Issue Position: Education - Elementary & Secondary Education - Education Reform

Issue Position

Senator Franken wants to make sure that Minnesota's kids get the best education possible. As a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, he is active in the Committee's efforts to improve our education laws, including No Child Left Behind.

Senator Franken believes that one of the fundamental problems with the way the No Child Left Behind law works now is that it's led schools to devote a lot of classroom time to teaching students how to take multiple choice tests -- leaving little time to teach important skills like critical thinking and teamwork, or subjects like music and art that keep kids engaged in school.

Instead of forcing schools to focus on a single high-stakes test at the end of the school year, Senator Franken wants to give them the flexibility to integrate tests into a continuous process of improvement. When No Child Left Behind was passed, parents thought the tests would be used to make sure their kids were learning. But since test scores don't come out until after kids are out of school, and don't provide teachers with timely or individualized feedback that they can use to help kids improve, these tests are basically autopsies. They don't help schools help kids learn.

As part of testing reform, Senator Franken is eager to see a move towards measuring student growth with assessments. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools are held accountable based on how many students meet a certain academic achievement bar. For example, schools get credit (or get identified as failures) depending on how many of their 5th grade students test at a 5th grade level. That means that schools don't get credit for moving a 5th grader from reading at a 2nd to 4th grade reading level -- a clear success -- but they do get credit if a student enters 5th grade ahead of her peers and just maintains that educational level. Senator Franken believes that we need to move beyond this approach and instead measure student growth. As Congress reforms No Child Left Behind, Senator Franken believes we need to make sure tests are a measure of progress towards a goal, instead of the goal itself.

Senator Franken believes that good principals are key are to a successful education system. He introduced the School Principal Recruitment and Training Act with Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to make sure that our schools have strong leaders so that our kids can succeed.

In addition, Senator Franken believes it's important to address the needs of students who face the greatest challenges, and are most at risk. He is working to provide funding for neglected Indian schools across the state, to help more low-income children get school meals, and to ensure that foster children, who often have very little stability in their lives, are not forced to move from school to school as they move between foster homes.

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