Author: Ross Hunter

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.

DEL Presence at Young Child Expo in Spokane

The Young Child Expo in Spokane was another opportunity to meet more of the participants in the wildly diverse early learning field in Washington. Also a great opportunity to practice speaking extemporaneously, which is what happens when you show up and the sponsors of an event have you on the agenda without you knowing it…

Last week, DEL licensing and members of the ECEAP team represented DEL at the Young Child Expo in Spokane. The table received a lot of attention and exhibitors feel it was a great success. Photographed left to right is Director, Ross Hunter, Liliya Aleksandrov (Regional Administrative Assistant-Spokane), and Nicole Lor (ECEAP Pre-K Specialist).

Other helpers at the expo include Sonya Stevens, Kim O’Brian, Lisa Hall, Judy Davis, Karen Cole, Susan Nelson and Karen Christiansen (Spokane Licensing team members).

Tennessee study on preschool – interesting?

Vanderbilt University just released a large study on the pre-school program in Tennessee. It’s an interesting study and I scrambled to find out enough about Tennessee’s program to respond intelligently to press inquiries on it.
My conclusion – Tennessee has focused on access over quality and they are showing some improvements in outcomes for kids (cutting the rate of repeating kindergarten in half, compared to kids not getting the pre-school program) but are not showing large results, nor are they retaining the results through elementary school.
This is different than the results we’re seeing from our program (ECEAP) in Washington, which shows strong results and is retaining those results through 5th grade. (WSIPP study results here.)We can do significantly better with targeted improvements to the system.
The Seattle Times: Latest results from major study shows preschool isn’t always beneficial
“It’s not a universal finding — a 2014 study of Washington state’s preschool program for low-income children found that gains persisted through fifth grade.

Preschoolmatters.org: An Early Look at Early Education in Tennessee

There are important lessons for Tennessee and the nation here.  If Tennessee is to get value for its pre-K dollar, it must ensure that programs are of sufficient quality.  An accountability and continuous improvement system is a prerequisite for quality, as is adequate funding for those being held accountable.

Nice article about my new gig on Thrive’s website

Thrive LogoThrive Washington is a public-private partnership focusing on ensuring very young children in Washington get the best start possible. Their web site is a great resource.

They wrote a nice article about my new job as the Director of Washington’s Department of Early Learning.