Paul Pastorek, former state superintendent of schools in Louisiana, has been advising Michigan Governor Rick Snyder since June 2014, less than a year. Pastorek’s claim to fame was his “success” in eliminating public education in Néw Orleans. A liberal advocacy group filed a Freedom of Information request for all emails between Pastorek and certain state agencies. It received a bill of $52,000 +. Information, it seems, is very costly, costly enough to bankrupt anyone who asks for it.
“Progress Michigan, a liberal think tank based out of Lansing, requested all communications between Paul Pastorek, one of Snyder’s education advisers, and employees of the Michigan Department of Education, Education Achievement Authority and Michigan Department of Treasury.
“The Department of Education and EAA both turned over emails between Pastorek and their employees for free, but the Department of Treasury sent Progress Michigan an estimated cost of $52,108.72 for the same bill.
“According to the letter to Progress Michigan, obtained by MLive, the department estimated each of its 1,286 employees would need to spend two hours searching their emails for communications with Pastorek. Each of those hours would cost the state $20.26 per hour, according to the letter.”
This is very odd. It takes me about four seconds to search my emails for a name. Why would every single employee of the state Department of Treasury require two hours to locate correspondence? Surely 90% or more had none.
Why the Department of Treasury?
“Some in the field already question the Department of Treasury’s role in education. It appoints emergency managers that control five Michigan school districts and so-called early warning legislation in the Michigan Legislature could give the Treasury more power over oversight of schools in bad financial shape.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Most law firms charge 15 or 20 cents a copy. Let’s be generous and assume 20 cents (even though it should be less coming from the public sector). These emails came to a total of over 260,000 pages? Wow, that’s a lot of emailing. One wonders how Snyder or Pastorek managed to get any work done.
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How does any other agency fulfill requests for public documents stored on a server? Surely there’s someone with access to the email server that has the ability to search, save, store and send this information and leave it to the person who receives it to create a paper copy if needed?
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Things get “curiouser” and curiouser”. Bizarre hardly describes what is happening in our government now, not only in education – as bad as that is, would that it were only in education but a series of governmental actions seem to be to eliminate the possibility of focusing on the really important aspects of life.
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An ultimate irony… What none of us have been able to get a department of education to do is to estimate the SOFT COSTS of implementing Common Core and the testing regime to go with it…
My estimate for Oregon is that it’s draining more than $300M annually from classroom time… There was a blip of a report in Colorado that appeared to be silenced to avoid embarrassing those in power – it indicated similar sized soft costs in that state.
But…just try to get anyone to look seriously at those costs. The typical answer I get is… “well the old testing regime cost just as much”… To which my answer is: And after 10 years it didn’t do anything. So why throw good money after bad?
Anyway, here are these governmental reform officials estimating the soft costs of a document request – with impunity.
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This is a good read from an ed reformer who (openly) hopes to privatize all public schools.
Did Governor Snyder run on privatizing Michigan’s public schools? Why not?
We can’t have a real public debate on whether the US should privatize public schools if ed reform politicians won’t be clear on the objective during political campaigns.
http://relinquishment.org/2015/03/17/the-times-are-they-a-changin/
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Snyder today will release plan to make Detroit all-charter. Some details have been leaked.
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/ingrid-jacques/2015/04/21/snyders-plan-split-detroit-schools-two/26110199/
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Michigan should be looking to education models in advanced states and countries like Massachusetts, Minnesota and Finland, not a backwater like Louisiana! It seems our state leaders are trying to transform our state into “Michissippi” which is a giant leap backwards! With good leadership in Lansing Michigan can be among the top states in education, technology, infrastructure and good paying jobs! Its time for big changes in Lansing and we need to replace the one-party monopoly whose main purpose seems to be to raid the treasury for themselves and their financiers. The people and students of Michigan deserve much better!
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