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DFL candidate outlines education agenda By Dennis Lien Saying education would be the top spending priority in his administration, he outlined a plan Thursday that he said would give public school teachers more help and responsibility as well as give students more opportunity. At the top of his list of initiatives is the controversial policy adopted eight years ago in the early years of the Bush administration. It requires states to assess basic skills if they want to receive federal funding for schools. Entenza said the state could scrap it after showing the Obama administration it's demonstrating adequate accountability and not lose federal money in the process. "We will replace it with one test, which is a real test based on what students are actually achieving," said Entenza, who's running against former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton and House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher in the Aug. 10 Democratic-Farmer-Labor primary. With 15 percent of teachers leaving the profession in their first year, he said he would reduce that exodus by upgrading teacher mentoring programs, providing new ones with better professional help. "It's a huge cost, because there is such huge turnover," he said. Entenza also said the state should do a better job of using technology to help students learn and should create a Web-based system of proven lesson plans and best-practices approaches for schools. In addition, he said |
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