Issues on which I agree with Donald Trump, volume 1

This is a small set. In general, he has a world view to which I do not subscribe. (In fact, I often find it terrifying.)

In the past few days he has tweeted a lot about Amazon.com. An article on Bloomberg.com about this has two paragraphs that point out one of the few policy agreements we do have – sales tax collection fairness.

Trump supports bipartisan bills in Congress that would allow states to mandate collection of sales taxes because U.S. policy should ensure that “those who are competing with Amazon are on a level playing field,” White House spokesman Raj Shah said Thursday.

In 2017, Amazon, which also supports the bills, began collecting sales tax in states that levy them, but the company doesn’t charge shoppers sales tax when they buy from third-party vendors that sell on the site. Those sales make up about half the company’s volume.

If states are going to rely on sales taxes to pay for education, medical care, the justice system, environmental cleanups, foster care, etc. then we should insist that the taxes be collected fairly so that everyone pays their fair share. In Washington this comes up a lot because we don’t have an income tax, making the fairness of sales tax collection more crucial. Places this comes up:

  • Internet sales. If you buy things from vendors located out of state it is difficult for states to require them to collect the sales tax. The customer still owes it, but collection is not possible after the fact. There is a multi-state consortium that Washington is a member of that has coordinated action by the states to simplify their collection rules to make a national system feasible. We are pursuing legislation in Congress (Streamlined Sales Tax) and challenging a Supreme Court decision from 1992 based on the widespread availability of services that easily calculate the tax.
  • Boats and RVs. Many, many people come up with amazingly clever schemes to buy a large boat or RV out of state to avoid paying sales tax, then try and hide it from the Dept. of Revenue. There are bills presented every few years in the Legislature to exempt rich people from paying taxes on mega yachts with arguments about getting minor additional servicing revenue in ports. My research led me to conclude that any new revenue would be swamped by small increases in avoidance.
  • You live here, you gotta register your car here. Lots of people try to avoid this to avoid paying the sales tax. Sigh.
  • Large art purchases. Many people buy art from out of state and have it shipped here, not knowing that they need to pay sales tax on it. Periodically the Dept. of Revenue subpoenas the sales records of large art dealers and contacts the owners about the taxes due. This is actually real money.

Actual legislation in Congress would be the best way forward as we would have a simpler to administer sales tax system. Failing that, a win in the Supreme Court would let states require collection with today’s complex rules. It’s still doable. One way or the other we need to make this change.

Great Seattle Times Article on Racial Disproportionality in Education

The Seattle Times has a great article in today’s paper on racial disproportionality in outcomes for kids in the Seattle School District. The article talks about efforts to change things and makes a point that well-meaning approaches if not carried out with rigor and consistency over time don’t have much impact. The data series in the article starts at 3rd grade. I totally agree that the district needs to have a substantial strategy focused on improving outcomes for children who start out behind. The Times should keep digging into the effectiveness of what the district does, and also into the effectiveness of all the districts in the area, all of whom have the same problem, albeit to greater or lesser degrees.

What the entire article misses is the most effective long-term way to approach the problem. The white kids in Seattle are much more likely to be more economically advantaged than children of color, and are consequently much more likely to have access to high quality preschool.  The chart to the left shows the scores in the Seattle School District on an assessment Washington State does for every entering Kindergartner broken down by race and ethnicity. These kids are 5 years old and you can see significant differences in their development.

You can play around with the data and look up your own district by clicking on the chart, or clicking here, which takes you to an OSPI website with the full data set for all the kids in the state. There are some weirdnesses with the data based on the rollout schedule of all-day kindergarten which tilts the data to underreport higher income kids. This will work itself out in the next few years.

Only about 28% of kids below 110% of the federal poverty level (about 20% of the three and four-year-olds in the state) will meet all six metrics on the WAKIDS assessment. If they have two years of ECEAP, Washington’s high-quality state-run preschool program, about 67% will meet that same metric. I’m using slightly different measures than the chart above from OSPI so the numbers are not directly comparable. This is because I’m writing this on a Sunday and don’t have access to all the data in the office to make them line up, but they’re similar.

In the chart to the right you still see racial disparities (that we are working on eliminating) but you can see that “Black 4-year-olds” do better than “All 4-year-olds.” This is black 4-year-olds who are below 110% of the federal poverty level and had ECEAP, compared to all income 4-year-olds who might or might not have had preschool. This is the power of high quality preschool. You can see the entire 2016-17 outcome report for ECEAP here.

What if low-income kids could have the same access to high-quality preschool that their higher-income friends do? Seattle is embarked on a journey to find out and I think it will make a tremendous difference. This is not a cheap strategy – but spending the money early can result in long-term savings in special education and other costs to the system presented by kids who are not ready. The anecdotal stories we hear from kindergarten teachers who all of a sudden get a wave of kids who are all ready to succeed are both uplifting and helpful. They say that they can teach to the entire class, without having some kids two or more years behind other kids. Everyone does better.

You can get buried in this data and lose perspective easily. If all you do is look at costs to the system you can forget the moral imperative we have to ensure that all kids have access to what they need educationally to be successful in the world. Fortunately the data wonks and the moral imperative people come to the same outcome – we should invest in more high-quality preschool for kids that need it.

Seattle (and all the other school districts in the state) should absolutely focus on what they can do to ensure that outcomes for kids are not pre-determined by the race and family income of kids entering the system. I particularly agree with the no-expulsion policy.

 

Hard to imagine…

In the Chronicle of Social Change Jerry Milner, Donald Trump’s appointment to the federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees federal child welfare funding and policy, speaks about his priorities in running the agency and improving outcomes for kids. The hard to imagine part is that I agree with almost all of his proposals, at least as they are described in this article..

He starts with an observation about how child welfare systems work today and how we have to get ahead of the game.

Right now, we typically respond only after families have lost much of their protective capacity and children have been harmed. We need to strive to create environments where they get the support they need before the harm occurs, which, in my mind, calls for a re-conceptualization of the mission and functioning of child welfare systems. Tweaking what we already have in place won’t solve the problems.

I totally agree, and the design of the new agency I head (The Department of Children, Youth, and Families) is structured around the same idea – that we should focus on preventing children and families from experiencing the kind of trauma that leads child welfare agencies to need to remove children for their own safety.

It’s worth reading the short interview. In his former life he ran Alabama’s foster care system and did interesting work in President Bush’s Children’s Bureau.

His level of oversight is narrower than I envision our agency embarking on – we are also responsible for the early learning system in Washington. This lets us invest in some of the key experiences in a young child’s life that build resilience and the ability to deal with some trauma, and in many cases actually reduces the trauma a family may experience by providing supports.

I’m also interested in his take on efforts at the federal level to re-structure the funding stream used for most child welfare work so that it more stable. Currently if we’re successful in reducing the number of children in foster care (say, by spending money on programs that provide support for them…) our level of funding goes down. This is super complicated to address, but something that needs to happen. I look forward to working with our federal delegation on this effort, and it’s good to know we have support from the administration.

Flexible funding, thoughtfully applied, will allow us to be a proactive rather than reactive system, which is key to preventing maltreatment, and key to strengthening families.

McCleary Almost Done

The latest decision from the court is available here.

The slide deck this particular image is from is available here. This was used in the November 16, 2017 House Appropriations Committee meeting and is another excellent product from Jessica Harrell, the education expert serving Appropriations – someone I depended on for many years.

It’s pretty exciting to see the progress being made towards adequacy and equity in the education funding system. This isn’t an optimal solution from my point of view, but it’s vastly better than what the system looked like in 2002 when I got peeved enough about it to run for office.

It was worth 13 years of my life to get this done. We now have full-day Kindergarten in every school in the state, not just the ones in rich suburbs that could afford it. Class sizes in K-3 are much more reasonable. Schools have enough money to cover reasonable transportation costs and the cost of materials and supplies they need to run a school. Most particularly, salaries are addressed so that there isn’t a huge disparity between districts.

I have quibbles about the details. It’ll need tweaking over time. It’s half of the state budget, so the Legislature should pay attention.

Dosage Matters for Washington’s Preschool Kids!

Our goal as an agency is to get 90% of Washington’s children to be “ready for kindergarten,”  and to have race and family income not be predictors of readiness.

About 20% of Washington’s children are in families at or below 110% of the federal poverty level (FPL,) or about $24,000 for a family of four.  These young people face many challenges in life and are a key part of any rational economic strategy for the state, as well as being part of the paramount duty enshrined in Washington’s constitution. The large gap seen in our kindergarten entry assessment between kids below 110% and their more advantaged peers persists through their entire experience in the K12 system, and the rest of their lives.

We’re looking at a number of ways to help these kids get ready for kindergarten. The most effective in national data and in Washington is high-quality preschool. Without that investment, we estimate that about 28% of this group will arrive in kindergarten meeting our benchmark for kindergarten readiness. 28% isn’t 90%.

Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. Say – ice cream. When it comes to high-quality preschool experiences – not so much. Dosage matters. There are three major components of “dosage,” the amount of preschool a kid gets.  Length of day, number of years, and length of year.

ECEAP today is mostly a half-day program – about 2 ½ to 3 hours. Most national research suggests that a full-day program is much more successful in getting kids ready for kindergarten.[1] There are other reasons full-day makes a lot of sense, which I’ll cover later.

We also have strong data supporting high quality preschool for both three and four year olds.

  • After one year of ECEAP, about 55% are ready when we measure in June. When we measure in the fall the number falls to about 35%. We attribute this falloff to both to summer learning loss, a problem well explored in the literature[2]and some testing differences between ECEAP and
  • A small fraction of kids start when they are three, getting two years of ECEAP. 69% of those kids are ready for kindergarten. 69% is a lot closer to 90% than 55% is.

Only a very small fraction of kids in ECEAP have summer programming, and it’s too new for us to have enough data to evaluate the effect. We’re super-interested in figuring out how to prevent the large drop of scores over the summer, and this year’s budget includes funds for a reasonable experiment to measure the effect of providing the service all summer. This would inform future investment decisions.

One of my particular concerns about ECEAP is that we’re not getting to the kids at the highest risk. Over 60% of the families below 110% of the federal poverty level (FPL) are headed by single parents, but only 42% of ECEAP families are. There are lots of potential reasons for this, but the most likely is that a half-day program is crazymaking for single parents. What are you going to do in the middle of the day – tell your boss you need time off to switch your kid from one place to the other?

We don’t have another intervention that works this well for getting kids ready for kindergarten, and if we’re serious about ensuring that kids from low income families have the same chance to succeed in school as their friends that are born closer to opportunity then we have to design the preschool experience so that it actually works for Washington families. Governor Inslee’s ECEAP budget proposal in front of the Legislature right now:

  • Continues to expand ECEAP, but with almost all full and extended-day slots. Washington law says that all kids below 110% FPL will be entitled to a slot in the fall of 2020, and Governor Inslee’s budget calls for a significant expansion in the next two years so that we’re not scrambling to try to do it all at once in the next budget cycle.
  • Funds a substantive experiment in summer programming so we can determine which particular model works best to reach our kindergarten readiness goals.
  • Continues eligibility for both three and four year old children, because without this we are unlikely to make our 90% goal and will be living with an opportunity gap for the next generation of kids, something we think is morally repugnant.

In one of my favorite turns of phrase this year, it’s pretty clear from national data that kids really need to spend more time each day in the somatosensory bath[3] of the high-quality preschool and intervention services that ECEAP provides. Research is emerging that indicates more time in high quality preschool each day equals better results for the kids who need it most.[4]

So in short, dosage matters and more is better for ECEAP. Some questions we’re still exploring in order to best steward the public funds in our trust while getting the best outcomes for kids:

  • What is the best combination of length of day, number of years, and type of summer programming to get the most children ready for kindergarten?
  • Which children benefit the most from the three elements above?
  • ECEAP is more than just classroom time. The variety of family supports and health coordination the program provides are a critical part of its success. Not all families need every type of support available. What types and levels of services each family needs, and how to determine that efficiently, is a question we took up in our Family Support Pilot and will continue to examine.
  • What other factors are affecting kindergarten readiness: availability of dual-language instruction, family involvement in various parts of the child welfare system, seamless transitions from effective early intervention programs like Early Head Start, ESIT, and home visiting to high quality preschool programs like ECEAP?

We don’t have a perfect formula for dosage yet, but we have the tools to devise a good one. Most importantly, we need to support and expand ECEAP in a thoughtful and effective manner. I’ll be writing more about how DEL plans to implement ECEAP expansion in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that post.

[1] (Kenneth B. Robin, 2006)

[2] Wikipedia “Summer learning loss” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_learning_loss

[3] Somatosensory “of or relating to sensations that involve parts of the body not associated with the primary sense organs.” James Heckman writes about the importance of the somatosensory bath of early childhood here: http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR37.5/ndf_james_heckman_social_mobility.php

[4] RAND 2016, “Informing Investments in Preschool Quality and Access in Cincinnati”, http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1461.html

McCleary Resources

The League of Education Voters recently published a page of resources for understanding the McCleary decision and how it impacts school funding. It’s a reasonable collection of items.

http://educationvoters.org/2016/07/22/mccleary-resources/

In addition, I would recommend that you look at some of the posts I’ve done over the past few years on school funding and the Supreme Court. There are a number of candidates this year that are arguing that the court has overstepped its boundaries – getting “too big for it’s britches” might be a way of saying it in the vernacular. I totally disagree, and my argument is here.

Constitutional Crisis? Not so much.

My discussion of how the remaining part of the problem should be solved is on the front page of my website, or you can find it here.

McCleary Phase II

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.

McCleary Phase II

The Legislature has made significant progress toward fully funding basic education. In the last three years, we’ve reduced K-3 class sizes, funded all-day kindergarten, and provided kids adequate materials and supplies for their classrooms. But there’s one critical and final component we must deal with – teacher compensation and local levies. The chart below should start to explain the problem.

Average Salaries for TeachersThis chart shows how teacher salaries have been constructed since 1996. The gray portion at the top is the part provided by local levies, not by the state.

Teacher salaries aren’t the only cost. School districts also pay classified staff and administrators, and the split between state and local funding is even greater for these categories than it is for teachers.

There are lots of reasons for this. Some make sense given how the system works and some are the result of the legislature skipping cost of living (COLA) increases during the recent recession. When the Legislature doesn’t fund COLAs, but the local district wants to fund them (in order to actually be able to hire competent teachers) they use money raised in local levies to do so. If it was just extra, above and beyond what is needed to actually be able to hire, this would be expensive, but not a constitutional problem. However, every study that we’ve done shows that they’re paying just about what the market needs them to pay to be able to hire and retain competent employees. The court ruled this unconstitutional because it’s the State’s responsibility to adequately fund basic education, and we’re shirking that duty by foisting part of the cost on local districts. Continue reading “McCleary Phase II”

Ross’ Statement on August McCleary Order

funded class sizeThe Supreme Court released a new order in the McCleary case this morning, holding the state in contempt and fining it $100,000 per day (to pay for basic education) until it resolves the remaining issues, including both the unconstitutional dependence on local levies to pay for basic education personnel costs and the cost of construction of new classroom space. They also expressed concern about the pace of the phase-in of class size reductions.

It’s important to know that the phase-in plan in the budget we passed this year completely pays for the class size reductions called for in the McCleary order. The court recognized the work done by the Legislature in funding class size reductions, but seems to be concerned about the phase-in of lower class sizes.  There is some confusion in how the cost of this investment is described in various documents, and we will work with the court to clarify this. The attached chart shows the level of funded class size and those recommended by the task force the court refers to.

House Democrats proposed a joint process to resolve the personnel cost issue with the Senate and Governor’s office and passed legislation (HB 2239) putting the process in place on June 26th. The Republicans in the Senate refused to take up the bill or offer any alternative.

I share the court’s concern about finalizing the plan sooner rather than later. Governor Inslee has called a meeting of all four caucus leaders for Monday to create a public process to resolve these issues expeditiously.