Tom Emmer’s education reform agenda focuses on three main pillars: improve teacher and school accountability, address teacher ineffectiveness, and facilitate innovation within our current system.
“In the next few years, we need to make 50 years’ progress in reform, we need a 21st century education model for a 21st century economy. The challenge we face today isn’t about accounting or dollars spent, it’s a challenge to fundamentally change how we teach our kids to succeed in the modern world. I want to outline a vision for how to move Minnesota back on top not just in the U.S. but also internationally. We have one goal in our reform plan: improving educational outcomes for our students.” — Tom Emmer
Our children deserve to be fully prepared with the knowledge and skills to create their own bright futures, and we must give them every opportunity to succeed.
Now, more than ever, we find ourselves part of a truly global economy with workforce needs changing and businesses facing employee shortages in critical areas such as engineering, science and health care. However, the way we educate our children is based upon an outdated delivery model that has not made the necessary advances this new economy requires. As a result, America’s schools are falling behind those of other industrialized countries.
We can’t be economically competitive with other states and with the rest of the world unless we improve student achievement. That means improving education through long-overdue reforms, which is why we have laid out an ambitious education reform agenda: Improving Opportunities for Future Generations. Our vision for real reform focuses on three main pillars: improve teacher and school accountability, address teacher effectiveness, and facilitate innovation within our current system.
We must empower our education professionals, teachers and parents to direct the future of their schools. We must reward teachers and classrooms that are successfully preparing our children and change those teachers and classrooms that are failing. If our K–12 education fails, our children will fail. The simple truth is, we can redesign government to be more efficient than ever and we can create the business environment that will create more jobs than we could ever dream – but if we don’t have the next generation prepared to drive the economic engine, our efforts will have been for naught.
As Governor, Tom Emmer would be committed to real change and to real improvement for my kids and for all Minnesota’s children. Minnesota has been and remains the best place in the world to live, work and raise a family. With these education reforms we can ensure that it remains so for the coming decades.
