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Answers to Popular Education Emails
I’ve been swamped with email on education issues and want to consolidate my responses to a number of popular questions as I think it’ll give a better sense of what my positions are on your issues. I’m hearing about: Basic Education funding, including ensuring that we adequately fund our McCleary obligation. Funding and implementation of Initiative 1351 The…
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Budget Update and Thoughts on Teacher Compensation and Levy Reform
I write this on Tuesday April 21st. At this point I do not expect that the Legislature will agree on a budget before the regular session ends on Sunday April 26th. The Seattle Times published a lot of articles this weekend about the budget, and I’m structuring this newsletter around them. The first article in…
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House and Senate Budget Differences on K12
I’ll be posting a handful of high-level summaries of budget differences with the Senate over the next few days. As usual, K12 is my first post in this sequence. House Democrats are investing $3.2 billion more in K-12 education with this budget over the amount we spent in the last biennium, a 21% increase. People…
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High-Quality Early Learning Rocks
Low quality childcare is actually bad for children. Not “less good.” On the other hand, high quality opportunities can improve school readiness in low-income children by two years and make significant improvements in all kinds of non-academic indicators like incarceration rates, family income, etc. There is a ton of research in this area, and it…
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State budget battles and Cougar culture in Seattle at Civic Cocktail, Feb. 4
SEATTLE CHANNEL FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Jan. 22, 2015 Contact: Lori Patrick, Seattle Channel Communications (206) 733-9764, lori.patrick@seattle.gov State budget battles and Cougar culture in Seattle at Civic Cocktail, Feb. 4 WSU President Elson Floyd and state legislators Ross Hunter and Steve Litzow join the conversation SEATTLE –A contentious state legislative session and a conversation about…
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Lawmakers seek community input on state budget
Posted on January 5, 2015 Rep. Ross Hunter How would you solve Washington state’s $4.4 billion budget problem? That’s the central question Senator-elect Cyrus Habib (D-Kirkland) and Representative Ross Hunter (D-Medina) will be asking their constituents at a town hall meeting this Saturday, 10 a.m. at Redmond City Hall. Representative-elect Joan McBride (D-Kirkland) will also…
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Dire Future for State Budgets?
The Washington Post has an article today (or some recent day – I only read online) about the long-term pressures faced by state and local governments. The article compares growth in key revenue sources with growth in costs and projects a dire future. The title is “GAO: Without draconian cuts, states face decades-long fiscal crisis“.…
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WA Budget 2015-17: High Degree of Difficulty
When writing about the budget it’s important to share good news as well as bad. First the good: (it’s short) the revenue forecast picked up a little bit. The bad is that we face one of the most difficult budget cycles of my time in the Legislature, and perhaps worse than we’ve seen in many…
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Golden Crayon Award
The Early Learning Action Alliance gave me a “Golden Crayon” award for my efforts last session to pass the “Early Start” bill. The bill had a lot of moving parts, but the main idea was to focus on improving the quality of the childcare we have now so that we reap the benefits down the road in…
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Common Core Education Standards
This week I got a campaign questionnaire from a group I hadn’t heard of before about the common core standards and a few other educational issues, wanting my answers to a set of questions they posed. The group is Washington State Against Common Core so you can probably predict the direction they would like the answers to…