Burmaster testifies at NCLB hearing in Madison

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Elizabeth Burmaster testified at a hearing of the Commission on No Child Left Behind, an independent, bipartisan effort to improve the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and ensure it is a more useful force in closing the achievement gap that separates disadvantaged children and their peers. Former Wisconsin Governor and Health and Human Services Secretary, Tommy Thompson, and former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes chaired the hearing on June 9 at Monona Terrace in Madison.

“Throughout our state over the last five years, we have made a New Wisconsin Promise to ensure a quality education for all our children,” Burmaster testified. “Like never before, our state has united on an educational mission: raising the achievement of all students, and closing the achievement gap between economically disadvantaged students, students of color, and their peers.

“The principles of the No Child Left Behind Act, of implementing high-quality state assessments, establishing accountability for results at the school and district level, ensuring highly qualified teachers are in every classroom, and public reporting of results, are sound principles for improving education which our New Wisconsin Promise reflects. However, the prescriptive nature in which those principles are delineated in the federal law has taken the sovereignty of public education from state and local school districts. Ensuring state and local control within the existing federal law, and making critical changes through reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), can ensure the values and principles on which the law was built remain, but return the responsibility of ensuring a quality education system for all children back to state and local officials.

“While citizens throughout our state do not all agree with the provisions and requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, they do understand Wisconsin’s history, our tradition of equity and investing in all our children, and the promise of a bright future through quality education.”

The hearings are intended to help inform the Commission’s upcoming recommendations on how NCLB’s school improvement, corrective action, and restructuring provisions have impacted schools which have not made Adequate Yearly Progress. Other witnesses who testified at the hearing included Gene Hickok, Senior Policy Director, the Dutko Group; John Ashley, Executive Director, Wisconsin Association of School Boards; Yvonne Caamal Canul, Director, Office of School Improvement, Michigan Department of Education; and Cheryl Clancy, Principal, Kosciuszko Middle School, Milwaukee.

Enacted in 2002, NCLB requires states to set up a series of interventions for consistently struggling schools, including initial targeted assistance, providing options for students attending schools labeled in need of improvement, and an escalating list of sanctions for those schools that consistently fail to meet adequate yearly progress targets in subsequent years. A recorded webcast of the hearing is available at www.nclbcommission.org.

Last updated on 6/12/2006