So kids don’t count for much in Texas? It’s a logical conclusion given the latest data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Every year, in a report called “Kids Count,” the Casey Foundation measures the well being of children in every state in 10 vital categories, including health, education and poverty.
Texas ranks 35th out of 50 states for overall quality of life for kids in that report. In fact, Texas is right down near the bottom in almost every category that the Kids Count report measures along with long-time laggards like Mississippi and Louisiana. It’s not what you’d expect in the Lone Star State. But it’s been that way for a long time.
In 2011, according to the latest Kids Count report, one in every four children in Texas lives in poverty. One in every six children is a new addition to the poverty rolls. Texas has the highest rate of uninsured children. Up to 600,000 children in Texas have at least one unemployed parent.
Politics aside, those are the facts from the Kids Count report released last week.
Now you are probably asking what gives the Annie E. Casey Foundation the right to trash Texas?
The Annie E. Casey Foundation is arguably “the nation’s largest philanthropy dedicated to vulnerable children.” It was established in 1948 in the Seattle area by Jim Casey, a co-founder of UPS. It’s named after Casey’s mother, a young widow who struggled to raise him and his siblings. The foundation is a “private charitable organization” now headquartered in Baltimore, MD. It published its first Kids Count report in 1990.
But hasn’t the recession had an effect on statistics for Texas children? Isn’t that the reason for Texas’ poor showing in the Kids Count report?
Indeed, things have gotten worse since the recession started. But they were bad to begin with. Statistics from Children At Risk put that in perspective. It’s a well-known Texas foundation that has been advocating for “vulnerable” children in Harris County since it was founded in 1989. It’s been publishing bi-annual reports on their well being since 1994. The reports also include statistics about Texas’ treatment of vulnerable children. A Children At Risk report from 2006-2008 paints a dismal picture of the way Texas treated them then.
It ranked Texas “second in the nation” for the highest number of low-income children. It called childhood hunger in Houston “a real and persistent problem.” In education, it ranked Texas “36th in the nation in expenditures per student.”
So things were hardly rosy for Texas children before the recession. Given the $4 billion the legislature just whacked out of the state’s education budget this year, it will be hard for school districts in Texas to make significant gains due to the large teacher layoffs, increased class sizes and other cost saving measures the schools have had to make. What about next year’s Kids Count report? No one who is concerned about “vulnerable” Texas kids expects it to be any better.