I’m sitting in a session on federal health care .. which I know is important… But I am going to talk a bit about a press conference about an hour ago on a proposal to change the presidential primary system, known as the Ohio Plan.

Here is David Norcross of the Republican National Committee talking to John of the Quorum Report.

Anyway, let me give you a thumbnail of the plan. The GOP votes on this before the Convention. Dems vote on this in January.

The states of New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and Iowa are carved out. Those states vote early, in the first 3 weeks of February.

Those states with 5 or fewer electoral votes vote something between the 4th week of February and the 2nd week of March.

Then the balance of states is divided into three flights: X, Y and Z. Those states draw for which goes first, then rotates. Roughly equal number of electoral votes. As this is structured, the candidate would likely be chosen at the end of the process, rather than beginning. It’s intended to avoid all the states pushing their primar

Presidential candidate John McCain was supposed to be in NOLA as part of the some of the energy talk. Then the barge accident happened, and he was quickly pulled. Not quite the publicity he wanted to have on energy policy.

This was probably funnier in the telling, but… I ran into a staffer with Austin ties on the way into the Convention Center yesterday who told me he had gone over the Riverwalk Mall to eat. That’s right next door to the Convention Center on the water… Big food court. Cheap beer, etc.

When he and his buddies used to come to NOLA, they’d go over to the mall, grab a cheap beer and watch the barges go by. Well, so he went over to the mall and grabbed his beer and sat there. But there weren’t any barges at all. And there was this smell… And the smell just seemed to get worse and worse… He finally got a headache and had to get up and leave.

And it wasn’t until he got back to his hotel two hours later that he actually realized he had been sitting there, waiting for nothing, because the entire river was closed down by the oil spill… Okay, I got a laugh out of that because I could see myself doing exactly that.

In past years, NCSL has provided me with a print-out of which lawmakers from Texas are attending the conference. I ask, and they provide the list….

Just now, however, they told me that any request for this year’s list has to come from the state.

While I just defended lawmakers’ privacy, I obviously still could find much to criticize…. 

I got a response to my post on New Orleans, saying that I needed to pay a bit more attention to the cocktail receptions and golf bags going out of the Marriott at 8 a.m.

I know this topic consumes many of the political blogs. And it’s a fair topic. Did AT&T pay for an evening of entertainment for the Texas lawmakers? Well, yeah. Remember when I told you I was standing outside the Marriott, and the delegation was leaving for dinner? They were getting on that bus that I am sure AT&T generously underwrote.

At times I have struggled with this topic. How concerned should I be about the lobby’s presence at NCSL? For the most part, my answer has been “not very.” If I thought any of our delegation could be bought for the price of an evening’s entertainment, I would think they were cheap, indeed. I am sure our lawmakers get far more benefit from walking into Eddie Vee’s for dinner during the session and watching the lobbyists fight over who would pick up their tab.

NCSL shook down AFT for a $25,000 donation to pay for a catered lunch that I attended — the one on presidential candidates — and Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, was sitting in that session. Do I think West now is more, or less, influenced by the teacher lobby after attending such a lunch? Ummm… probably not.  Lobbyists come to NCSL — and underwrite events and dinners and cocktail hours — because it gives them face time with the lawmakers. So it’s my job to file that way in the back of my mind and consider each lawmaker’s position on bills of interest each session.

For instance, if a whole bunch of lawmakers are on board with a tech bill that would clearly benefit AT&T next session — and they have no reasonable defense for why they aren’t favoring, say, cable companies — then I suspect I would be a bit more suspicious about their motivations and whether I thought they could be bought. In fact, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that lobbyists have provided some of the best context for bills during some of these policy sessions, throwing out the dirty laundry. I am very happy to use them to educate me on issues such as global warming.

I think I’ve alluded to the fact that some lawmakers here — Eissler, Howard, Naishtat, Diane Patrick, Chisum, Latham, Morrison, Van de Putte — are policy wonks. And I file that away in the back of my mind, too. If I remember correctly, it was the Statesman that wrote about the fact that private interests underwrote a trip Mike Krusee took to a conference or such. To me, that’s also balanced by the fact that Krusee was — until the s@$#t hit the fan — was a very key policy wonk on transportation. He chaired the NCSL committee. He was truly, and really, committed to policy… far more than taking a handout from lobbyists.

Does taking money weaken your credibility as a lawmaker? Sure. But there is some context to be applied there.I suppose, when I file this away in the back of my mind, I do file it away with everything else I know about the lawmaker, his record and his principles. Do I think a lawmaker is bought with a plate lunch? No. Would I be more concerned if there was a pattern of a lobbyist paying for rent and dinners and airfare? I am sure. And I am sure I would be interested in how much AT&T spends on lobbying, a point I think the Dallas Morning News made in its own article on the subject of lobbying.

In the meantime, being the policy reporter, I’m far more concerned that our state is behind the 8-ball on health IT. And that national trends support Chairman Eissler’s contention that we need to expand our data systems. And what the federal guidelines are on the e-discovery of any governor’s e-mail… all of which were sessions yesterday.  

… But the Boss sent me a note tonight, telling me he had pimped me out to the Progressive Blog Alliance. And people were actually reading my pearl drops of wisdom from The Big Easy.

Two, three, four people are reading the blog? Seriously? I am going to start posting. So I thought I should jump on the computer — after watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall, of course ($12.95 plus tax, thank you) — to actually write something, since it had been a number of hours since I last posted.  (By the way: If you’ve ever vacationed in Hawaii, Sarah Marshall really is a great film. I loved seeing the Big Island. But I digress here…)

Back to the whole concept of blogging. Seriously, I don’t get it. I don’t know how people find they love to blog. I can write and write and write, but if I can’t tell if anyone reads me, what’s the point? I wonder why I’m doing it at all. So I can’t quite figure out how so many of you bloggers do it… Why? It does seem a bit thankless, at times, to me.

But since I am talking, let me talk about NOLA. I probably have a couple of blog posts in me on this topic of the city, for sure. I came back to the hotel room tonight and crashed. Had a couple of brownies in the Press Room, and I was toast. (Sorry, a big carb rush combined with old age.) I heard I missed some great reception hosted by Sen. Van de Putte, but that’s another story.

Anyway, I woke up at 10 p.m., and I went out for a meal. And it was practically impossible to do. I remember reading a blog recently where a guy from a rather snarky publication up in Dallas (okay, D Magazine) said he had been to NOLA and found no difference in the place. It was all peachy keen, business as usual, just the way he remembered it.

Seriously, where was this guy? Sure, it looks the same, but it’s not the same here. I was out on the streets, and I couldn’t find a fast food restaurant open anywhere. And I think that’s really tells the tale of this city. Sure, you can find liquor and girlie clubs and liquor down in the French Quarter, but the real story to how NOLA has recovered from Hurricane Katrina is whether you can find a McDonald’s open at 10 p.m. on a Thursday night. And you can’t. That’s just simply scary.

This place is wounded. Badly. In a session with the photogs of Katrina at conference, there was a comment about sitting in front of a scanner and hearing the calls … 29-S, 29-S… 29-S is a suicide in PD talk here. This situation devastates people.

And, yeah, it’s tough to rely on a McDonald’s to say that… although I will have more specifics to add my theory later. So where did I end up eating? Krystal’s. 

No McDonald’s. No Popeye’s. No Arby’s. No local joints. They’re not open past 10 p.m. in the middle of the entertainment district. And why? The woman behind the counter of the package store at the end of the block told me it’s because they just can’t find anyone to work in this town.

It seems crazy. They can’t find enough people to work in New Orleans, one of the biggest tourism/convention capitals of this country. If it doesn’t boggle your mind, it should. Is this a city recovering? Or just in pain?

I’ll have more to say on that in another post, but let me end with this story… I was in the Exhibit Hall about the time they closed around 4 p.m. today, and I ended up at the AFT booth. And the people on duty were from Jefferson Parish. That’s the high end of NOLA, for those of you who don’t know the area. It’s where the good schools are… places like Metarie. I had a friend who was relocated to NOLA with Shell a number of years ago, and I remember she was relieved to live out in Metarie. Because it actually had a good school system. Did. Of course.

Anyway, they can’t find enough teachers to teach in Metarie now, even though voters set the starting pay at just about where a lot of Texas suburban districts are. So where is all the hype? I know, when I was at the ASCD conference here in NOLA a couple of months ago, they had a big tour that included the KIPP campus. Well, la di da. A big charter school chain is now doing so much to change the face of education in NOLA. Maybe that’s a great thing here….But the real point — the point you really need to take away from this — is that the public schools are struggling to operate in NOLA because they can’t find enough people who want to come back to this city, at this point. Maybe that’s good… if you think the schools needed reforming anyway. Maybe that’s bad. It depends on your viewpoint.

Maybe this is the time that NOLA rebuilds itself as a completely different place. But the Jefferson Parish union people tell me that one of the things that really stuck in their craw was the fact that — in the middle of all this — Aldine ISD put a sign in the middle of their neighborhood to recruit teachers.Well, I know Aldine. That doesn’t surprise me at all.Aldine — and that’s the Greenspoint area in Houston, if you’re not familiar — has a staff almost evenly split between black and white teachers. That’s a feat. That takes work. So the fact that Aldine was ready and able to take the best (and I assume black) teachers out of Jefferson Parish is no surprise to me.

So I struggle with the thought… If Austin — or any other city — was wiped off the map with a natural disaster and had to rebuild, I wonder if we would have a sense of what we wanted to return. Sure, we took the toughest students out of New Orleans — I hear a lot about the new gang wars in Houston public schools — but we also took the best doctors, the best teachers, the best… everything. One of the teachers here said that a number of teachers of the year out of Texas came out of NOLA… Whether that was district or state level, I dunno.

I don’t know if that ends this post on a profound note, but that is my thought at this hour. 29-S  

Seen on a bumper sticker coming into town…

New OrleansProud to swim home.

Right now we’re in the middle of a press conference on the sustainability of the Gulf Coast.

It’s talking about how energy production and wetland preservation can peacefully co-exist.

Rep. Warren Chisum is going to address the group soon. I’ll be taking some video of it.

Post Presser: I think I’ll just simplify this for you.

What is interesting about this one is that there is pressure to drill off the Gulf Coast. Of course. We’ve all been to the pump lately. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s just a matter of time before we come up with some compromise on offshore drilling.

So these states in this accord — Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama — which have been devastated by both environmental factors and recent hurricanes, want to make sure they get their share of offshore oil royalties. It’s probably only with those royalties that we will be able to preserve things like our fishing industry.

I am sitting in an NCSL education session this morning that talks about linking data about a child across years and across agencies.

Does Texas do this? So far, we don’t. It has only come with the advent of the three new education research centers — and the establishment of the K-12/higher ed alignment in the last year or so — that Texas even comes close to using data as more than simply a stick to beat schools.

Now that all states are required to create data systems under NCLB — Texas was ahead of the curve on that one, at least initially — there is a ground-swell movement to determine how we should use of our collected data. Because data can be used.

For instance, a lot of people have raised the issue of students taking remedial courses as they enter college. New Mexico is able to track the information on remedial courses by number of students; what type of remedial couses they take; what was the ethnicity, gender and high school of the student; where they ended up in the higher education systems; and all this data by year, for the last eight years.

As Peter Winograd, who heads up the Office of Accountability in New Mexico, just said…  Without data, you’ve just got an opinion. Imagine if we actually used data to make decisions on curriculum on our state at the State Board of Education meetings. It really would minimize the infighting. Hopefully.

This data analysis is the next generation of No Child Left Behind, in my mind. It’s actually taking the data and use it drive policy questions. Right now Rep. Rick Miera of New Mexico is telling the group that New Mexico used to have a thousand bills to reform the education system. Everyone had an idea of what they wanted to change, but not one bill was based on actual tangible data, Miera said.

Now that all states are required to create data systems under NCLB — Texas was ahead of the curve on that one, at least initially — there is a ground-swell movement toward how we should use of our collected data. Because data can be used.

For instance, a lot of people have raised the question of students taking remedial courses as they enter college. New Mexico is able to track the information by number of students; what type of remedial couses they take; what was the ethnicity, gender and high school of the student; where they ended up in the higher education systems; and by year, for the last eight years.

Lousiana is another example. They track teachers by teacher preparation program. You graduate from a teacher prep program in Louisiana, and they start tracking the performance of your students. Then they match it back to your teacher prep program. What works? What doesn’t?

Imagine — when Texas is able to gather that information, and they will be able to do so in the next year or so — what decisions can be made. You suddenly know where curriculum is weak, whether alignment is off kilter and what the state or school district may have to do.

Who is with me?  I’m in a session with lobbyists from ATPE and TSTA, plus Rep. Howard.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain sent education surrogates to the NCSL convention.

Of course, it was education. Is there any other kind of policy? When Eduflack posted today that No Child Left Behind was going to be Bush’s legacy, I thought, “Duh. Of course it is.” I can’t think of any other policy area — outside the war, of course — where Bush’s policy agenda has had a broader impact.

I’m not going to run through every point each surrogate made, but I did want to highlight some rather unformulated thoughts on their luncheon presentations. Talking about it at dinner tonight, the comment was, “One has style and the other has substance.”

So which is which?

Linda Darling-Hammond has the substance. Darling-Hammond, who represented Obama, has an impeccable resume and a lot of credibility in the education community. She knew exactly where to pitch her suggestions to the audience today.

For instance, she referred to alternative certification programs as the “spray and pray” approach, drawing appreciative laughs from the audience, which was heavily pro-public education sitting in a luncheon underwritten by the nation’s largest teacher unions. Darling-Hammond’s agenda buzz words included free college tuition for long-term teachers; stronger professional development; a purposeful assessment system; and a major “reconceptualization” of what No Child Left Behind should mean.

The real question, of course, is, “How in the world will you pay for this?” On this, Darling-Hammond was the least specific, noting that the costs of dropouts drains $45 billion a year from the country and that half of that amount, reinvested in education, could make a tremendous difference. Just the fiscal note on the tuition bill alone — I would think — would probably boggle the mind.

I did pull up an LA Times article that pegs the cost of Obama’s entire plans at $130 billion a year.

Lisa Graham Keegan spoke for McCain. McCain is Keegan’s long-time mentor and championed her campaign for superintendent of instruction in Arizona. She has street cred in the NCSL community — having chaired some of the education policy initiatives as a member of the Arizona legislature — but is viewed with some suspicion among educators as a privatizer.

p>Keegan was far less specific in her remarks than Darling-Hammond. However, Keegan hit a consistent Republican note in her speeches, one that rarely referred to privatization directly but often echoes the classic pro-choice complaint that children should not be subjected to failing schools just because they live in a low-income neighborhood.

Keegan said McCain is extremely strong on shared standards, assessed equally, but he wants to revisit the definition of Adequate Yearly Progress. She also talked about “learning gain models,” which would indicate a system that both measured achievement and progress. Obama has suggested similar measures to fix No Child Left Behind in his recent speeches.

While Darling-Hammond suggested Obama had been working on an education plan for well over a year, his concerns have not been in sharp focus on education until his endorsements by major education groups.Keegan is not talking about new money for education. Instead, she speaks of redirecting current money to different initiatives. It would be easy to say “spend more money,” Keegan said, but the reality is that federal budgets will be as tight as state and local budgets.

I also found it interesting that Keegan distanced NCLB from Bush, saying that the Act was more an extension of the work of states at the time of its passage than an initiative created by the Bush administration.

 I’ll be at an early morning breakfast on… hold onto your hats!… taxes.

“Creating a Competitive Tax Climate in Your State.”

Hosted by the Tax Foundation, Council on State Taxation, Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana and Pelican Institute for Public Policy.

You know, the same weekend we were staying in Nashville for NCSL was the weekend Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock repeated their wedding vows in Nashville. They were in a bar where the Texas delegation was having drinks one evening … an evening when I was clearly asleep by 9.

I wouldn’t get half as excited for Anderson-Rock sighting (and who would? they’re already kaput.) as I’m going to get for a breakfast on taxation. I will be bummed, however, to miss my Austin Chamber Media Appreciation Event. Despite the fact this is the fifth one, I haven’t managed to make it to one yet. Although I am sure the chamber will never forget trying to remove me from the last chamber event I attended…which is truly another story.