Children and Youth, Education and Literacy
High-quality early learning cannot be achieved or sustained when the bonds between teacher and child are broken because teachers leave their jobs to gain higher paid employment in order to support their own families. But a report by the Economic Policy Institute estimates that 40% of Washington's child care center teachers earn less than 200% of the federal poverty level.
Based on this knowledge, in 2005 the Washington state Legislature passed -- and the Governor signed -- the Early Childhood Education Career and Wage Ladder (Wage Ladder) into law. The Wage Ladder improves the quality of child care by enabling early learning teachers to earn better compensation, based on educational advancement and achievement, as well as experience and job responsibility.
The Wage Ladder is the only early learning program in Washington found to create statistically significant improvements in the quality of care. The cost is about $250 per child per year, and represents a frugal, robust, and evidence-based intervention that has catalyzed high-quality child care in Washington.
With the Wage Ladder, early learning educators gain economic security and professional education, just the ingredients needed for high-quality early education and care. If we value our children, we will value their teachers and caregivers, not less so, but especially so in this recession.
A suspension of the Wage Ladder will jeopardize the professional and educational progress of over 800 early learning teachers across the state. These early learning teachers will lose critical supports necessary to sustain their participation in the early care and education field -- and the children in their care will suffer the consequences.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Western)-Washington
Education and Literacy;Government Reform
Washington has had an inheritance or estate tax since 1901. The United States has had an estate tax in place since 1916. Initiative 920, which would have repealed Washington's estate tax in November 2006, was resoundingly defeated by the people, 62% to 38%. Our estate tax raises over $100 million annually, on average.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Western) / Washington / King County / Seattle
Children and Youth;Education and Literacy
Campus support programs provide financial, academic, and other types of supports to help former foster youth succeed in college. However, relatively little is known about the impact of these programs on college retention or graduation rates. This study lays the groundwork for an impact evaluation by examining program implementation from two different perspectives. Researchers conducted telephone interviews with the directors of 10 campus support programs in California and Washington State. The interviews covered a variety of domains, including the population served, referral sources and recruitment, the application process, the provision of services and supports, program staff, relationships with stakeholders, and data collection. In addition, participants from 8 of the 10 programs completed a web-based survey that asked about their perceptions of and experiences with the program. The survey included questions about students' demographic characteristics, referral and recruitment, the application process, reasons for participating in the program, services and supports received, unmet needs, contact with staff, and recommendations for improvement. The report concludes with several recommendations for moving forward with a methodologically sound impact evaluation of campus support programs for former foster youth.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Western) / California;North America / United States (Northwestern) / Washington
Education and Literacy;Government Reform
Washington's public colleges and universities are a critical resource for building a prosperous future for our state and fulfilling the promise of opportunity for all. Without strong public institutions of higher education, our youth will be stymied in striving to reach their full potential, and our state will not remain competitive in the global economy. Yet over the past two decades, the state's financial support for higher education has not kept pace with population growth and rising costs. Public institutions differ from private colleges and universities in their commitment to providing access to higher education and improving the well-being of all state residents. The University of Washington, in its statement of values, describes "Being Public" as follows: "As a public university we are deeply committed to serving all our citizens. We collaborate with partners from around the world to bring knowledge and discovery home to elevate the quality of lives of Washingtonians." As centers of education, research, and innovation, public colleges and universities spur economic development throughout the state. Washington's business leaders have long expressed the need for a more highly trained workforce, with more public investment in every level of education, from preschool through graduate study. Governor Christine Gregoire said in her 2009-11 Budget Proposal, "Washington's public colleges and universities are the economic engine that drives the state's economy and will drive our recovery." To build a strong foundation for Washington's future, we must increase public investment in higher education as a part of upgrading our whole public education system. Doing so will require identifying new sources of public revenue.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Northwestern) / Washington
Education and Literacy;Poverty
In the face of impending budget cuts to higher education, Washington policymakers are considering adopting a "high-tuition/high-aid" model that significantly increases tuition, partly offset with more financial aid. The assumption of this approach is that students who can afford it pay more; those students who cannot, benefit from larger financial aid packages. But the experience of universities that have adopted this model shows that high-tuition/high-aid preserves neither access nor quality.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Northwestern) / Washington
Common enrollment systems designed to manage student enrollment across district and charter sectors introduce a host of governance challenges. City charter and district leaders realize the importance of cross-sector representation when deciding policies related to enrollment, such as the number of choices families should list or whether some students will have enrollment priority over others. The question of who will administer the enrollment process once these policy decisions are made can be highly controversial. Cities that don't attend to these management questions early on risk major political fights that can stall or derail progress on the effort.
There is little precedence, nor is there a ready-made legal framework, for coordinating enrollment across sectors; how these systems will be governed and operated must instead be resolved through the collaboration of agencies, many of which have histories of competition, mistrust, and hostility. In this issue brief, we draw from a series of interviews with local education leaders in Denver, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., focusing on the governance issues that emerged as these three jurisdictions sought a cross-sector common enrollment system.
While some urban school systems have long had enrollment processes to manage choice for schools under their control, the expansion of charter schools presents a different and more complicated challenge for both parents and administrators. In many places, students no longer have a single "home district" in the traditional sense. Instead, they can now choose to enroll in the local school district or one of the city's charter schools. State charter laws give charter schools -- whether they are an independent local education agency or not -- authority over their enrollment processes; a charter school must conduct its process in a manner consistent with the law, typically a random lottery.
As charter schools grow in number, so does the number of separate enrollment systems operating across individual cities. In Denver, for example, a 2010 report showed that 60 separate enrollment systems operated in the city at the same time. Similar situations occurred in New Orleans and D.C. As individual selection processes grew to unmanageable levels in these cities, education and community leaders sought ways to rationalize and centralize student placement across an increasing number of school choices
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Western)-Colorado-Denver County-Denver;North America-United States (Southern)-Louisiana-Orleans Parish-New Orleans;North America-United States (Southern)-District of Columbia-Washington
Children and Youth;Education and Literacy
With support from MetLife Foundation, the Afterschool Alliance presents this compendium, containing a series of four issue briefs examining critical issues facing middle school youth, schools and communities, and the vital role afterschool programs play in addressing these issues. The four issue briefs featured in this publication address: the importance of aligning afterschool with the school day, bullying awareness and prevention, service-learning opportunities and literacy education. Each brief combines relevant statistics, comments from experts and community leaders, and examples of outstanding afterschool programs. The compendium also includes profiles of successful programs and a discussion of the MetLife Foundation Afterschool Innovator Award.
The 2011 MetLife Foundation Afterschool Innovator Award winners are:
- Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools - New Orleans, LA
- Higher Achievement - Washington, D.C.
- Urban Arts/Project Phoenix - Oakland, CA
- 21st Century PASOS - Gettysburg, PA
- America SCORES - Chicago, IL
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Midwestern)-Illinois-Cook County-Chicago;North America-United States (Northeastern)-Pennsylvania-Adams County-Gettysburg;North America-United States (Southern)-District of Columbia-Washington;North America-United States (Southern)-Louisiana-Orleans Parish-New Orleans;North America-United States (Western)-California-Alameda County-Oakland
We compare two alternative methods to account for the sorting of students into academic tracks. Using data from an urban school district, we investigate whether including track indicators or accounting for classroom characteristics in the value-added model is sufficient to eliminate potential bias resulting from the sorting of students into academic tracks.
We find that accounting for two classroom characteristics -- mean classroom achievement and the standard deviation of classroom achievement -- may reduce bias for middle school math teachers, whereas track indicators help for high school reading teachers. However, including both of these measures simultaneously reduces the precision of the value-added estimates in our context. In addition, we find that while these different specifications produce substantially different value-added estimates, they produce small changes in the tails of value-added distribution.
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Southern)-District of Columbia-Washington
