Pawlenty: I love being governor

Governor Tim Pawlenty has ambitious plans for Minnesota education, but no plans for office outside of the state.

Pawlenty appeared on KARE 11 Sunrise Thursday to talk about education, but the topic of a national run was bound to come up. Murmurs that Pawlenty, a rising star in the G.O.P. nationally, would seek national office in 2008 were rekindled this week when John McCain's presidential campaign announced Pawlenty will appear in McCain's place at a weekend political convention in Michigan.

Pawlenty stressed that he is not running.

"No, people ask me that all the time, but I am sincere in saying I want to be governor of Minnesota. That's why I ran. We have a lot of good things we can do as governor," he said. "I'm just helping Senator McCain as a volunteer."

The governor has put education reform high on his agenda. In his State of the Sate address , Pawlenty called our educational system "obsolete," and said many students are "coasting, bored, and checked out."

"Bill Gates says we're preparing students for the citizenship and economy of forty years ago and we need to prepare them for the economy of the future," he said, adding, "We have gifted and talented kids who are doing well. We have some kids who, for understandable reasons, need some special accommodations," Pawlenty said. "But there are a lot of kids, not all, in between who are hot being as challenged as they could be ? particularly in high school."

"The system has to be redesigned. It is kind of a one size fits all system. We want it to be more rigorous, more relevant."

The centerpiece of Pawlenty's plan is a system that would reward student for doing college-level work in high school.

"Incentivizing them with scholarship money to take college-credit-earning classes while they are still in high school. Under our proposal high school students could earn up to a year of college credits while they are still in high school, plus we'd give them a scholarship that they could apply towards college if they got credits toward college during high school.

"Then for kids that that might not interest them, there are some other options as well. We want to increase the rigor. Four years of a foreign language if you're going to be in one of these new rigorous high schools. More math, more science, more things oriented towards technology and engineering."

The governor admits that the largely Democrat Legislature may not adopt all of his plans, but said he remains hopeful.

"There seems to be some bi-partisan support for the idea that we can improve our high schools in particular."

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