Data on [Unequal] Childhood Well-Being

For years, I taught a course called Education and the American Dream. Students were juniors, seniors, and graduate students from across majors. My campus student body was over 40% first-generation students at the time. The campus did excellent work on teaching about multiple other forms of inequality and diversity, but few of my students had ever had access to scholarly perspectives on education, social class, and economic mobility before that class. They hadn't been offered any academic perspectives on these central dynamics of their own lives as they were about to test the promise of education as the pathway to opportunity.

When I asked them to write reflectively about when they first became aware of class differences between themselves and others, the poor and working-class students would speak of early experiences of taunting over wearing the wrong clothes in school or elementary school teachers underestimating their academic potential. Middle-class students would speak of much later experiences such as taking a high school sports bus to an away game and traveling through communities that their parents wouldn't let them otherwise visit. They did not feel pain; they were briefly traveling through unfamiliar places on their way to settings where they'd be centered.

Few of the students had any explanation for economic inequalities beyond the lower-income students' vague self-doubt over whether they had what it takes to "make it" and middle-class students' vague sense that they were reaping the rewards of their own and their parents' hard work.

One of the resources that I used to raise questions about inequality in that class (and in others) was the annual Annie E. Casey Foundation's annual Kids Count Data Book. Inequality can be invisible as schools and communities become economically segregated, and the causes of inequality can so easily be reduced to personal worthiness and hard work

The Data Book reports on multiple indicators of child well-being for each state and tells stories of very different lives in different places. With a few clicks, students begin to see the consequences of unequal state-level access to resources that enable children to thrive: housing policies, secure employment, social safety nets. Beyond the state-level data on the home page, readers can click through on each state to find more detail on individual counties, cities, and congressional districts and filter data by race/ethnicity and by age. The disparities cannot be explained by parents' hard work and individual accomplishments.

The state-level comparisons themselves are striking. In 2024, for example, we learn that in New Mexico, 23% of children live in poverty and 32% of children live in households in which parents lack secure employment. 19% of children live within high poverty areas and 13% have a parent without a high school diploma.

In contrast, only 7% of New Hampshire children live in poverty and 19% live in homes that lack secure employment. No children live in areas of high concentrations of poverty. 95% live in households with parents who graduated from high school.

The Data Book doesn't include data on school funding (only test data, which can be problematic beyond these big picture comparisons), and again, we see serious inequalities in that data. New Hampshire spends $21,900 per K-12 student while New Mexico spends only $14,690 and is still far from the state spending the least on education. Children already struggling under other economic restraints too often have less invested in their K-12 schooling.

All of this is often invisible to students trying to understand why they've so often had to struggle and to students growing up in relative ease. Few students graduating from college learn much about public policy around economic inequalities that disadvantage so many children by accident of birth or how they, as citizens and communities members, can work to remedy these things.

Probing accessible data on unequal childhoods can be one small step forward, in part because it can be very hard to argue that any child should be denied the resources to thrive because of the tax base and the politics of the state in which they were born. Data like this also makes it harder to argue that the solution to these structural inequalities in childhood is for individual young people from under-resourced communities to become educated, one by one.

Those arguments instead begin to sound vaguely cruel.