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Past Event

Center on Children and Families Briefing

Measuring Child Well-Being: The Education Flatline?

Education, Children & Families


Event Summary

The Brookings Center on Children and Families, in cooperation with the Foundation for Child Development and Duke University, has released the 2006 Child Well-Being Index (CWI). The CWI, which focuses on seven domains of child well-being including health, spiritual well-being, and education is based on thirty years of data collected from a variety of national surveys. The new report shows continued improvement in the status of America's children, but also provides sobering new statistics on obesity and education.

Event Information

When

Tuesday, March 28, 2006
10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Where

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Washington, DC
Map

Contact: Brookings Office of Communications

E-mail: events@brookings.edu

Phone: 202.797.6105

According to the CWI, child well-being declined during the 1980s. While child well-being recovered and improved after the mid-1990s, the education domain, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, has been relatively flat over the entire thirty-year-period despite a variety of national, state, and local reforms. Panelists will address two important questions: Why so flat? What reforms promise to be most effective in increasing achievement? Panelists will take questions from the audience following the discussion.

Transcript

RON HASKINS: We're very pleased to have what amounts to our third edition of the Index of Child Well-being. This is something that we release here every year for the past three years.

We had two broad intentions in doing this. One is, and Ken [Land] has been a leader in this area, and to create a broad and high quality measure of child well-being that expresses not just one number that gives an index of child well-being, but also has a range of more specific measures in other areas and domains of well-being that the public and policy makers and people like you would be interested in. And Ken has done a magnificent job of that.

And then the second thing, of course, that we would like to do—and this is a goal that here in Washington everybody is trying to bring attention to their own constituency—our constituency is children, and we regard the child well-being index as a way to bring attention to children in at least two ways. First of all, an overall indication of the well-being of children, especially as trends. Is it going down or up? Is it high or low? But then, more particularly, because of the domains that Ken has developed, to give more specific information about several specific domains of child development. And that turns out to be a very fortunate feature of the child well-being index because things go in different directions. And as is the case this year, we find many things are generally pretty good, but there are some dimensions on which there are very serious problems.

And, of course, this year, as we have done in past years, we have selected one domain that causes us concern. And this year it's education for reasons that Ken will show you.

So at this event today, we are really doing two things. We're publishing an index and trying to bring attention to children's issues. And then we're also looking into more detail in the area of education and what's wrong with education. And then we would like to do what is appropriate here in Washington, namely mention several specific solutions that we've invited well known experts to propose and to defend.

Read the full transcript (PDF—205kb)

Participants

Address

Ray Simon

Deputy Secretary of Education
U.S. Department of Education

Introduction

Ron Haskins

Senior Fellow, Economic Studies

Moderator

Ray Suarez

Senior Correspondent
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, National Public Radio

Overview of Index

Kenneth Land

Professor of Demographic Studies and Sociology
Duke University

Panelists:

Diane Ravitch

Nonresident Senior Fellow, Governance Studies

Gene Maeroff

Senior Fellow, Hechinger Institute
Columbia University Teachers College

Kate Walsh

President
National Council on Teacher Quality

Marty West

Research Fellow
The Brookings Institution


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