Contact: Mike Myslinski at (408) 921-5769 or Claudia Briggs at (702) 595-9142
RENO – Hundreds of California teachers attending a California Teachers Association conference here were joined by Nevada educators today in a solidarity rally calling on Congress to vote no on the current reauthorization proposal for the federal “No Child Left Behind Act.”
David A. Sanchez, president of the 340,000-member CTA, and Douglas Bache, vice president of the 29,000-member Nevada State Education Association (NSEA), urged Congress to reject NCLB reauthorization changes that will hurt students, educators and our public schools. The proposal by U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-California, and supported by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco will only make a bad law worse, Sanchez said.
“The Miller-Pelosi ideas would only result in more unfair emphasis on test scores, make it harder to attract and retain teachers, and erode local control and employee rights,” Sanchez said. “California and Nevada’s teachers – and educators across the nation – want NCLB changes that improve student learning and support teachers. We oppose proposals that create punitive sanctions for the struggling schools that the law was designed to help.”
Sanchez also called on U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada – an open critic of the flawed law – to support changes in NCLB that improve student learning and support teachers.
“We urge Congressional leaders to reject the draft language currently proposed for the NCLB law and take the time to ‘get it right,’” said NSEA Vice President Bache. “Our members have been hampered enough by having to teach to the test and it’s time for our professional educators to be allowed to do the work they were hired to do, not teach to the test.”
“President Bush and Congress have broken their promise to fully fund the law, making NCLB a federally mandated burden on local school districts,” said Washoe Education Association President Ken Buhrmann. “The shortfall in promised federal funding now exceeds $56 billion nationwide and this is not acceptable.”
“No Child Left Behind is flawed legislation that impacts our students in a very negative way,” said Washoe Education Support Professionals President Cindy Quaglia. “It is time for the law to be changed, since lawmakers have the opportunity to do so. Now is the time to make this wrong a right.”
View Reno NCLB Rally TV Clip
More information on CTA’s campaign concerning NCLB is available at www.cta.org/issues/esea/.