispus Attucks and Ralph Bunche (which was turned into a charter).
These people want to destroy history. Whether it is the complexity of Jesse Owens’s victory during the “Triumph of the Will” olympiad or the later stories that were told as Chicago opened dozens of real public schools named after black people, the ugliness is the same.
Oh… And one of the other things that Rahm’s “team” did was fill the dumpsters with the trophies, yearbooks, bulletin board displays and all the other community histories that each of those schools embodied.
At least, thanks to Erica Clark and some of the rest of us, the names of those schools were read one last time on May 22, 2013. Since then, Chicago’s owners and rulers have been whiting it all out as fast as they can.
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Let me know when your book is published – I’ll buy a few copies just like I did with Diane’s book. Your posts are always a treasure trove.
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I recall this came up in Boston in 2009.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/09/galvin_orders_c.html
State orders City Hall computers secured in e-mail dispute
Sept. 14, 2009
Boston.com
Secretary of State William F. Galvin’s office has ordered the city of Boston to immediately secure City Hall computers and hire an independent computer forensics expert to retrieve emails that were improperly deleted by Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s top policy aide.
The head of the public records division of Galvin’s office, Alan N. Cote, wrote in a letter to Menino’s chief lawyer that the demand was based on the “credible belief” that the aide, Michael J. Kineavy, violated the state public records law by routinely deleting emails in such a way that copies would not be preserved by city servers. Cote said his office received copies of 300 emails today listing Kineavy as a sender or recipient and sent via city computers “which now appear to have been improperly deleted.”
The public records law requires municipal employees to save electronic correspondence for at least two years, even if the contents are of “no informational or evidential value.” Penalties include fines of up to $500 or prison sentences of up to one year.
I would imagine that the great state of NY also has a public records law.
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The city should have a records retention policy that prohibits emails relating to any kind of policy decisions from being deleted. Emails from high-level staff all the way to the top would likely be retained for several years through such a policy. Someone should make a public records request for the actual policy to ascertain if the city has one and what the rules say. Emails or any kind of electronic communications between staff members about policy decisions should be included in the policy. Geez, due to Enron, even private companies have to retain their records for 7 years – as per Sarbanes-Oxely of 2002. I can’t imagine any gov’t. agency not having such a policy or defaulting to the state’s policy.
And teaching economist – yes, having emails as part of a records retention policy does inhibit what you say in the emails, which is why here in Louisiana, our top level state employees use their personal emails to conduct state business. But, if someone screws up and lets that personal email somehow get into the state system – oh, snap – it then becomes public record. Exhibit A – Supt. of Ed. John White saying he wanted to “muddy the water” with Legislators over their voucher program concerns.
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