MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - Democrat John Kerry says if he's elected president, he will push for 1 million more students to graduate high school within five years.

In a series of events this week, Kerry is challenging President Bush on one of the signature issues of his presidency - education. The Massachusetts senator voted for Bush's education policy known as No Child Left Behind, but now says the president has failed to back up the law with enough money to help schools raise academic standards.

On Tuesday, Kerry was focusing on the estimated 1 million to 1.25 million students who drop out each year. Kerry says Bush is ignoring the part of his law designed to help stem dropouts and that under current regulations, administrators can push lower-achieving students out of school to boost test scores.
The success of Kerry's pledge to increase graduation rates would be difficult to judge, since estimates on how many students drop out vary.

Kerry says more students would graduate if the federal government encouraged smaller schools and required them to improve graduation rates. He is proposing a national effort to align the standards of what students learn in school to what they're supposed to know when they get to college or work. And he is backing laws already on the books in some parts of the country that allow states to withhold driver's licenses of those who drop out.

Bush spokesman Steve Schmidt said the senator's criticism of No Child Left Behind is "another example of John Kerry saying one thing and doing another."

"John Kerry voted for No Child Left Behind legislation, but has turned against it and now criticizes it at every turn for purely political reasons," Schmidt said.

Kerry's campaign said he would pay for his education initiatives by repealing Bush's tax cuts for people making more than $200,000 a year. It would cost $100 billion over 10 years to fully fund No Child Left Behind, and Kerry's other proposals to stem drop outs would cost $4.5 billion over 10 years, they said.

On Tuesday, Kerry was scheduled to visit with at-risk students in the Minneapolis Youth Build program and then read to a kindergarten class in Albuquerque before leading a discussion of education with New Mexico Democrats and parents.

He planned to campaign in California later in the week.