Sabotaging America’s future
America’s nurseries are failing at their job. The states with the largest increases in the number of young people in their populations tend to produce the worst outcomes for kids, judged by measures such as high school graduation, access to health insurance and exposure to poverty. The states that produce the best outcomes for kids tend to be either stagnant or declining in their youth populations.
That means the nation is relying for its future workforce and consumers on states that are achieving the least success — and often making the least effort — to equip their kids to succeed.
“The fact that we have so many kids living in parts of the country where the outcomes aren’t as good … is something we are going to pay for later,” says demographer Bill Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.
These stark conclusions emerge from Frey’s analysis of the trends in the youth population for all 50 states and the latest Kids Count data book from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. (Full disclosure: the Casey Foundation is among the sponsors for the Next America project at National Journal that I supervise.) Casey ranks the condition of children in the states across 16 quantitative indicators in education, health, family and the economy, and then synthesizes a cumulative rank for each state.
Comparing that ranking with Frey’s analysis of changes in the 19-and-younger population for each state from 2000 through 2014 produces stark results that are ominous for the nation’s future economic vitality and social stability.
The 15 states that Casey ranked as producing the best outcomes for kids are mostly clustered in New England (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut), the Midwest (Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin) and the mid-Atlantic region (New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia). But in nine of the 15 highest-ranked states, the number of young people declined from 2000 through 2014, Frey found. Only in Utah and Virginia on that list did the number of young people increase by at least 5%.
The 15 states that Casey ranked as producing the weakest outcomes for kids are clustered across the Sunbelt (from South Carolina, Georgia and Florida to Texas, Nevada and California) and Appalachia (West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky). In nine of the 15 lowest-ranked states, the number of young people increased from 2000 through 2014. The increase reached doubledigits in six of them.
In all, nearly 37 million young people, representing 45% of Americans younger than 20, now live in the 15 states at the bottom of the Casey list. Just 15 million young people, representing only 19% of the younger-than-20 population, live in the 15 states atop the list.
An imposing chasm separates kids’ experiences across the two groups of states. The share of children in poverty is lower than the national average (22% in 2013) in all 15 states topping the list. The share of children in poverty exceeds the national average in all 15 states at the bottom, including California (23%) Arizona (26%) and Georgia (27%). Results for high school graduation rates and access to health insurance follow similar patterns.
One other chasm separates the highest- and lowest-ranked states: diversity. Minorities represent a majority of kids younger than 20 in just two of the 15 highest-ranked states. Minorities already represent a majority of the younger-than-20 population in eight of the 15 lowestranked states (including Georgia, Florida, Texas and California), and at least two-fifths in four others.
Today, the Sunbelt states face the acute challenge of equipping more children of color to reach the middle class. It is becoming a national necessity. Frey’s data show that the absolute number of white kids younger than 20 has declined in 46 of the 50 states since 2000. Against that backdrop, a failure to elevate minority kids will hurt not only their home states, but also our national economic competitiveness.
Largely for that reason, Rolf Pendall, director of community policy at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, says the U.S. can no longer accept the historic division that assigns primary funding responsibility for programs affecting seniors to Washington and for programs affecting kids to the states. “Increasingly it’s a limited number of states, and a limited number of metro areas, that are the nurseries of the future workforce,” Pendall says. “That means it’s in the national interest to provide for maximizing the life chances of kids [in those] places. That’s … not charity. It’s investment.”
That recognition could translate into providing a national baseline of services, such as access to preschool and health insurance for all kids, and a livable wage for parents. But it also means all Americans will lose if the states most responsible for nurturing the next generation don’t commit to the challenge more urgently than they have done to date.