Higher Ed Utah

(SL Tribune) – The Salt Lake business community has some big ideas to improve education in Utah.

State-funded optional preschool for at-risk kids.

Statewide optional all-day kindergarten.

Giving the ACT to all students.

And setting goals of 90 percent of sixth-graders and ninth-graders reading and doing math at grade-level.

Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce leaders spent Tuesday discussing the draft proposals — which are part of the chamber’s statewide Prosperity 2020 movement — with the Governor’s Education Excellence Commission. In coming months, the chamber will attempt to work with lawmakers to set some of its ideas into motion, said Richard Kendell, a chamber advisor and former Utah Commissioner of Higher Education.

“It’s very important to business,” said Lane Beattie, chamber president and CEO. “It is our future and if we don’t address it now we will lose that future.”

Read the entire article at sltrib.com.