INDIANAPOLIS — In algebra, students are required to show the steps taken to come to their answer, in part because teachers need to see whether they grasp the concepts.
Indiana’s former state superintendent Tony Bennett hid his calculations when coming up with the school-grading formula last year, working backward to make the equation fit a predetermined answer: an “A” for Republican donor Christel DeHaan’s charter school. His staff was quietly asked to figure out the rest.
The only reason the grade-changing scandal was unveiled was because it was detailed in emails he never deleted from his computer.
The fallout has cost Bennett his seven-month tenure as education commissioner in Florida and launched a pair of state reviews into the validity of a school-grading system that’s at the center of a national education overhaul movement.
Bennett called the reports last week “malicious and unfounded” as he resigned in Florida, but school superintendents in Indiana said the emails finally began to give them the answers they so desperately searched for last year from Bennett and his team.
In Indiana, the state protects emails as public records. Jim Corridan, state archivist and director of the Indiana Commission on Public Records, points out that substantive emails including any dealing with policy must be saved for three years.
For the most part, emails can be legally “destroyed” after that time frame, and not every trivial note like if Bennett had wrote his wife to say he’d be late for dinner must be preserved.
