Our children hold our future in their small hands. With that in mind, as Illinois Issues marks its 25th anniversary we recognize the importance of measuring how well Illinois has cared for the youngest segment of its population.
Writer Jon Marshall has taken a comprehensive look at the quality of the lives of children and whether governmental policy has helped or hurt. He's told us that more of Illinois' children live in poverty than in 1975, the year the first Illinois Issues rolled off the presses.
And far more of our kids are victims of violence. Sadly, that comes as no surprise. We're about to close a decade in which the murder of small children is so customary that our collective outrage wasn't ignited until a sniper's bullet killed a 7-year-old as he walked to school with his small hand planted firmly in his mother's palm.
The Editors
We in Illinois have created amazing opportunities for our children in the last quarter of the 20th century. With the click of a mouse, kids can explore the world through computers. They can get advanced medical care undreamed of a generation ago. From almost the time they can walk, they can study violin, take tot ballet classes and join soccer, T-ball and a multitude of other leagues. A lucky few can even go to preschools with computer labs, tennis courts and television studios.
For other Illinois children, though, these golden opportunities are no more real than mirages. By almost any standard, the Land of Lincoln continues to fail hundreds of thousands of its kids. Over the last 25 years, Illinois' children have suffered from growing economic disparity, deteriorating family and community structures and just plain negligence. As a result, more children are poor, targets of violence and victims of abuse and neglect. "A lot of kids are growing up with a lack of hope for the future," says John Kelker, who analyzes youth programs as president of the United Way of Central Illinois.
We have, in effect, created two states for our children, separate and unequal. "There are children who are experiencing utterly different lives who live within
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miles or blocks of each other," says Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, who observes the fate of Illinois families as editor of Chicago Parent magazine. "For kids in middle- and upper-class homes, their parents have access to all sorts of enriching activities. A few blocks away are parents who are barely scraping by and don't have time to do much for their kids."
The long-term impact of living in poverty, defined as an annual income of about $16,000 for a two-adult/two-
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child family, can be devastating. Children growing up in poverty are more likely than others to die before their first birthday, drop out of school, be abused or neglected and go to bed hungry, according to Voices for Illinois Children, a nonprofit advocacy group.
According to Kids Count, changes in Illinois' tax policies tend to favor families with higher incomes. In 1995, the state's poorest families, those whose income averaged $18,400 per year, paid about 13.6 percent of their income in state and local taxes. At the same time, those families with an average income of about $53,200 paid 9.8 percent. The very wealthy -- the top 1 percent who averaged $1.1 million per year -- paid 6.1 percent of their income in state and local taxes. Though Illinois has moved to double the personal income tax exemption to $2,000, only five other states tax families at income levels lower than this state.
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even know the folks down the block. "People now spend more time in their backyard than on their front porch," the United Way's John Kelker observes.
Instead of relatives and neighbors watching out for each other's children, more families now rely on schools and social service agencies for help. Indeed, schools increasingly play the roles that parents used to, offering before- and after-school programs to keep children busy and safe.
The number of young people who were victims of violence grew even faster than the number of those who commited crimes in the last quarter century, Bretag says. In 1974, for instance, the state received only 1,864 allegations of child abuse and neglect. In 1996, the state confirmed more than 53,000 cases. (Certainly, better reporting has played some role in that increase, though no one can say how much.) Further, of the 38,134 crimes against children that were reported in 1997 in Illinois, 73 percent were violent in nature.
Even our smallest towns are no longer immune to violence against young people. Pockets of drugs and gangs existed everywhere a generation ago, the United Way's John Kelker says, but now the violence is more intense and sometimes impossible to avoid. "Our kids live in fear" because of the prevalence of violence in our society, he adds. "In some ways, the smaller communities are less able to deal with it."
Other indicators of children's well-being are starting to show improvement
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as well, says Robert Goerge, associate director of the University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children. Reports of abuse and neglect are starting to drop, fewer teens are getting pregnant, immunization rates are rising and the number of children who live in poverty is leveling off. A rising economy and improved public awareness are helping, he says.
And in the last decade, officials approved a number of changes that increased funding and accountability of Illinois' schools. In the mid-1970s, on the heels of reforms designed to "equalize resources" among schools, state government covered nearly half the cost of educating Illinois' kids. By 1996, that share had dropped to 32.1 percent, meaning local property wealth once again increasingly determined the quality of kids' education. Last year, for example, New Trier High School District in a well-to-do area north of Chicago spent $13,927 per student. Meanwhile, Trico Unit District in Jackson County, located in the poorer southern region of the state, spent $4,596, less than a third as much, to educate one child.
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were considered by some to be the worst in the nation. The first reforms, approved in 1988, established elected local school councils in that school district, the largest in the state, giving parents more say in running their neighborhood schools. The second reform effort, approved in 1995, handed overall responsibility for the schools to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.
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Illinois has begun to make progress over the past three or four years on some of the issues that matter most to children. But we still have a long way to go.
How do we compare with other states? According to a report released this summer by the Children's Rights Council, a national child-advocacy group, Illinois ranks 33rd among the 50 states and the District of Columbia when it comes to being a good place to raise kids. Our ranking takes into account such factors as the number of babies who die before their first birthdays, the availability of prenatal care and immunization, the number of children who are abused and neglected, and the number of kids who drop out of high school, get arrested and have babies.
Illinois fared even worse in another study. In this year's national Kids Count survey, which is sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Illinois ranked 34th out of the 50 states and Washington, D.C. The seven other Midwestern states ranked higher. So did other highly urbanized states such as California, New York and Pennsylvania. According to that survey, 10 percent of Illinois' teens between ages 16 and 19 have dropped out of high school, 30 percent of children live with parents who lack full-time employment and 27 percent live with a single parent.
All of these factors make the future less bright for many of this state's children. But most troubling, the poorest Illinois citizens are those who are under the age of 18. While poverty rates for older age groups dropped, the rate for children jumped from 16.5 percent of the population in 1975 to 22 percent in 1985. In the last three years, that rate has inched down to 19 percent, or 680,000 poor Illinois children. Another 25 percent of the state's children live right on the margin of the federal government's definition of poverty, says Virginia Mason, executive director of the Family Resource Coalition of America.
But we can't just blame government for the condition of our children. The problems cut across economic lines and are embedded within our families, our neighborhoods and our communities.
Since the mid-1970s, more children spend time without supervision, raised by single parents or by couples where both parents must work to make ends meet. As a result, children often return from school to find no adult at home. "This puts kids at a disadvantage at a very young age," says Andy Anderberg, who works with thousands of children as executive director of the Springfield YMCA. "If kids are coming home and parents aren't coming home, the kids still have time on their hands and feel outside peer pressure more." That peer pressure can be good, but if the influence is a negative one -- encouraging kids to smoke, take drugs or join gangs, for example -- the results can be deadly.
More than 65 percent of mothers with children under the age of 6 are now in the work force, slightly more than twice as many as in 1970, yet many cannot find quality child care, according to Kids Count.
Illinois families must spend an average of $34 a day, 83 percent of a minimum-wage worker's daily pay, to leave a child under the age of 2 at a child-care center. Moreover, many parents must work nights and weekends when little professional care is available. And the quality of the care that is available is often questionable. That's because, in part, we have relegated those who care for our youngest children to the ranks of low-paid, low-status workers. Full-time child-care teachers in Illinois earn on average about $15,000 a year. "We pay child-care workers less than we pay people who park cars," says Jerry Stermer, president of Voices for Illinois Children. The upshot: 40 percent of child-care workers quit every year.
Further, parents have a harder time than they did even 25 years ago, turning to relatives for help in watching their children. The accelerating mobility of our society -- 18 percent of Illinois' students changed schools in 1997 -- means children have become more isolated from grandparents or aunts and uncles. And neighborhood ties have loosened, meaning parents can rely less on the folks down the block to watch their kids. In fact, they may not
It's no surprise that more children are getting into trouble with the law. Sadly, kids under the age of 18 have fallen increasingly into the lap of the legal system. Between 1983 and 1998, the number of Illinois juveniles who were on probation jumped by 34.5 percent, from 8,870 to 11,932. Between 1978 and 1997, the number of young people in Illinois prisons more than doubled, from 940 to 2,121.
The responsibility for these statistics falls directly into the laps of adults. "I can't tell you the number of times we hear from kids that 'if only one adult cared about me, I'd feel better,'" says Debbie Bretag, executive director of the Illinois Center for Violence Prevention, a nonprofit agency that works with children to make their lives less dangerous.
Although violence among teens has started to drop in the 1990s, a steady succession of horrific events have dominated the headlines in the past decade or so, frightening parents and children alike. Laurie Dann went on a shooting rampage through a Winnetka elementary school in 1988, killing one child and injuring five others before killing herself. Dantrell Davis, 7, was killed by gang gunfire on his way to a Chicago school in 1992. Robert Sandifer, 11, shot a teenage girl in Chicago and was then killed by members of his own gang in 1994. Two Chicago boys, ages 10 and 11, dropped 5-year-old Eric Morse out a 14th-floor window in 1994. And that's just the short list.
Fortunately, the rate of confirmed cases of child abuse and neglect has started to drop in the last couple of years.
So is more attention from state government. "The legislature has really learned about the importance of early childhood development," says state Rep. Julie Hamos, a Chicago Democrat who serves on the House Child Support Committee. For instance, Illinois first began funding preschool programs in 1985 at $3 million a year. This year, spending for Head Start and pre-kindergarten reached $141.7 million. In 1997, state government also began giving child-care subsidies to low-income parents. For example, a family of four in Sangamon County, making below $25,975 can get $16 per day for the care of a 3-year-old.
Another new initiative is Healthy Families Illinois, which enlists community groups to visit the homes of new parents to offer advice and support. "I think this is a major turning point in Illinois policy, that we're recognizing the importance of parents in the first five years of life," says Jerry Stermer of Voices for Illinois Children. "We are no longer waiting for failures to occur before responding."
But two years ago, the state's politicians agreed to set and then provide the dollars to fund a minimum level of spending for each elementary and secondary student, and they agreed to allow that foundation level to increase over three years. The state's share of education spending has climbed to 37.6 percent. In fact, between fiscal years 1997 and 2000, the state boosted public education spending by more than $2 billion to $6.3 billion, a 47 percent increase, according to Scott Goldstein and Jonathan Njus of the Metropolitan Planning Council, a nonprofit group of business, professional and planning leaders.
In addition, state officials approved reforms designed to improve Chicago's public schools, which in the early 1980s
That district's 436,000 students are now getting more tutoring and intensive prekindergarten and afterschool programs. And they will not automatically move to the next grade if they are failing. Although Chicago students' performance on test scores still lags behind the national average, that district can boast that reading and math scores have gone up for the last five years in the elementary grades and that high school scores have gone up for the last three years.
Illinois officials also took the lead nationally five years ago when they ensured, by law, that homeless children could attend school. And they moved to assure basic health coverage for the state's 351,000 uninsured children. Though state officials are struggling to reach all eligible children, the new KidCare program offers comprehensive health insurance to families whose income is below 185 percent of the poverty level.
Shadowing these improvements, though, are federal and state changes in welfare rules that could end up making a huge difference, positive or negative, in the lives of hundreds of thousands of Illinois children. "For every woman on welfare, there are two children," says state Rep. Carol Ronen, a Chicago Democrat who chairs the House Children and Youth Committee. "We still don't know welfare reform's impact on them."
The welfare reform bill passed by Congress in 1996 forces entitlement recipients to seek work. In response, Illinois adopted reforms, which included a 60-month lifetime cap on welfare. But parents with children under the age of 1 were exempted from the work requirement.
While state government is making major changes, some of the greatest progress in policies important to children is happening in communities. For example, in 1994 the Chicago Public Schools launched Cradle to Classroom, a program that enables neighbors to see if new parents need help. Thousands of park districts, libraries, religious groups and community organizations also are creating after-school and weekend activities for children.
Opportunities have increased especially for girls in the past quarter century. A generation ago, seeing a girl playing soccer or basketball was rare. Now, just as many girls as boys fill ball fields on weekends. "Little girls are growing up feeling they have a lot more opportunities than they used to," says Bernice Weissbourd, founder and president of Family Focus, which runs programs in the Chicago region for parents and children. "They know they can be doctors, scientists, computer analysts or whatever they want to be."
Opportunities have increased, too, for children with disabilities. New federal laws encourage integration of the disabled into classrooms and activities, says Robert Bloom, executive director of the Jewish Children's Bureau of Chicago.
But this progress for some children doesn't mean we can forget our dismal performance with others. "We still have not solved fundamental questions that result in nearly 20 percent of our children growing up poor, 40,000 a year being abused and neglected and large numbers being hauled off to jail," says Stermer. "We've turned the corner on a number of things, but we're far from doing everything we ought to be doing. "It's not that we don't care about these problems, but the solutions tend to be more complex than we want to grapple with. We just don't make it a priority.''ž
Jon Marshall writes extensively about social, political and family issues. His last article for Illinois Issues, "Patching the Cracks," analyzed the deteriorating condition of the state's roads and mass transit and appeared in the March 1999 issue. He has two children. Funding for the magazine's focus on the lives of children in this issue is provided by the Woods Fund of Chicago.