Want change? Improve children’s well-being
I’ve heard many times that the traditional greeting among Masai warriors in Africa was, “How are the children?” And the traditional answer was, “All the children are well.”
At any time, but especially in times such as these, it is of great importance to ask that question constantly. It should be deeply troubling — and motivating — that we cannot, in honesty, give that answer.
The Milwaukee area offers one of the most vivid examples of why we should be concerned.
Consider two fresh reasons for saying that.
Save the Children is a century-old non-profit organization that focuses attention on the state of children throughout the world.
It issued its 2020 report this month on the well-being of children in the United States, including rating each state and county, based on five things: infant mortality rates, child “food insecurity,” high school graduation rates, rates of births among women ages 15 to 19, and child homicide and suicide rates.
Wisconsin did fairly well overall, rated ninth among the 50 states, which was up from 13th place in the organization’s report two years ago.
But the report pointed to Wisconsin as one of four states where the disparities among counties were the greatest in the nation. The others were Minnesota, New Jersey and South Dakota.
The ratings gap for the Milwaukee area was enormous. Ozaukee County was rated as the 4th best county for kids among 2,617 counties that were analyzed nationwide. Waukesha County was 18th best in the U.S. and Washington County 37th. Also rating in the top 50 in the country were Calumet County, which was 15th, and Iowa County, which was 37th.
But Milwaukee County’s rank was 2,100. The only lower county in Wisconsin was Menominee, which came in at 2,602, fifteenth from the bottom nationally. Three Wisconsin counties (Florence, Iron, and Pepin) did not have enough data to be rated.
As efforts to address the huge gaps in racial equity and opportunity take on new energy and urgency nationwide, the well-being of children should be a crucial matter on the agenda. There has been a lot of work done on this — teenage birth rates in Milwaukee have declined in recent years, for example — but there is so much more to be done to stabilize the lives of all children and give them better chances to succeed in life.
The goal, obviously, is not to bring down Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha counties, but to bring Milwaukee County up.
I listened several years ago to a compelling talk at Marquette University by Raj Chetty, one of the nation’s foremost analysts of masses of data that correlate with economic opportunity. Chetty, now an economics professor at Harvard, is a graduate of University School of Milwaukee.
Levels of segregation of all kinds – race, income, educational outcomes – match with big differences in opportunities to succeed in the long-term, especially for those born into the bottom 20% of the American economy, Chetty said.
And the Milwaukee area fits every factor that Chetty cited as limiting opportunity.
So what more can we do about this? There are no easy answers, of course. But if the question, “How are the children?” troubled us more, couldn’t we make more progress?
A second point to consider: There has been a widespread assumption that the shutdown of in-person schooling that began nationwide in March was a setback especially for children who were already in the lower brackets of educational success. They
need the most attention from teachers and, connected to poverty, many have weaker (or no) access to online services that became a primary conduit of efforts to continue teaching.
Some facts to support this concern are now emerging. A New York Times piece on June 5 spotlighted analyses from NWEA and researchers at Brown University and Harvard.
NWEA is best known for offering MAP tests, which are used to gauge student progress throughout a year. Many Milwaukee area schools use MAP. According to the Times’ story, NWEA said the average student nationwide lost as much as a third of a year of progress in reading and a half year of progress in math due to school closings.
The Brown and Harvard researchers focused on results for students learning math through a program called Zearn. Zearn also has been used widely in the Milwaukee area. Their results showed that students in high-income ZIP codes had continued to progress at expected rates, even after switching to distance learning. In middle-income ZIP codes, progress slowed by about a third, and in low-income ZIP codes, it slowed by about half.
In short, the prospects are strong that students will begin the next school year behind where they would have been in normal circumstance, and that will be especially true overall for low-income kids who were not benefiting from stronger distance learning efforts.
Come September, students’ needs will be increased, even as resources and the daily routines of going to school are likely to be stressed and reshaped. Not a pretty picture, right?
But perhaps we can take it as all the more reason for translating the current calls for change into ways to give many children better starts in life.
We are not going to get any time soon to the point where we can answer, “All the children are well.” But it would be a big step for the Milwaukee area for people as a whole to be able to say, “A lot more children are doing well.”
Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette Law School. Reach him at alanborsuk@marquette.edu.