Category: Early Learning

Great New Report on WA State Preschool Program

The Learning Policy Institute, run by Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, released a report yesterday that talks a lot about the quality of Washington’s Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP), our state’s preschool program. The short summary:

  • The program is great.
  • It doesn’t serve enough kids, because being great is really, really expensive.

You never agree with everything in one of these reports, and I have some quibbles about parts of it. They are confused about what kids and parents need and draw a distinction between “childcare” and “preschool.” We offer ECEAP to 3 and 4 year old children. It’s a program that happens during the daytime. Mostly it’s a half-day program, which is very difficult for single parents to manage. (Half-day programs are crazy-making if you are employed or in school.)

Many (perhaps most) working parents need childcare that extends significantly beyond the hours offered by preschool programs. Some parents need care in evenings or on weekends. Almost all will need care in the summer when many preschool programs aren’t running. (More on summer learning loss in another post coming soon.) We spend hundreds of millions a year providing childcare subsidies to parents as a result of the welfare reform changes that happened in the mid-90s in the Clinton administration. We will need to do this regardless of our investment in preschool.

Washington thinks that improving the quality of this care is really important, and we’re investing in that as a state. The report is somewhat dismissive of childcare investments, and this won’t be adequate if we’re trying to improve Kindergarten readiness in any broad way.

There have been a number of news pieces covering this release:

NPR: What Good Preschool Looks Like: Snapshots From 4 States

Seattle Times: Washington’s preschool program praised as one of the best in national report

Education Week:  Here’s What High Quality Preschool Looks Like in Real Life

StreetInsider.com: New Learning Policy Institute Report Highlights Key Strategies for Achieving High-Quality Preschool (this is a weird source, but that’s the Internet for you.)

How to talk to your kids about the Orlando shooting

Time Magazine had a nice article today about how you might talk to your kids about the Orlando shooting. They suggest different messages for different age kids. The preschool one is pretty simple:

For pre-school kids: This is the only age which experts recommend trying to avoid the subject a little. Children younger than five tend to confuse facts with fears, says Harold Koplewicz of the Child Mind Institute, so limiting access to news and watching what you say is advisable. Answer questions, but carefully. “Remember, you don’t have to give them more details than they ask for.”

I’m personally struggling about how we as a society can have millions of weapons like this in the hands of people who are clearly unhinged. What are we thinking? almost a decade ago I sponsored a bill that allowed judges to take guns away from people who have been committed to mental institutions because they are a danger to themselves and all of the rest of us. This seems like a straightforward thing, but was surprisingly contentious. It turns out to have been one of the few gun safety bills passed in multiple decades. There is something wrong with us as a society that we cannot make balancing decisions about issues like this.

Home Visiting

The New York Times has a great article in the Magazine today by Paul Tough, the author of “Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why.” In it he talks about “Home Visiting,” one of the key strategies my agency and many others (including the United Way of King County) are employing to help get kids who start life pretty far from opportunity get on a better trajectory. These are pretty intensive programs that have to be done in very careful ways to work, but that are totally worth doing.

This job has got me focused on the pernicious effects of poverty much more than I thought it would. There are for sure painful management issues to deal with, there are the details of ensuring that kids are safe in thousands of child care facilities across the state and the need to focus on managing details of a budget that is almost 3/4 of a billion dollars a year, but the opportunity to make a difference in the trajectory of the life of a kid who would otherwise have been in deep trouble is pretty compelling.

 

At DEL we’re all about those results boss

We (the Department of Early Learning) published an outcomes report on the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (or ECEAP) last week. ECEAP is, despite its horribleness as an acronym, Washington’s pretty well-regarded preschool program. The Seattle Times analysis in the Education Lab part of the paper was pretty good. My favorite quote:

“The percentage of children ready for kindergarten after attending Washington’s subsidized preschool program exceeded the state average.” – Seattle Times Education Lab

This is what you want to read in a story about the comprehensive preschool you run. Even better would be “low-income children who attend Washington’s subsidized preschool program are all ready for kindergarten!” We’re pretty close, but have some remaining work to do, and some significant work in some areas.

To be eligible for ECEAP a family has to have an income less than 110% of the federal poverty level (FPL,) be on a school district IEP , have risk-factors related to school success or be involved in the child welfare system. For a family with one parent and two kids, that’s a little more than $22,000 per year. Only about 12% of Washington’s total population is below the poverty line (we are 16th best in the country.) Kids are more likely than all adults to be in poor families though, and 17% of Washington’s kids are below FPL, again the 16th best in the country.

We only serve about a third of the kids that are eligible due to their family’s income, mostly because we don’t have enough slots to do so. The Legislature passed a law about 5 years ago saying that these children are “entitled” to an ECEAP slot by 2020 and started to phase in enough capacity to serve all these kids. In the 2014-15 school year we added 1350 slots. This seems like a lot, but we need to add somewhere between 1,800 and 3,000 slots a year for the next four years (depends on your assumptions about how many kids will sign up) to make the goal.

At DEL we’re all about those results boss, and the results are pretty good:
  • After one year of ECEAP a higher percentage of low-income kids meet the kindergarten readiness expectations than do a sample of all kids, including high income kids. This is remarkable, though we have room to go to meet my goal of 90% all kids completely ready for kindergarten.
  • After two years of ECEAP, almost all of our kids are ready for kindergarten except in math, and we get almost 80% to that bar.

There are some clear policy implications, but also some significant caveats you should have reading these results.

  • First, the kids going to ECEAP are not a perfect sample of low-income kids. This means that you can’t just assume you’ll get the same results if you expand the program to cover more kids. Like all programs that are hard to get in to (there are not enough slots and we usually have waiting lists) the kids with more effective parents are more likely to be in the program. These kids are also more likely to do well in preschool.
  • Second, and something I’m pretty concerned about, our current ECEAP attendees are twice as likely to come from a two-parent family than a typical low-income kid is.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but mostly we think it’s because most of ECEAP classrooms are half-day programs. If you’re a single parent trying to work a half-day program is crazy-making and you don’t even consider it. It’s wicked hard to organize a transition from one program to another at lunchtime if you are working in the service industry, or anywhere else where you don’t control your schedule.

Another pretty significant caveat is that the readiness scores of ECEAP kids are measured in the spring by their classroom teacher. Most kids have some regression during the summer if they are not in some kind of organized program, and only 567 of our 10,000 slots run through the summer. We have some analysis work to do to understand this effect.

Caveats aside, these are great results. They lead us to some obvious conclusions.

  1. We need to focus more on math. This is true in ECEAP as well as across the board for all kids. We have some fun ideas and you’ll hear more about these from us as the next couple of months unfold.
  2. Two years of preschool is better than one, and is probably necessary to get many of the kids we’re concerned about on a trajectory that will work for them.
  3. We’ll need to be mostly full-day and extended day if we want to be functional for a typical low-income family with working parents.

You’ll see more analysis of the assessment done on all entering kindergartners that will show comparable data, including the summer fade-out.

 

Ross lobbying for budget

I worked hard to lobby Sen. Joe Fain for the Department of Early learning’s budget last week at a reception honoring the ten years since the creation of both the Department and Thrive Washington, our non-profit partner. Someone took a video which Sen. Fain was kind enough to share on YouTube.

He may have a different perspective on “satisfying” than you and I do, but his comment made me smile.

A Different Approach to Breaking the Cycle of Poverty

This is a super-interesting story from The Atlantic Monthly (driven by anecdotes) that raises a lot of interesting questions about how states administer federal childcare money, including how we set up the eligibility requirements in a world of scarce financial resources. (This is the world I live in.)

If you think about what we do as “childcare” you are interested in ensuring that only parents who are working in low-wage jobs get subsidized care. If you think about it as “education” you start thinking about ensuring that high-risk kids have access to free, high-quality early learning. I prefer the latter approach.

Washington has a mix of these two approaches. I had dinner at an event for Bellevue College with a BC student that grew up dealing with foster care and other craziness. She has a young child as a single mother and is working her way through the BC nursing program. Fortunately Bellevue College has a childcare program partly funded by student activity fees, because our program requires that she be in a “vocational” program that is shorter than one year instead of the nursing program that will put her firmly on the road to the middle class.

We should fix this.

Early learning director, former Eastside lawmaker Hunter confirmed by Senate

It’s always nice to hear positive comments about your work from the people on the other side of the bargaining table. Senators Hill and Litzow are quoted in this story about my confirmation in the Redmond Reporter.

Normally a Senate confirmation isn’t all that big a deal, but many of you may be aware there was a pretty high-profile non-confirmation of the Secretary of Transportation last week, so other cabinet officials were surprised when I had such an easy time of it.

Many Senators said nice things about me on the floor of the Senate. Some of them are even true. I’m thankful for all of it, and perhaps most thankful for all the stuff people made up. 🙂

Does Preschool “Crush” Children?

Erika Christakis’ article in this month’s Atlantic Monthly “The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids” has generated a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Slate’s Laura Moser asks “what’s the alternative” in her response in Slate this week.

Both articles are well worth reading. Christakis’ argument, that pre-school that is too focused on curriculum and “table tasks” is bad for kids is probably true, but just like the velocity of an object is only interesting when you consider the frame of reference of the observer (Einstein, “Special Relativity”, 1905) Moser points out that 75% of families have all adults working and don’t have much option but to use childcare of some kind or another.

Low-income families face an even tougher problem. According to Kids Count, a national effort of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, about 2/3 of families with children under 18 are headed by a single-parent. Since 1996, the federal welfare system has effectively required parents to work in order to receive benefits.  Washington provides childcare to about 50,000 – 70,000 kids as part of this system. If we’re going to require parents to work, we have to provide safe, reliable, and effective childcare in order to make that possible.

Continue reading “Does Preschool “Crush” Children?”

Only 56% of low-income kids get enough well-child visits

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington almost all (95%) of children have medical insurance. ALL low-income (below 300% of the federal poverty level) children have access as part of Apple Health for Kids.

This chart shows the performance of all the Apple Health plans at actually getting low-income kids to visit the doctor on the recommended schedule. 56% of infants received the typical schedule of well-child visits. As you can see we are both significantly below the national average (61.55%,) and more importantly totally pathetic in an absolute sense. You can read the full report here.

Why is the early learning guy writing about this you ask? Well… if our goal is to have all kids being ready for kindergarten by age five, then the earlier we can provide appropriate care for a child who’s experiencing a developmental delay the more likely we are to be able to have the best possible outcome. The pediatrician is the person most likely to discover a concern and provide the family with free options, but this won’t work if the kid doesn’t appear in the office.

As part of our Essentials for Childhood effort to coordinate the activities of the Department of Health and the Department of Early Learning we’re looking into problems like this and finding ways to work together to coordinate services for children in Washington.

I’m particularly frustrated by this one because we pay the managed care organizations to coordinate this care. My personal thought is that we don’t pay the plans at all if they don’t get the kids to show up, but there is probably a more nuanced approach to solving the problem that will work better. We’re working on this.

DEL is Hiring!

The Department of Early Learning is hiring to build an internal research and analysis team. We are spending way too much on consultants to do statistical analysis and research on proposals that we should be able to do in-house. DEL is building a small team of analysts to help us focus our work on the data about what works. We posted a job for a research team manager. Click here to see the details. You should have a background in statistical analysis of social service or education programs and be super-smart.

The listing is for work in Olympia, but we are considering location the research team in King County if that makes more sense. I agree that the commute is painful.

Please forward this to anyone you think would be interested and competent.