Welfare of youths still lags in state

Kids Count lists Arkansas at 44th

A map showing the  Annie E. Casey Foundation’s annual Kids Count study information.
A map showing the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s annual Kids Count study information.

Arkansas continues to rate as one of the country's most inhospitable places for children, according to a national report, and some state policymakers and experts don't expect that to change in the near future.

For the second year in a row, Arkansas ranked 44th in the nation on child welfare, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation's annual Kids Count report.

The state for years has languished in the bottom tier of the ranking -- which is based on metrics that include childhood poverty, reading proficiency and juvenile deaths -- and children's advocates worry that the state isn't doing enough to remedy that.

For instance, even though the number of Arkansas teenagers giving birth has dropped by nearly half over the past two decades -- from about 6,800 in 1994 to about 3,800 in 2014 -- Arkansas still has the country's highest teen birthrate. Other states, such as Mississippi, tackled teen pregnancies more aggressively, said Laura Speer, who oversaw the Kids Count report.

Teen births are one of the 16 economic, education, health-care and community indicators that the Kids Count report tabulates for its state rankings. Speer said many of the indicators tend to correspond with childhood poverty.

About 184,000 Arkansas children -- more than one in four -- lived in poverty in 2014, according to the report. Child poverty spiked during the recession and has remained high even as other metrics have recovered, Speer said.

"What's really frightening is that kids in Arkansas are treading water as our economy has been, by other metrics, improving dramatically," said Bill Kopsky, executive director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, an advocacy group. "What's going to happen to those families and those children when we hit the next recession?"

There are proven ways to reduce childhood poverty, Speer said. They include child assistance programs, tax credits and help through the federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program.

"It's not so much that we don't know how to do it -- it's just having the political will to get it done," she said.

Increasing education funding would provide one long-term solution to improving children's welfare, said Rich Huddleston, executive director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families.

Only one-third of Arkansas' fourth-graders are proficient in reading, and one-quarter of the state's eighth-graders are proficient in math, as defined by the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Increasing funding for pre-kindergarten and after-school programs could boost those figures, Huddleston said, but Arkansas lawmakers are more interested in cutting taxes than investing in schools.

"Let's face it, you can't do both," he said.

Tax cuts that the Arkansas Legislature passed in 2013 and 2015 were estimated to cost the state tens of millions of dollars each year in uncollected revenue, according to the Department of Finance and Administration's initial estimates.

It's misleading to focus on tax cuts, because the state's school funding formula insulates students and teachers from budget shortfalls, said state Sen. Jane English, R-North Little Rock, who is chairman of the Senate Education Committee.

Even so, lawmakers' actions influence school funding levels, Kopsky said, and the tax cuts have hampered the state's ability to invest in pre-kindergarten, in-school health and nutrition initiatives, and after-school and summer programs.

"There's really solid research that shows investing in any of those things would help every child in Arkansas the day after they're implemented -- immediate returns," Kopsky said. Instead, initiatives such as charter schools are "consuming so much oxygen," he said.

There isn't much talk among lawmakers about increasing after-school or pre-kindergarten funding during next year's regular legislative session, English said, but the state is following through on its push to improve career education.

Enrollment in the state's pre-kindergarten program could double if the state invested the money for expansion, said Sen. Uvalde Lindsey, D-Fayetteville, who is vice chairman of the Education Committee.

A less expensive -- and less popular -- education-funding option might be to link teachers' and administrators' salaries and bonuses to student performance, he said, but "it's fraught with disaster."

"The teachers union's not going to like it. The administrators are not going to like it," Lindsey said, because it would single out a few educators as exemplary while the rest would seem deficient. "There are more losers than winners, so in a vote-getting process, you don't win many battles by p***ing off the majority," he said.

Whatever the solution, Lindsey said, the state needs to pay more attention to low-income, rural and special education students.

"What works in education doesn't change a hell of a lot," he said. "I think we know some of the problems -- a lot of it is, do we have the political will to change direction?"

SundayMonday on 06/26/2016

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