Measuring Child Well-Being: The Education Flatline?

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.

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.