Texas is steady relative to rankings, but little sign of change
(Media Release): According to data released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in its annual KIDS COUNT® Data Book, over the last decade there has been a significant decline in economic well-being for low income children and families. The official child poverty rate, which is a conservative measure of economic hardship, increased 18 percent between 2000 and 2009, essentially returning to the same level as the early 1990s. This increase means that 2.4 million more children are living below the federal poverty line. Data also reveals the impact of the job and foreclosure crisis on children. In 2010, 11 percent of children had at least one unemployed parent and 4 percent have been affected by foreclosure since 2007.
“In 2009, 42 percent of our nation’s children, or 31 million, lived in families with incomes below twice the federal poverty line or $43,512/year for a family of four, a minimum needed for most families to make ends meet,” said Laura Speer, associate director for Policy Reform and Data at the Casey Foundation. “The recent recession has wiped out many of the economic gains for children that occurred in the late 1990s. Nearly 8 million children lived with at least one parent who was actively seeking employment but was unemployed in 2010. This is double the number in 2007, just three years earlier. The news about the number of children who were affected by foreclosure in the United States is also very troubling because these economic challenges greatly hinder the well-being of families and the nation.”
The Data Book also provides the most current information about 10 key measures of child well-being the Foundation has tracked over the last twenty years. Since 2000:
- Five areas have improved: the infant mortality rate, child death rate, teen death rate, teen birth rate, and the percent of teens not in school and not high school graduates.
- Three areas have worsened: the percent of babies born low birth-weight, the child poverty rate, and the percent of children living in single-parent families.
- Two areas are not comparable: changes made to the American Community Survey’s (ACS) 2008 questionnaire regarding employment affected the ability to track trends for the percent of teens not in school and not working, and the percent of children in families where no parent has full-time, year-round employment. Although comparisons cannot be made back to 2000, both indicators worsened between 2008 and 2009.
The Data Book ranks states based on their performance across the 10 indicators of child well-being. New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Massachusetts rank highest, while Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi rank the lowest. The eight states with the biggest improvements in their rankings between 2000 and the most recent years of data are New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Virginia and Wyoming. The five states with the biggest drops in their rankings are South Dakota, Maine, West Virginia, Hawaii and Montana. Texas has fluctuated only slightly from between 37th to 35th place in the past 10 years.
Details on Texas, Houston and county data can be found on the website here.