Early Learning | Press

Child care workers in U.S. averaged $18,820 in 2006

05.01.2008 | Seattle Post-Intelligencer | Child care workers typically earn less than locker-room attendants and service-station workers, pulling in $18,820 a year in 2006, according to a report released Thursday. In Washington, child care workers fared a little better, as their average salary was $19,710 in 2006, according to data released by the American Federation of Teachers. | Read

Gates Sr. touts early-learning programs: Philanthropist says current system is failure, disaster

04.19. 2008 | The Bellingham Herald | Philanthropist Bill Gates Sr., father of the Microsoft co-founder, called on Whatcom County business, government and education leaders Friday to direct a major reform of early-learning programs. | Read

In Our View: More Learning

04.16.2008 | Vancouver Columbian | Justifiable demands for improved quality of public education will continue to reverberate fruitlessly until a stark confession is made: Students in Washington state and across America are not spending enough hours and enough days in classrooms. | Read

State's Department of Early Learning paying dividends

04.11.2008 | Longview Daily News  | Washington lawmakers made early childhood education a high priority beginning in 2006, with the creation of state Department of Early Learning. More than a dozen programs dealing with early childhood development were assigned to the new department. The Legislature was betting that bringing programs under a single, cabinet-level umbrella would improve the effectiveness of the state's efforts to help Washington's youngest citizens succeed. | Read

Seattle “pay-for-k” a cautionary tale for other states

04.07.2008 | New America Foundation - Early Ed Watch | Rounds up progress - and backsliding - in Minneapolis toward universal full-day kindergarten. Seattle Public Schools get a mention as a cautionary tale. | Read

WA Childcare Advocates Seek Advice from Finland, England

03.10.2008 | Washington News Service | Juggling preschoolers and paychecks isn't as hard for families in some countries as it is for Americans. So, a group from Washington went to Finland and England recently, to see what they could learn about those countries' cultures and priorities. They found that taxes are high there, but tax dollars are used to cover costs of early learning and college, family leave, and healthcare -- expenses that most Americans pay on their own. | Read

Improving and Rating Our Local Child-Care Choices

03.09.2008 | Kitsap Sun | Where's a good day-care? That's probably one of the most frequent — and important — questions asked by newcomer families in Kitsap County, or by families where a stay-at-home parent is returning to the workforce. But it also can be one of the most difficult to answer. Personal referrals from a friend are a possibility, but sometimes, for various reasons, they're not a good fit; or possibly, they have no openings. So where does a parent go for advice? | Read

Child-care bill a new kind of law for the private sector

03.05.2008 | Seattle Times | The child-care bill in the state Senate, House Bill 2449, is an ingenious creation. It places the workers and managers in most private child-care centers in a bargaining group with others in the area. There will be a vote on union representation, and if a majority of those voting vote yes, the whole group, bosses and workers alike, will be in the union. The union will bargain with the state over payment per child, and will negotiate a fee for itself. | Read

With teacher turnover high, Vancouver schools shift recruiting effort to attract idealists

03.02.2008 | The Columbian | Washington state school districts are struggling to retain the teachers for whom retirement is still decades away. State schools Superintendent Terry Bergeson wrote in her five-year strategic plan that Washington’s attrition rate for new teachers is higher than the national average. “Lower paying districts have particular difficulty attracting and retaining teachers,” Bergeson wrote. The result, she said, is that “lower-income and minority students often don’t have equal access to the best-prepared instructors.” | Read

Washington Childcare Centers Explore Right to Organize

03.05.2008 | Washington Public News Service | It's a new twist on unionizing. Instead of workers negotiating with employers, child care centers and their workers want collective bargaining rights with the state. A bill aiming to allow that is on the Senate floor this week. Washington pays a subsidy to help poor families get child care, but care providers say it's not enough to cover their costs or retain qualified employees. | Listen

Tacoma School Board agrees to fund free full-day kindergarten

02.29.2008 | The News Tribune | If you want smarter high school graduates, you’d better start feeding students bigger doses of reading, writing, math and even coloring right from the start, Tacoma school officials believe. So starting this fall, free all-day kindergarten will be on the menu at every public school in the city. | Read

More day cares may unionize: Bill would allow workers to organize at state-backed centers

02.28.2008 | Everett Herald | Susan Torngren knows there's much more to looking after kids than feeding them and changing diapers. After 25 years as a child-care provider, she said, it still remains one of the most neglected professions. That's why she supports a bill moving through the Legislature that would enable licensed child-care centers that take state money to care for low-income children to join unions and bargain with the state for more money. | Read

Grant brings White Center initiative a step closer to quality child care

02.20.2008 | Seattle Times | After more than a year of planning, the high-profile effort for quality child care in White Center is about to get off the ground. Thrive by Five, a public-private partnership, today announced the first $12 million in grants for the White Center Early Learning Initiative, including $7 million to build a new early-learning center in White Center's Greenbridge community. | Read

Support education programs that boost working families

02.17.2008 | Seattle Times | We all know education pays. It is the foundation of prosperity for most working families. The lack of an education is a factor in the rapidly growing income inequality in our state. As the educational-achievement gap widens between higher- and lower-income workers, so does the income gap. To begin erasing these disparities, more low-income working adults need to gain the education and skills necessary to compete for higher-wage jobs and prosper in our local economy. | Read

Nurturing human capital

02.17.2008 | Seattle Times | In the 19th century, industrialization swept the world. Many European nations expanded their welfare states but kept their education systems exclusive. The U.S. tried the opposite approach. American leaders expanded education and created the highest-quality work force on the planet. That quality work force was the single biggest reason the U.S. emerged as the economic superpower of the 20th century. That progress stopped about 30 years ago. | Read

Head Start: Raising Standards

02.08.2008 | Seattle Post-Intelligencer | During the past year, Congress and President Bush raised the standards for Head Start. That decision threatens to leave a Washington state program for young children even further behind the national model. With a little flexibility, though, establishing and funding a state Head Start will strengthen the academic and social foundations for thousands of lower-income children. | Read

Good education is key to everything

01.31.2008 | Everett Herald | Real estate professionals have proven time and again what you already know -- strong schools make for stronger home values. If your home is a major investment for you, then schools should be, too. | Read

WSU program gets nearly $1 million from Gates Foundation

12.19.2007 | Tri-City Herald | The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $967,000 grant to expand a project teaching basic skills to Spanish-speaking child care providers. The idea is to give Spanish-speaking child care providers solid foundations in reading, writing and comprehension in their native language, then move on to teaching them English as a second language. The result is providers who are better able to teach children the skills they'll need when they start school. | Read

Time to care major factor in gaps at school

12.09.2007 | New York Times | A new study by the Educational Testing Service - which develops and administers more than 50 million standardized tests annually, including the SAT, concludes that an awful lot of low test scores can be explained by factors that have nothing to do with schools...like high-quality day care and paid maternity leave. | Read

Where's the evidence that property taxes are too high?

12.12.2007 | Everett Herald | Our kids are falling behind in global standards, and education ends for the majority at 12th grade. This is not just about the need for our children to have the skills and the brains to compete globally. Public education is the foundation for democracy. | Read

Early Learning Center Gives Kids, Parents a Calm Start

11.18.2007 | Everett Herald | One single mother hurries from the bus stop pushing a stroller in the rain. Other parents run in from distant parking lots around Everett Community College, lugging heavy car seats to be picked up by relatives later in the day. Many are tired, schlepping backpacks and rushing to get to class. Sometimes their kids are crying. But in the lobby of the Everett Community College Early Learning Center, there is a warm greeting from staff and morning rituals that offer parents and children a calm second start to the day. | Read

Congress Makes Wise Investment with Head Start

11.18.2007 | Longview Daily News | Congress gave final approval this past week to a five-year reauthorization bill for Head Start, the nation's flagship early childhood education program. It took four long years of sometimes heated partisan debate to produce this legislation. But, in the end, Congress got it right. | Read

Day care can mean a degree

11.16.2007 | Tacoma News Tribune | More local colleges are building or expanding facilities to meet demand for on-campus child care. For many students, it makes getting an education possible. | Read

Misguided law masks real progress schools have made

09.05.2007 | Everett Herald | Reading the paper I noticed that Ballard is once again on the list of "academically struggling" schools. It didn't make a lot of sense, until I read the fine print of the Leave No Child Behind law. This law slices and dices the student body until one sub-group emerges of students who aren't doing well. | Read

Full-day kindergarten too important to be phased in

03.21.2007 | Everett Herald | When kids start kindergarten, are they ready to learn? Too often, according to a survey of kindergarten teachers, they aren't. In 2004, kindergarten teachers found that more than half of their new learners were not prepared for the academic and social challenges of kindergarten. This isn't just a low-income problem. For those schools with mostly students from middle-income families, fully two out of five kids were deemed not ready to learn. | Read

Success matters both in the classroom and on the field

09.06.2006 | Tacoma News Tribune, Everett Herald | We have this fixation on WASL tests, but we also know that sports evens out the playing field for some kids left behind on exam day. It is an equal opportunity avenue for success and advancement. It is something every kid can be part of. We need to increase funding for sports, not cut that opportunity. So when we consider de-funding our public schools with Initiative 920, let’s remember who we are hurting. | Read (Tribune)| Read (Herald)

Repealing state estate tax would rob public education

06.14.2006 | Tacoma News Tribune, Everett Herald | Last week we got our first inkling of the WASL scores for 10th-graders. While more than 85 percent of kids passed the reading and writing tests, 45 percent did not make the grade in math. In order to graduate from high school, each child must pass all three tests. That means that as of today, every other kid in 10th grade has the credentials to graduate, and every other kid doesn’t. | Read (Tribune) | Read (Herald)

Use part of state surplus to fund sixth period in high school

12.14.2005 | Tacoma News Tribune | This week, Gov. Chris Gregoire proposed a major education initiative for young children. She recognizes that it makes a lot of sense to provide the foundation for learning early in a child’s life. And in the long term, it saves society a lot of money. As important as this new initiative is, it doesn’t do anything for the children who are already in the “pipeline.” | Read

Full-day kindergarten should be priority for Legislature

11.30.2005 | Tacoma News Tribune | Kindergarten teachers are confronted the first day in school with children who are not prepared to follow a sentence through to its end, who haven’t been read to, and who don’t know their numbers or their ABCs. Today, the state only pays for half-day kindergarten as part of basic education. But half-day kindergarten lasts two hours and 15 minutes – just about enough time to get these kids organized and almost ready to learn. So each day is too close to starting all over again. We could change this, with state funding for full-day kindergarten. It’s not a radical idea. And the results are proven. | Read

Educational improvements, investment must continue

06.29.2005 | Tacoma News Tribune | Our place in the world will rest on brainpower. If we want to compete, we have to give our children the skills to compete. Our democracy is based on an informed and thinking citizenry. If we want to renew our democracy, we must educate our kids in the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic and critical thinking. Our children – all of them – deserve the opportunity to learn and succeed. If we want to give them this chance, we have to invest in them now. | Read