The Children’s Alliance and other Early Learning Action Alliance members are celebrating a hard-earned victory today.

The Legislature has passed a bill that takes a step toward making early learning for infants and toddlers a top priority as our state builds and strengthens pre-kindergarten.

On December 1st, months of hard work on the part of advocates, policy makers, and early learning experts culminated in the submittal of a formal letter and a draft early learning plan to the Governor.

Director of the Department of Early Learning Bette Hyde, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn, and President and CEO of Thrive by Five Washington Nina Auerbach proposed a set of Early Learning Recommendations to the Governor for action in 2010, representing an unprecedented effort to plan and consider near-term policies that would support a statewide early learning system for all children, from prenatal to grade three.

Early learning has getting more attention in Washington, D.C., and this week brought a couple of pieces of good news.

Rep. George Miller introduced a student loan bill last week that includes $8 billion over the next eight years for high-quality early learning programs. By early-learning standards, that’s a head-turning figure (though it is apparently a drop in the bucket in banking circles, as the overall bill generates $100 billion in funding by cutting private lenders out of the student loan business).