Over the weekend, the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina dominated many of the news stories, including this one in the Christian Science Monitor and if you were like us, you were still stunned by the devastation in New Orleans and the surrounding area.  While it may be five years, and a lot of great work has been done (including some celebrities building very “green” housing there that may be groundbreaking for the rest of the county), education and schools were also inserted into the dialogue.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, guest host Brian Williams hosted a discussion that included praise for the New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD).  It was stated that in an awkward and somewhat perverse way, the hurricane was the best thing that happened to New Orleans Schools (we’re not paraphrasing here).

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So we decided to go back into our archives a bit to get some perspective on what BoardBuzz was saying five years ago.  We have about six postings of coverage about how school boards associations in the effected states were handling things, how local school boards were pitching in, and efforts nationwide while many of us watched what was happening on TV.

Educators around the country have been watching and will continue to watch what happens in New Orleans schools.  A new study said the city is the most reform friendly city in the U.S. for education, and while the scores and graduation rates continue to go up, there is still debate over whether the strategies used there would work in other urban districts around the country.  Meanwhile, take a trip back in time and see how this city has captivated us since 2005.

This week, NPR featured an interesting interview with author, Lewis Hyde, who argues in his book, “Common Air” that the rapid expansion and notion of intellectual property rights threatens to stifle creativity and runs contrary to the ideals of America’s founding fathers like Benjamin Franklin, who created bifocals, the lightning rod, and the furnace stove, among other things, but never sought to patent his inventions because he wanted everyone to benefit from them.

Though it sounds abstract, it’s an intriguing piece that has implications for all aspects of society, including education and educational technology, which is driven and advanced through the collaborative process of sharing ideas and best practices.

Wikis and other forms of open source content are a perfect example, which you’ll have an opportunity to learn more about at NSBA’s T+L Conference, held in Phoenix from October 19-21.

If your district hasn’t dabbled in open source formats, October 19’s pre-conference session, “The Cloud, Open Source and Web 2.0: Financial and Instructional Implications for District Leaders,” is a good start for you.

While the October 20 workshop, “Beyond Textbooks: Sharing Teacher Success and Creativity,” features the culmination of years of hard work from the Vail School District, who developed a digital instructional calendar containing lesson plans and instructional resources aligned with state standards— then shared it with other districts across Arizona.

If that’s not an example of the power and importance of keeping ideas and dialogue open, we don’t know what is.

On August 26, 1920, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified ratification of the 19^th amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting the right to vote for women.  BoardBuzz celebrates this anniversary and the millions of women who campaigned for suffrage. 

Did you know that Kentucky was the first state to permit suffrage nearly a century earlier and that it granted the right to vote for school boards?  Beginning in 1838, land-owning widows and single women were allowed to vote in school elections.    

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

According to “School Boards at the Dawn of the 21st Century,” anywhere from 39 – 45% of of school board members are women (depending on the size of district)  – putting school boards closer to gender parity than state legislatures or other locations of political leadership.  So there is much to celebrate today – and more yet to accomplish.  BoardBuzz believes that school boards will be on the leading edge in the future just as they have been in the past.

As a new school year gets underway, it’s a good bet that the flu season will be upon us before too long. BoardBuzz remembers all too well the frenzy, fear and tragedy around the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic and is grateful that preparations for the 2010 flu season seems a lot calmer.

Although the World Health Organization has declared the H1N1 pandemic virtually over, the flu in some form will be back. So we checked out what message the federal government is sending to schools right now at its central website, www.flu.gov:

The most important things schools can do to reduce the risk of flu is to encourage flu vaccination for all students and those staff who are recommended for vaccination; suggest early treatment for people at higher risk for flu complications; facilitate use of respiratory etiquette and hand hygiene by students and staff; ensure that sick students and adults do not come to the facility; and separate sick and well people as soon as possible. School administrators should frequently remind students, their families, and staff about the importance of these.

So update those letters you sent to parents last year, order a lot of soap and hand sanitizer, put up signs around the school, re-teach students and staff how to sneeze or cough into your elbow, and reconnect with public health officials and other care providers to plan partnership activities…including education programs for staff, students and community, and setting up school-located vaccination (SLV) clinics.

The seasonal flu vaccine prepared for the 2010-2011 season will protect against an influenza A H3N2 virus, an influenza B virus and the 2009 H1N1 virus. So for most people, the nasal spray or one shot should suffice this year. As important, the recommendation this year is for everyone six months of age and older to get vaccinated against the flu as soon as the 2010-2011 season vaccine is available.

SLV clinics are an important way for schools to contribute to preventing the spread of influenza. NSBA’s school health staff has been working with CDC and other key partners to update the SLV guidelines developed in 2009.

Connect with your state school board association’s website and NSBA’s Flu Planning for Schools website for easy access to lots of timely information that will be routinely updated.

How do kids lose their natural curiosity about science? When do they stop asking how things work or why a bird can fly? The answer, unfortunately, has been the way science content is presented in our classrooms. Lots of reports and media coverage suggest there is a growing shortage of individuals pursuing careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) while other experts think the facts have been overstated.

A recent report by professors at Rutgers and Georgetown universities, Steady as She Goes? Three Generations of Students through the Science and Engineering Pipeline concludes the number of college graduates in these fields have remained relatively steady over the past decade, but now, those top graduates are finding careers in finance and consulting to be more attractive. 

So back to the first question. How can K-12 education nurture a child’s curiosity into a passion for science that will not only lead to a college major in the field but a lifelong commitment? Part of the answer lies with how the district delivers science education; part rests with how aggressive district leaders are in creating collaborations with local businesses or university partners to enrich their programs; and part rests with the priority that STEM initiatives have within the board’s vision and how they convey that to parents and community members. From free NASA resources for teachers to workshops that showcase the SMarT Project, an NSBA-AAAS toolkit to help boards  engage their communities in a dialogue around STEM, sessions at T+L will help school leadership teams tackle the many parts of this complex issue. More importantly, there will be firsthand examples presented by educators  whose schools have seen great gains in both since and math achievement and are recent winners of Intel’s Schools of Distinction program.

Erica Jacobs, a columnist for The Washington Examiner, today explored the phenomenon of school bullying following the U.S. Department of Education’s first ever summit to address school bullying.

Jacobs shared her personal experience and noted:

Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan convened America’s first summit on bullying last week, and it’s about time. The goal was to bring together government agencies to both prevent and combat this growing problem. One in three students reports being bullied in middle or high school, and there are increased numbers of cyber bullying incidents. These are not rites of passage or normal adolescent behaviors, according to experts at the summit. They are learned patterns that can be changed.

My school’s bully was named Bradley. Everyone knew his pattern: He picked on students who were shy, overweight, or had a disability. We saw his actions in the schoolyard, yet we didn’t report him to teachers; we thought it was just the way it was. The message from the Department of Education, psychologists, and experts from the Department of Justice is that bullying has been protected for too long; it’s time to educate parents, teachers, and students to recognize when a child is being bullied and stop it before it’s too late.

BoardBuzz agrees that we must address school bullying as a safe school environment is critical in making sure our students succeed academically.

By now, we’ve all heard of the “blueberry story” by Jamie Vollmer—the former business executive who was shot down by a sharp-witted teacher after a speech where he tried to push his business practices onto public schools.

Since his conversion to a public-school advocate, Vollmer’s work as a consultant in hundreds of schools has inspired a new book, Schools Cannot Do It Alone.

NSBA’s Executive Director Anne L. Bryant calls it “a tonic for every educator’s soul… Teachers, administrators, and school board members will LOVE his message because it is what we believe at our core.”

Vollmer’s book lays out the challenges that public schools face, the transformation needed and some very real ways school board officials must actually achieve the goal of excellence. And it also shows practical ways school boards must engage our communities so that in fact public schools are not alone. Vollmer has offered solutions that are radical, sensible, and doable.

This week, the National Journal is compiling a list of summer reading recommendations from Bryant and other education leaders.

What’s been your best read this year?

Could Texas’ $830 million share of the Education Jobs Fund that could save more than 14,000 education jobs end up in legal limbo?

It seems that Gov. Rick Perry and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott are threatening to sue the federal government because of requirements to receive the new education funding.

“If anyone wants to play games or mess around, we will simply stop funding them and put that money in states where there’s a real need,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told The Houston Chronicle.  ”We’re not going to have any tolerance for (states) trying to divert money or playing games.”

Duncan continued, “We will be working with every state, including Texas, to make sure the right things happen for children.”

So are we going to see a showdown in Texas?

Today in The Washington Post, Dana Milbank questions President Barack Obama’s education policies, noting, “Obama has taken the worst aspect of Bush’s No Child Left Behind education law — an obsession with testing — and amplified it. Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed — despite evidence that such practices are harmful.”

BoardBuzz believes there needs to be vast improvements to No Child Left Behind including reevaluating the emphasis of standardized testing. We should not assess the quality of a school on a student’s performance on a single assessment; and then mandate a series of overly broad sanctions that are not always targeted to the needs of the students.   To date, the strategies in No Child Left Behind have not yet proven to have a significant impact on improving student or school performance.

Let us know what you think?

An article in today’s The New York Times should be read by all edu-watchers in America.  It raises the interesting question (our headline) when putting education in the hands of often unknown entities.  With hundreds of millions of dollars on the line in many states across the nation, and an increasing pressure to show results by organizations and companies to raise student achievement, one might think that there would be guarantees when it comes to performance, but many of the organizations getting money to turnaround schools have nothing to do with results.   And in many cases, the school districts impacted by these turnaround groups are in urban areas that can’t afford to lose any more ground.

So will this educational infusion of money be like the carpetbaggers of the south following the Civil War, as Dr. Rudy Crew points out in the article, or like the Homestead Act, which gave land to eastern farmers and freed slaves as they settled the west?  Although the Homestead Act was controversial in ways, it was a government funded program that gave farmers a reason to move west, settle the land, farm it, and in many cases those families are still there today.  Is Race to the Top going to have an impact generations from now?

With many of the entities making big claims, we wonder what the decision makers will be looking for when deciding to pay them.  In some cases, experts have weighed in on what they’ve seen so far is not impressive to them, as many of the organizations and companies don’t have a lot of school experience.  But with the U.S. Department of Education looking for new ideas, it’s hard to judge what is innovative versus inexperienced.  As millions get doled out, it seems that everyone is just chasing the money.  At BoardBuzz, we can’t help but ask, is that what’s best for America’s students?