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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. …
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Town Hall Meetings Are Hard – But Politicians Should Do Them
In my 13 years in the Legislature I probably hosted over a hundred town hall meetings all over the 48th district. Sometimes they were cavernously empty. Sometimes they were like what former Rep. Israel describes below – raucous. Sometimes this was organic, like the time my Republican seatmate Rodney Tom and I hosted a joint…
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Mama Yaya meets Governor Inslee and Results Washington
Amelia Cruz, the owner and operator of Mama Yaya’s Child Care in Lacey was our guest at the Results Washington meeting yesterday. Results Washington is responsible for implementing Governor Inslee’s focus on lean management and continuous improvement. We review progress on key indicators of progress in outcomes. In this specific case we were looking at…
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Tranparency Provides Clarity
Sorry for the worst headline ever. Click here for the video above. This article in the Huffington Post from Allan Golston, President of US Programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation touches on an important topic – the power of the right information at the right time to help people make life-changing decisions. In…
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Censorship for Preschoolers?
I got a letter last week from an organization opposed to censorship. They were concerned about some language in one part of our “Early Achievers” rating system for childcare quality that has led some providers to believe that we will deduct points from their score if they have the “wrong” books on their shelves. The…
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Home visiting in Chinese!
And Vietnamese… Frank Ordway (DEL Assistant Director) and I met with a great group of home visitors last week at the Chinese Information and Service Center (CISC) in Seattle. We are the tall guys at the back of the group. They run a program jointly funded by DEL and King County United Way called “Parent-Child…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
