Should We Take Texas’ Low Rankings in Child Well-Being with a Grain of Salt?

The latest Kids Count report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation was released last week. It’s the 25th edition of the report, and it once again shows Texas ranks low among the U.S. states in overall child well-being.

That ranking is based on a variety of factors, including education (more than half of Texas children don’t attend pre-school), and economic indicators, like the percentage of kids living in poverty.

But public policy experts and social scientists don’t always agree on what data to use to define something like poverty.

We talk with Texas Kids Count director Frances Deviney from the Center for Public Policy Priorities about the Lone Star state’s place in the latest Kids Count report, and the 24 that preceded it. And we explore what a quarter century of such reporting may tell us about whether policies designed to serve our kids in the Lone Star State are as effective as they could be.

Then, we hear an alternate view from Chuck Devore, Vice President of Policy with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative Texas think tank which takes issue with the Kids Count report’s use of the federal government’s traditional measure of poverty, and prefers the use of what’s called a supplemental measure of poverty.

And finally, we’re joined by Dr. Robert Sanborn, President and CEO of Children at Risk, a Houston-based nonprofit, to discuss the state of child well-being here in Greater Houston.