Transcript
RON HASKINS: ...
This is more or less the second edition of Ken Land's Index of Child Well-Being, supported by the Foundation for Child Development. For those of you who are interested in this area, it is actually quite fascinating. He has a very long history that goes back to many, many years ago, and Ken Land, I won't tell how many years, but many years, even back to a former association with people in this very building. So the history of child well-being is long and extremely interesting.
The one common strand, I think, in this history is that most people who have been involved, their goal has been to figure out a way, either through the use of a single composite number or of several numbers, to vividly portray the trends in the well-being of the nation's children, and, of course, it's been either in the back of their mind or in many cases in the front of their mind that this might have an impact on public policy, especially if someone paid careful attention to using this information to impact on public policy.
And as I said, Ken Land has been a leader in this field for many, many years, which is quite remarkable, because in order to do that, he has had to overcome his affiliation with Duke University, and so I compliment you on that, Ken.
The most straightforward and obvious use of these indexes is to identify problem areas and then to trace progress over a number of years, and so when we released this index last year and again this year, we have used the occasion to shine a spotlight on some of these problem areas, and the two that we've selected this year are teen pregnancy and youth violence.
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