Active Ingredients of Statewide PreK Quality Improvement: Advancing Equity and Coordinated Governance in Washington State

• In Event: 2-212 - Building and Sustaining Preschool Quality Improvement: Evidence from Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington

Integrative Statement

The Washington State Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP), overseen by the former Department of Early Learning (DEL), was created in 1985 to prepare 3- and 4-year-olds from low-income families for success in school and in life. ECEAP, closely mirroring Head Start, has focused on the well-being of the whole child by providing comprehensive nutrition, health, education and family support services to Washington’s most at-risk young children.
On December of 2011, DEL was awarded a Race to the Top grant of $500 million over four years. With the passage of the Early Start Act in 2015, all licensed child care and early learning providers offering services to children and families that qualify for state subsidies had to be enrolled in WA’s Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS), Early Achievers, to maintain subsidy authorization. Early Achievers offers coaching, professional development, and resources for providers to support each child’s learning and development. It also ensures that participating programs are sustaining high quality programming through structured observations of classroom quality. These observations—along with child outcomes and workforce data—offer a wealth of data on PreK quality across the state.
In 2010, the Legislature passed House Bill 2731 establishing ECEAP as a statutory entitlement for all eligible children by the 2018-2019 school year. However, that deadline for entitlement has since been extended to 2022-2023. In such context of rapid expansion of state-funded preschool programs, we asked: How is Washington systematically engaging key actors to continuously improve the quality of publicly-funded preschool programs? What contextual factors have facilitated and undermined such efforts?
As part of a multi-year longitudinal case study, we conducted multiple site visits to gather data that consisted of 32 interviews with key informants at multiple levels of the Pre-K system who played a critical role in shaping and sustaining improvement efforts. With such an investment in early learning, we expected to find strong alignment and commitment to a coherent vision for high quality preschool across policy, advocacy, and research.
Our findings revealed that the department is making strides across multiple system-wide improvements: the alignment and transparency of ECEAP standards and Early Achievers (EA) ratings to unify program quality standards at the state level, alignment across two coaching systems (ECEAP and Child Care Aware), improving equitable access to PreK by increasing the scale of the ECEAP program, and integration into DCYF. We observed a shared sense of cohesion, transparency, and commitment to early learning across all levels. Moreover, we found that sustaining key leadership and cultivating an equity-oriented culture within the agency facilitated a rapid expansion of ECEAP slots and quality supports: bipartisan political support, political leaders championing for early learning, philanthropic excitement, strong advocacy efforts, and public-private partnership. Despite the positive momentum, interviewees also expressed concerns related to current improvement efforts including recruitment and retention, the prioritization of early learning at DCYF, and coaching capacity and resources.
This paper will also illuminate systemic barriers and key supports that substantially shaped continuous quality improvement of ECEAP programs in Washington.

Authors

• Soojin Oh Park, University of Washington College of Education
  Non-Presenting Author

• Micaela Moricet, University of Washington
  Presenting Author

• Gail E Joseph, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author

• Molly Branson-Thayer, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author