You do not have to look far to see the impacts that the pandemic has had on schools and communities over the past two years. Recognizing this, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) is proud to be working with the National Alliance for Hispanic Health (NAHH) in support of the Vacunas CVN Network, a national network for community-based…

On January 4, 2022 the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) released high school graduation rates for the State of Florida and the District. The FY21 Federal High School Graduation Rate includes standard diplomas but excludes special diplomas and General Education Diplomas (GEDs). Students with Disabilities (SWD) on Access Points curriculum are…

School board members are struggling to interpret laws that govern where and how they do business now that as many conversations take place digitally as they do face to face. As online and digital interactions increase, so too does public concern that officials have more opportunities to violate state open-meetings and open-records laws meant to…

One of the most fundamental questions about charter schools--who should have the power to approve them--has re-emerged in force in a number of states. Florida, Georgia, and New Jersey have been the scene of debates this year over whether state or local authorities should have the final say on allowing charter schools within a particular district's…

Since the 1970s, American governors have become increasingly active in education politics. Where they once told state education chiefs to "make me the best education governor ever," they now demand control of state boards of education, push for state control of school funding, and urge statewide standards for teacher evaluation. This…

This case set in Jacksonville, Florida, covers the years 1998 to 2001. A new nontraditional superintendent, Major General John C. Fryer, focuses on student achievement, but financial needs and Florida law require him to bid contracts for student transportation, upsetting a 50-year pattern of contracting without competitive bidding with more than…

Governments are increasingly publishing information about the performance of the services they provide, in part to help citizens hold their elected representatives accountable for government service outcomes. Yet there is little evidence concerning the influence of information about government service performance on voter behavior. This paper…

This case describes the experience of a new school board member in Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Marta Perez, as she discovers a wide range of ethical and management problems in the school district and attempts to deal with them. Layered throughout the case are challenges pertaining to the school board's roles and responsibilities,…

This article examines the legal and political significance of teacher unionization in rural and suburban school districts between 1960 and 1975. While most historians focus on the growth of unions in urban areas, strikes in outlying districts played a determinative role in the development of public sector labor law, particularly in the arbitration…

There are a number of detailed requirements for gifted screening, referral and eligibility specified under State Board Rules and School Board Rules. In all of these areas, explicit mention is made of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) scores as being integral components. The FCAT scores used for these purposes prior to 2008 were…

This study examines the role of content professionalism and public outreach, along with partisanship in the availability of online local public information. Comparing county and school board websites in Florida, the author suggests that online public records serve as a proxy for the entity's overall level of transparency. A content analysis of 134…

In 1941, members of the local unit of the Florida State Teachers Association (FSTA) met in Tampa to plan a lawsuit against Hillsborough County's school board for paying African-American teachers less than white teachers. Hilda Turner, who taught history and economics at Tampa's historically black high school, agreed to serve as plaintiff; she was…

This paper presents the highlights of a conference entitled "Advancing Student Achievement through Labor-Management Collaboration" held in Denver, Colorado last February 15-16, 2011. This first-of-its-kind conference on labor-management collaboration is a historic effort to transform the relationships among local superintendents, school…

This article describes how a school district's use of a transparent tool coalesced support for systemic improvement. The author was looking for a way to push improvement in his 4,000-student school system when he discovered the balanced scorecard, a strategic tool for performance management. The author details how the balanced scorecard helped him…

There is broad agreement that teacher quality is related to student achievement, but there is far less agreement about the degree to which school districts and administrators are constrained in making policies to improve teacher quality that might also affect teacher employment and working conditions. Conventional wisdom holds that state law and…