It seems that America’s biggest nurseries are failing at their job.
Those “nursuries”—the states with the largest-growing youth populations—tend to produce the worst outcomes for kids, judged by such measures as high-school graduation, access to health insurance, and exposure to poverty. The states that produce the best outcomes for kids tend to be either stagnant or declining in their youth populations.
That means the United States is increasingly relying on the states that are most struggling—and often making the least effort—to equip their kids to succeed and ultimately build the country’s future workforce and consumers. “The fact that we have so many kids living in parts of the country where the outcomes aren’t as good … is something we are going to pay for later,” says the demographer Bill Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program who recently analyzed the youth-population trends for all 50 states.
[For more of this story, written by Ronald Brownstein, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...oor-outcomes/400751/]
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