Again, I applaud Seattle City Council member Tim Burgess for the admirable work he’s done pushing this issue forward. But I still find it a little stunning that it took this long for our local electeds to realize what a winning political issue this is.
No doubt support wouldn’t quite be this strong statewide, as the “why should I pay to educate your kids?” crowd is a bit stronger in the red counties (not to mention the “universal preschool is a government plot to indoctrinate our kids” loonies). But dollars to donuts support would be north of 65 percent, and by statewide standards that’s a landslide. So if I were Jay Inslee I’d seriously think about running on universal preschool in 2016.
Take a closer look at that survey, Goldy, and then change your headline.
The survey you quote was of Seattle parents/guardians who have children in grades K-3 in Seattle Public Schools. No way you can stretch that to become “Seattle parents.”
Good grief.
Page 7 of the survey –
47% of those who do not use preschool, do not because they do not want to.
30% can not afford it.
7% have no access.
I guess there’s a population to be served there, but it’s smaller than I would have thought, if this survey is actually representative of Seattle as a whole.
why aren’t we expanding a program which works – Head Start? Or, does Head Start not work … this week … according to the latest study from ALEC … ??
Murray and Burgess are soooooooooo tied in the ed deform toadie$ from Gate$-ILL-Vain-IA … ‘quality’ preschool will be hordes of 6 figure a year yuppie scum making power points about the actual work done by all the 10 buck an hour serfs with the kids.
Trust=Zero
I’ll do a quick survey of which metro orca-card users wishes there was a program that, on a means adjusted basis, would have helped pay for the orca card membership entirely. I expect my numbers will be similar.
“Free stuff” always gets high numbers in Seattle.
And it was 90% of those parents who had kids who were in K-3 and who responded to the survey — no more than about 2,000 parents. Ever-decreasing numbers for each caveat to the headline.
If a sentence after the ‘free’ and ‘sliding payment scale’ content were added, and stated “A substantial majority of the cost of this program would be paid for by a property tax levied against all residential and commercial property within the Seattle city limits.”, how might the support rate differ, I wonder?
It wouldn’t be the first time that someone on HA crowed about high polled support for something – I’m referring to the national minimum wage increase here – and neglected to account for the fact that support fell substantially when respondents were told about the downside.
The number of comments before mine questioning the support level, or the makeup of that support, in one way or another is rather refreshing.