Thanks to the reader who reminded me of this curious incident just two months ago. The Los Angeles school board voted to shred all internal emails more than one year old, then, after a public backlash, voted to reconsider that decision. I am not sure whether they decided to start shredding emails or not. Clearly, those emails would have a direct bearing on the problematic $1.3 billion iPad deal. Were any of them shredded or were they preserved? I don’t know.
More breaking news: A federal grand jury is investigating the iPad deal. KPCC staff, especially Annie Gilbertson, is all over this story.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Looking forward to the Deasy perp walk. One can dream…..
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They could shred all they want. I feel confident that the Los Angeles school board isn’t tech savvy enough, nor has the wherewithal to know that what is shredded or deleted may be recovered with little difficultly…Have they removed all board members with even a scant amount of common sense and who care about the students?!
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Sorry to tell you, Dolly, that the BoE had just bought an expensive program from Microsoft that does indeed do an effective job of making emails disappear. That happened the week after Deasy’s
2 year old emails were found and published by an investigative journalist. Deasy, at about that point, wanted to see all the BoE emails and hired the BH lawyer to make the case, he said. At least, this is what we could find out. but now we know he probably worried about future investigation surprises and had/has his fraud lawyer at the ready.
As to Board members, “they”??? whoever ‘they’ are, did not remove anyone…we in California vote for Board members, just like most of the districts in the US, and they leave if they do not get a majority of the votes. But for the past few years, the billionaires have tried to steal the votes with huge donations to inferior and politicized charter supporters. So far it has not worked, but of the 7 members, two are Deasy/Broad/privatizer/Charter supporters. The other 5 are teachers.
I am amazed when folks chime in about tech savvyness, etc. This is the second largest district in the US, and we are not all hicks in Los Angeles. We have the best public university in the country, UCLA, which has a good teacher training, Education department and it was guided for ages by Ms. Seeds of UES fame, and then Madeline Hunter, giants of education.
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“This is the second largest district in the US, and we are not all hicks in Los Angeles.”
Maybe you could use some of us hicks out there to help straighten the crap out, but then again we’ve got enough of it around here from those big districts flinging it off themselves.
Come on, Ellen, you don’t really have a problem with us rural poor hick districts, now do you???? We face the same idiocies and idiologies as you bigger more sophisticated urban types. Sometimes we’re actually smart enough to look at what the “big boys” do and say “Nope, we ain’t doin that sheeiit”.
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Ellen L.,
P.S. I know you didn’t mean to disparage us country folk with that reference, I just couldn’t prevent myself from responding.
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Duane, my dear colleague. Never would disparage others as hicks. However, the the writer to whom I addressed the comment seemed to think no one at LAUSD BoE had enough tech skills to delete emails. As most educators know, the BoE assigns others to do this task, and the new MS software can clear cyberspace of offending info rather easily.
You, erudite and multi faceted friend, although you do on occasion play the hick, are far from being uneducated and unsophisticaed in the ways of manipulation…but you always add a soupcon of humor.
Must admit though, that you can be a gadfly (read as, a pain in the butt).
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“The prosecutors specifically seek records about the tablet program, known as the Common Core Technology Project,”
Is there a specific benefit to tablets over, say, a laptop? I know marketers are pushing them on kids, that device, but why are they so popular in ed reform circles?
Is using a tablet even a good way to take a Common Core test? There’s a lot of input required in the Common Core testing. I looked at both of the Common Core sample tests online (just for 6th grade, my son is a 6th grader). Wouldn’t that be clunkier and more difficult with a tablet, plus they have to purchase a keyboard, right?
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Records retention in a school district is usually based on the content and purpose of the record instead of an arbitrary standard time that applies in a blanket manner for all records. Legal counsel will advise you of your legal liability if you destroy a record early and also the potential risks if you retain a record beyond the time you are legally required to do so.
Presumably California has a records retention schedule for school districts like Wisconsin’s.
http://publicrecordsboard.wi.gov/docview.asp?docid=15892&locid=165
On page 24 there is a flowchart for the decision making process on whether an email is a public record in Wisconsin.
If California has state level guidance, it seems to me the LAUSD should direct staff to follow the state guidelines instead of adopting an arbitrary local standard.
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“Barn-doors and Horses”
You can’t expect the horse to stay
With barn door open wide
For several months, it’s gone away
With Deasy, for a ride
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SomeDAM Poet,
Have to tell you that I sure enjoy your poems.
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Yvonne Siu-Runyan: what you said.
😎
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TAGP!
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FYI, folks….The LA Times today published the name and agency of the lead FBI agent who signed the subpoena to collect the i Pad info in yesterday’s raid on LAUSD. She is “US attorney in the Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section, Patriciea A. Donahue.”
Very interesting.
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Addendum…don’t forget that many weeks ago Deasy hired the powerful BH attorney, Saferstein, who specialty is fraud defense.
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