CFK Reports From: Measuring Child Well-being: The Education Flatline?
Event: Release of 2006 Child Well-being Index; panel discussion
Organized By: The Brookings Center on Children and Families; the Foundation for Child Development and Duke University
Where/When: Falk Auditorium – The Brookings Institution, March 28, 2006

Report by: Susan Phillips

From 1975 through 2005, U.S. children made virtually no progress in their educational attainment, at least according to the measures tracked by developers of the Child Well-being Index, or CWI. That "flatline" was the topic of this presentation and panel discussion.

This is the third year that Brookings and the Foundation for Child Development have released the Child Well-being Index, or CWI. The index was developed by Kenneth Land of Duke University, and tracks seven "domains": health, safety, education, family economic well-being, community connectedness, emotional/spiritual well-being, and social development.

Each year, the researchers focus on one of the seven domains, and this year the spotlight was on education.

Land reviewed the broad trends revealed by the CWI this year. Overall, the trend is positive, said Land, driven by improvements in the safety, emotional/spiritual well-being and community connectedness domains, and smaller improvements in family economic well-being. However, in addition to the lack of educational improvement, the researchers found continued declines in health and social development – the first attributed primarily to the impact of rising obesity rates and the second driven by changes in family composition.

(One recurring criticism of the CWI is that it gives equal weight to each domain, so that, for instance, improvements in the measures of emotional/spiritual well-being, which include things such as involvement in church, can trump declines in children’s health or economic security.)

Interestingly, Land noted, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 appeared to drive a sharp increase in children’s safety in the following year.

Focusing on the educational domain, Land said that one positive finding is that increased pre-Kindergarten enrollment rates do seem to serve as a "leading indicator" for improved reading and math scores among 9-year-olds. This means that if current trends continue, with states making greater investments in expanding access to pre-K, the overall educational attainment of students should go up over time.

Land said that the changing racial and ethnic mix among public school students is probably "a partial explanation" for the lack of clear progress on educational measures.

Ray Simon, deputy secretary of education with the U.S. Department of Education, said he believes that the reforms embodied in No Child Left Behind will soon begin to prove their effectiveness in the form of improved achievement by students, but that high school reform must be the new priority. "We have significant problems getting high school reforms to scale," said Simon. "We’re losing our edge, particularly in math and science."

Other panelists included Marty West, a research fellow at Brookings, who spoke about whether charter schools could become part of the solution to the problem of stagnating student achievement; Gene Maeroff of Columbia University Teacher’s College, who argued that reforms will be most effective if targeted on the early years, specifically Pre-K through third grade; Diane Ravitch of Brookings and NYU, who argued the time has come for a national curriculum, national standards, and a national achievement test; and Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, who noted that despite the clear evidence that teacher quality is a key to improving achievement, there is little consensus on how to improve teacher quality or direct the best teachers to the neediest students.

The report is available on the Brookings website, and a transcript will be posted soon.