Dive Brief:
- Children’s overall well-being worsened between 2019 and 2024, particularly when accounting for education, health and economic outcomes, according to the 2026 Kids Count Data Book released Monday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
- The national score for children’s wellbeing — measured based on four indicators that include economic well-being, education, health, and family and community — dropped from 553 in 2019 to 547 in 2024, the foundation said. Education saw the sharpest score decline, from 518 to 417, while children’s health dipped from 624 to 607.
- The foundation also found racial disparities present across all four categories. In 2024, for example, 4th graders who are Black, Latino, and American Indian or Alaska Native all saw notably higher rates of reading improficiency compared to White students and the national average.
Dive Insight:
The latest findings on children’s well-being raise “serious concerns about the long-term academic success and future opportunities for children and for young people,” said Florencia Gutierrez, senior associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, during a Friday session at the Education Writers Association’s National Seminar in Baltimore.
“The data book reminds us that learning doesn’t happen in isolation. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” Gutierrez said. “Economic stability, health, housing and community conditions all shape a child’s ability to succeed in school.”
Gutierrez added that there were some minor improvements in indicators for child poverty and parental employment. However, she said, many families still continue to struggle with increased housing costs, economic instability and gaps in healthcare coverage.
Within the data book’s measurements on education, the foundation said that the percentage of 3- and 4-year-old children who were not in school rose from 52% between 2015 and 2019 to 54% between 2020 and 2024. Likewise, the percentage of 4th graders not proficient in reading increased from 66% in 2019 to 70% in 2024, and the percentage of 8th graders not proficient in math rose from 67% to 73%.
There was one bright spot, however — the percentage of high schoolers not graduating on time did see a slight decline from 14% to 13% between the 2018-19 and 2023-24 school years.
A key takeaway from the Kids Count report is that pandemic education recovery is “still unfinished” but also “deeply unequal,” particularly when the data is disaggregated by race, said Augustus Mays, vice president of partnerships and engagement at EdTrust, during the Friday session.
The findings on reading and math proficiency from 2024, Mays said, “show that our systems are not producing sustained, equitable recovery."
EdTrust has been pushing over the past decade for states to improve their student funding formulas to be more weighted for their students’ needs, Mays said. Recently, he added, that could be seen in Michigan, where the state passed a bipartisan law that drives state funding to schools in areas with concentrated poverty and also prioritizes multilingual students.
At the same time, Mays said EdTrust is concerned at the federal level over cuts made in last year’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Because of that, he said that “states are going to have to pick up the sort of slack where the federal government has walked away for now.”
