“Our core commitment to education needs to be more than creating efficiencies among the various school districts; it must ensure our children learn to the best of their ability. Just as the Nemours Foundation does each day with student health, we must challenge old assumptions, if we are to deliver better results for our children and better performance from our schools.

I’ve talked with thousands of parents and teachers about how to improve education for our children, and the same answers emerge: We need to let Delaware’s dedicated and talented teachers teach. We need to get parents more involved. We need to push individual decisions down to the school level. We need to measure student progress throughout the year, not just at the end of the year. This year, under the leadership of Senate Education Committee Chair Dave Sokola and House Education Chair Terry Schooley, working with Lt. Governor Matt Denn and Secretary Lillian Lowery, we propose legislation that makes three critical changes:

First, it’s time to eliminate the Delaware Student Testing Program. We will replace it with a testing program that measures student progress over the course of a school year. Currently, my daughter gets her DSTP results when the school year is over. This does not help her learn and does not help her teachers adjust to her needs. It does not measure the progress of individual students or the excellence of any particular teacher. Our new system will offer far greater insight into what a student brings to class on the first day and what they need to learn so they can end the school year with the skills required to succeed.

Second, with money saved from moving investments from the back room to the classroom, we will reward excellence in education by paying the state’s highest-performing teachers more and better, reward truly great teachers in high-risk schools.

Third, we will offer greater flexibility to our local schools, so they can better solve problems and encourage them to be more innovative. In exchange for this freedom, districts will be held more accountable for results and will need to be more transparent in how they spend state money.

But education must not end with a diploma. To ensure our financial and economic foundation, while we better educate our children for a brighter future tomorrow, we must continue to educate our current workforce today and create an economic climate where businesses and employees can thrive across a range of industries.“

Oh…. the irony 7 years later….. I was tempted to insert  red  rebuttals to snark all the wayward actions  taken in the opposite direction from this vision, but… you don’t need me to see that…