A group of teachers, students and parents gathered in the Pyle Center Thursday night to hear State Superintendent of Schools Elizabeth Burmaster discuss the No Child Left Behind Act. The law, passed into legislation in 2001, has caused a great deal of controversy within the state public school systems.
The intent of NCLB is to \ensure empowerment and give resources to needy children"" and ""pay attention to needy schools,"" said Burmaster. It does this through federal mandates and standardized testing to determine the progress of schools and their students.
Burmaster said there are many major issues with this law that are problematic for public education. She said the law is an issue of social justice, an economic issue and an ""issue of morality."" Ultimately, Burmaster argued the law threatened public education and therefore, ""democracy is threatened.""
Burmaster discussed the ways the state of Wisconsin can fight to initiate change. The community should being to come together, she said, and recognize what quality education is. Access, equity and accountability are what will make a quality education. She said these values are the tradition of education in Wisconsin and are what the community must use to fight the threat of the No Child Left Behind Act.
The public can achieve this, she said, by ""investing in schools"" to increase opportunities for all students. This, she said, will help in closing the gap in achievement that disadvantaged children have in public schools.
Burmaster also said, however, that because the law does exist, the state of Wisconsin must find a way to ""make the law work for us,"" while in the process, fighting for change. She argued the state needs to fight with resilience and ""sustain ongoing efforts to improve and achieve a lasting change.""
""We need to believe in this not because the federal government told us to, but because it is what we need to do,"" she said.
David Wasserman, an eighth-grade teacher at Wright Middle School, 1717 Fish Hatchery Rd., said ""I like what I heard but I don't know if the teachers that I teach with and I don't know if I myself feel like change is going to happen.""
Anthony Edge, a UW-Madison junior added, ""[Burmaster] touched on a lot of the issues that education students, that we are interested in and it's good to hear what is happening in our own state.\
