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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE |
CONTACT: Children's Defense Fund |
State of America's Children Deteriorating According to New Children's Defense Fund Report
Most Recent Data Requires Urgent National and State Response to Child Needs
WASHINGTON - December 23 - Today the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) released The State of America's Children 2008® report, a statistical compendium of key child data showing epidemic numbers of children at risk: the number of poor children has increased nearly 500,000 to 13.3 million, with 5.8 million of them living in extreme poverty, and nearly 9 million children lack health coverage-with both numbers likely to increase during the recession. The number of children and teens killed by firearms also increased after years of decline.
"It is a national disgrace that the richest nation on earth lets every sixth child live in poverty," CDF President Marian Wright Edelman said. "Our poor children exceed the population of all ages in the state of Illinois. The number of uninsured children exceeds the population of the country of Switzerland. We continue this neglectful waste of our precious human capital at our collective peril. We can and must do better!
"Investing in our children-the seed corn of our nation's future-is key to our nation's economic recovery and competitiveness in the global economy. And we do not have a minute to waste as a child drops out of school every 11 seconds of the school day; is born into poverty every 33 seconds; is abused or neglected every 35 seconds; is born without health coverage every 39 seconds; and is killed by guns every three hours. No external enemy poses such a grave threat to our children's and nation's security as these facts," stated Mrs. Edelman.
According to the CDF report, children in America lag behind almost all industrialized nations on key child indicators. The United States has the unwanted distinction of being the worst among industrialized nations in relative child poverty, in the gap between rich and poor, in teen birth rates, and in child gun violence, and first in the number of incarcerated persons.
"A cradle to prison pipeline crisis is fueling a massive and costly prison system that is becoming the new American apartheid. It is draining tens of billions of dollars from crucial health and education investments all children need to get into a pipeline to college and productive work. Poverty and continuing racial disparities in all child serving systems are sentencing countless children to dead-end lives. That a Black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime and a Latino boy has a 1 in 6 chance is a personal tragedy and national catastrophe. We can and must change these horrifying outcomes. If we can bail out Wall Street bankers who have brought our economy to its knees, we can rescue our children from hopelessness, despair, sickness, illiteracy and preventable poverty," Mrs. Edelman said.
The State of America's Children 2008 compiles the most recent and reliable national and state-by-state data on poverty, health, child welfare, youth at risk, early childhood development, education, nutrition and housing. Highlights of the report are attached. The full report is available at www.childrensdefense.org/stateofamericaschildren.
The Children's Defense Fund is a non-profit child advocacy organization that has worked relentlessly for 35 years to ensure a level playing field for all children. CDF champions policies and programs that lift children out of poverty; protect them from abuse and neglect; and ensure their access to health care, quality education, and a moral and spiritual foundation. Supported by foundation and corporate grants and individual donations, CDF advocates nationwide on behalf of children to ensure children are always a priority.
The Children's Defense Fund's Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.
4 Comments so far
Show AllThere is nothing surprising about these findings; this has been the trend for at least the past twenty years. What is surprising is that the Children’s Defense Fund and similar organizations seem to be unwilling to challenge established institutions and conventional attitudes by encouraging middle- and working-class people to see that education has less to do with “schooling” and more to do with family values and family activities.
The educational achievement disparity between whites and Asians and African-Americans and Hispanics is growing across social class lines. There is much evidence to suggest that a major reason for this disparity is that the parents of working class and lower income kids are divorced from the educational experience. I think an important part of neighborhood organizing is encouraging families to work as teams around the education of their children.
Conventional wisdom believes that the single most important influence on a child's achievement is the teacher. I am suggesting that for every child their parent is their most important role model. If kids see their parents having fun giving expression to stories, plays and poems, it will give kids a model for an additional way for them to play with reading. Conventional wisdom tells us that the purpose of reading is to acquire information. I am suggesting that the purpose of reading is to transport the reader into the world created by the author. This can be done more effectively if kids and parents read aloud together as teams. Parents and kids reading aloud together is simple and achievable, and can motivate parents and kids to visualize everything from the expression of dialogue to simple costumes. It can encourage parents and young people to work as teams in achieving goals, as well as to discover the intimacy and articulation of literary characters.
If parents and kids can be encouraged to work as teams dramatically exploring the content of literary stories as recreation, then it is possible to create team-based programs in everything from social sciences to math and physical sciences that are designed around an exploration/recreational model. Middle class and higher income kids are encouraged to explore many things by their parents; working class and lower income kids are steered toward sole reliance on their teachers whose focus is fixed on achievement tests. It is possible to implement programs that encourage both family and educational values through creatively designing ways for parents and kids to collaboratively play and explore.
As a society, we are coming closer to defining working class and lower income kids as uneducable. It is a sad irony that there is enormous talent among working class and lower income people—look at all the self-discipline, imagination and creativity that have been produced by the poorest people: jazz, blues, break dancing, rap, hip-hop, etc. If it were possible to evaluate intelligence independently of social class, working-class and lower income people would score across the Bell curve the same as higher income people. I think we can strive to develop innovative family team-based programming that effectively educates working class and lower income parents and kids.
It is not enough to encourage working class and lower income parents to think that by sending their kids to school they have adequately discharged their responsibility to educate their kids. Such a belief is destructive of the public schools because it doesn’t provide the motivation from parents that create learning readiness in their children. This is especially true for African-American and Hispanic parents. African-American and Hispanic parents repeatedly contend that they are incapable of providing the educational enrichment that their middle class counterparts do effectively. I contend that there are many ways to create learning environments for working class and lower income parents and kids that are fun and enjoyable, and motivate kids and parents to explore their environment and become intellectually curious and inquisitive. Unless local libraries, churches and neighborhood community centers accept responsibility for creating such learning environments, the future prospects for working class and lower income minority children are bleak and desperate.
In my view, there is much more to educating working class and lower income kids than simply sending them to public schools. Parents have an enormous role they can play and they could be organized through neighborhood churches, community centers and similar local venues. We seem to be locked into a rigid conception as to what constitutes education and as a result we ignore all the other things we could do to educate today’s children today.
I'm rather appalled at this story -- not just the reality, but the story itself.
'Human capital', 'seed-corn', 'cost of prison', 'productive work' -- does EVERY damned thing we talk about always have to come down to dollars and production and competition!? Can no case be made that we should take good care of human beings, children included, simply because they ARE human beings?
I remember this starting when I was kid and the Russians launched Sputnik, and all of a sudden we had to start improving education for kids -- not because it was good for kids, but because we needed technologically competent cannon fodder to win the cold war. Then I heard the ads with "children are our most precious resource". No, dammit -- coal is a resource, water is a resource, children are children!
Children are not resources, capital, seed-corn, or production units, dammit -- they are CHILDREN! If we don't know enough to take of children simply because they are children, and not part of some national economic or defense aganda, then this country is seriously bankrupt in moral and spiritual terms -- not just financial.
PS. Oh, yeah --- Merry Christmas...
Profit comes before People http://www.wisecountyissues.com Our schools, stores, homes are being diseased by the health care system. In East Tennessee, "horrifying" health care is the same as their high standards of excellence in health care. What is on public record is completely different than what is being advertised by Wellmont Health Care Systems, Kingsport, TN
"Compassionate conservatism," "no child left behind," and "Jesus is my favorite philosopher because he changed my heart" indeed. One would think that people by now would have figured out what the GOP is all about. Fortunately this time round a little more than half seem to have caught on.
Alex