Gates, state invest in children

Washington's smallest children are about to get some big-time attention and money from state political and business leaders as well as the world's largest foundation, which says the smartest way to get children ready for success in school and life is to get them ready for kindergarten.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is launching a new early-learning initiative in Washington, with up to $90 million in grants in the next 10 years to boost the quality of child care and early learning for children from birth to age 5.

Gov. Christine Gregoire has made early-childhood education a signature issue. A bipartisan panel has recommended a shakeup in how the state's early-learning programs are managed. Other private groups are also making new investments in programs for young children.

Once upon a time, Washington children didn't officially start learning until the first day of kindergarten.

The state paid them little attention until then.

And early-learning advocates struggled to attract the interest or money of the state's power brokers, despite growing evidence that what happens in a child's first years of life sets the stage for success or failure.

Now, Washington's tots are in the spotlight, and children's advocates say the prospect of new money and new leadership interest has them ecstatic.

"The stars are being aligned," said Elizabeth Bonbright Thompson, longtime executive director of the state Child Care Resource & Referral Network. "It's taken us how long to get this kind of attention? But yee haw!"

The $90 million Gates initiative, to begin in earnest next year, will be the largest in the foundation's Pacific Northwest program area. (The foundation has a separate K-12 education program that has given more than $267 million toward Washington school reform.)

"We now find ourselves at this juncture with all this information about the benefits of early learning; a recovering economy; private, public and philanthropic interests coming together," said Greg Shaw, the foundation's Pacific Northwest program director.

Where the Gates Foundation leads, other philanthropists and policymakers often follow.

"The fact that they're focusing on this is huge," said Bob Watt, co-chair of the state Early Learning Council and vice president of community and government affairs for Boeing. "They bring tremendous energy and resources."

Statistics show negatives

The Gates Foundation didn't start out thinking about the pre-kindergarten set but began two years ago investigating ways to help at-risk youth.

Their research led them to some surprising conclusions:

Washington's children trail the nation in critical areas that impede their ability to be successful in school, particularly when they are compared with children in other progressive, bellwether states with similar demographics.

"It's sort of undeniable when you look at the statistics that many children are not succeeding," Shaw said.

Nearly one in four Washington children age 5 and under — about 110,000 statewide — has two or more factors, such as poverty and parental unemployment, that increase the risk of failure in school and beyond, according to a study the foundation commissioned.

Just 25 percent of children attending the lowest-income schools show up for kindergarten "school-ready," compared with 58 percent of children in high-income schools, according to a state teacher survey.

The foundation's plan: to create two model child-care centers, one each in Western and Eastern Washington. Each center will offer highly trained teachers, high-quality care and a physical space designed for children. And it will serve as a hub to reach out to other child-care providers and families caring for young children.

That might include: a trained public-health nurse making home visits to offer support and information; professional development for caregivers; curriculum development; pre- and post-natal support programs; and child-development or community-education classes.

The goal is to raise the quality of care in both communities and demonstrate ways to narrow the gap in school-readiness statewide. In their demonstration communities, the foundation hopes to reach a majority of the young children, and up to 70 percent of the low-income children.

The foundation expects to pick its two communities by next summer, and it also plans to give grants to other promising programs statewide.

No longer a leader

Washington once was considered a leader on early-childhood issues, but many observers say it now lags well behind other states.

"There's nothing I can think of that Washington is a leader in today," said Richard Brandon, director of the University of Washington's Human Services Policy Center who worked with the foundation in developing its early-learning strategy.

"There's no system to track them," Brandon said. "Between birth certificate and kindergarten, we lose them."

Washington is home to some of the nation's top researchers and thinkers on early learning, but the movement has failed to catch fire in their home state. Other states have pushed ahead, persuaded by research that underscores how critical the years from birth to age 5 are.

Georgia offers universal pre-kindergarten for 4-year-olds through a public-private partnership and tracks how children do once they reach kindergarten.

North Carolina has a birth-to-age-5 system focused on improving the quality of programs for young children, wage increases tied to teacher training, and more financial help for families.

California pours some $800 million a year from tobacco taxes into education and social services for young children.

Uneven quality

In Washington, the quality of early-learning programs is uneven at best, and access to the best programs is unequal.

Parents are mostly on their own in sorting out the good from the bad among the state's 8,300 licensed child-care centers and home day-care providers and an unknown number of unlicensed child-care providers.

The state provides early-learning programs only for low-income, abused or disabled children.

The federal Head Start program and the state-run version, called ECEAP, together reach about half of eligible low-income 4-year-olds in Washington, the Gates Foundation says.

Low-income families who qualify for child-care subsidies find that the amount covers the cost of only one-quarter of available child-care slots, down from 75 percent five years ago.

The Gates Foundation pans most child care in Washington, saying it is "often of low or poor quality," and laments that at a time when "neuroscience is shedding new light on how critical the first three years of life are to success in learning ... young children are increasingly receiving little more than custodial care."

Families rely largely on word of mouth to find the best care. Gregoire said that's how she found the family day-care provider who cared for her daughters when they were young.

State licensers focused on "the sugar content of the cereal she fed them or how far the fence was from the house," Gregoire said, but the provider never got the kind of support that might have helped her provide better care.

Gov. Gregoire's emphasis

Some longtime advocates of early learning credit Gregoire for bringing new political focus to the issue. She created Washington Learns, a public-private group studying the state's education system from preschool to higher education. The Early Learning Council is an advisory committee to that group.

Last week, based on the council's recommendations, Gregoire proposed a Cabinet-level Department of Early Learning and a quality-rating system for child-care centers and family day-care homes.

Gregoire "just kicked it into high gear," said state Rep. Ruth Kagi, D-Lake Forest Park, who sponsored legislation last year that launched the Early Learning Council. "I can't imagine us not making huge progress in the next two years."

Other factors driving the new interest in early childhood include the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) and a greater emphasis on student achievement.

"It's hard to hold [schools] accountable when kids are showing up three, four, five years behind," said Joyce Walters, a Boeing executive working with the new Business Partnership for Early Learning (BPEL), a business-led initiative in King County with a goal of raising $4 million for programs to better prepare children for school.

Not all agree

Still, some aren't sold on the notion that early learning is the place to invest limited state money. Others don't agree that government has a legitimate role in family decisions about children's care.

Advocates have been careful to frame their cause as a way of supporting families, children and caregivers in any setting.

And a big question: How are middle-income families supposed to afford higher-quality child care? Some families pay more for child care than they would for college tuition.

The Gates Foundation says child-care costs for moderate-income families could rise as quality rises, and that closing the school-readiness gap could mean more than doubling current expenditures on early learning, including state and federal funds.

As the UW's Brandon says: "You're not going to get quality staff and learning at hamburger-flipper wages."

Gregoire says it is premature to talk about the cost until the new Department of Early Learning is in place.

"I don't believe throwing money at this issue is the answer," she said. "An immense amount can be done just by providing additional tools" to parents and caregivers.

But her goal is lofty.

"Much less than 50 percent of children are ready to learn when they hit kindergarten," she said. "I would like to double that, at a minimum, and make the system seamless, so preschool is working together" with K-12 schools.

Much of the hard, devil-in-the-details work lies ahead. The Early Learning Council co-chaired by Watt will spend the next 11 months creating a final set of recommendations for how early learning should be funded, how to improve program quality and how to keep it all affordable.

Jolayne Houtz: jhoutz@seattletimes.com; 206-464-3122