The 10 American Cities Most Seriously Failing Their Youngest Residents: OMEP’s Groundbreaking Study on Child Poverty and Early Education Access
When you stroll through some Detroit neighborhoods on a weekday morning, the quiet can seem strange. underenrollment in schools. Shops closed. Young children at home when they would be in a classroom with a qualified early childhood educator in a different zip code. Although it doesn’t make headlines every week, it has been discreetly recorded, debated, and researched for years. The fact that almost three out of five children in Detroit live in poverty is more difficult to accept. That is not a topic for discussion. The first five years of a generation are shaped by that reality.
The National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health released research that demonstrated how concentrated this crisis has become in the biggest cities in the United States. The 71 largest cities in the nation had a child poverty rate of more than 30%, which was ten points higher than the national rate at the time. Since the 2007 recession, child poverty rates have increased by eight percentage points or more in seven of the ten cities with the highest rates. Fresno made an incredible 16-point leap. These statistics are not abstract. They are indicators of a serious structural issue that has persisted.
The top cities on the list—Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Fresno, Cincinnati, Memphis, Newark, Miami, St. Louis, and Milwaukee—are not chosen at random. Most have a familiar backstory. Some people lost their manufacturing jobs, and they never returned. The collapse of the housing devastated others. The children left behind in these areas are growing up during the critical years for social learning, language acquisition, and brain development, which is what unites them in addition to economic decline. Furthermore, a large number of them are not receiving the necessary early education support.
Researchers have been arguing for decades that early childhood education and care are among the few effective strategies that can start to end the cycle of poverty. Access to high-quality early learning environments benefits low-income children’s academic performance, health, and even future earnings. It’s not sentimentality that drives the urgency of early childhood care. The numbers are what matter. Furthermore, it is difficult to overstate the disparity between what is needed and what is available in places like Cleveland and Buffalo, where the majority of children live below the poverty line.
The knowledge has been around for a while, which makes it especially difficult to follow. Two-generation approaches, which combine high-quality early childcare for children with job training and education for parents, have been identified by experts as a way to improve families more sustainably. It’s not a difficult argument. When families are more stable, children perform better. When parents have legitimate career paths, families become more stable. However, despite the data continuing to come in year after year and pointing in the same direction, there has been little political desire to fund these kinds of programs on a large scale.
At about 25% nationwide, rates of child poverty among the youngest children—those under three—have continuously been even higher than the national average. That’s the window where intervention is most important, and it’s also the window where current programs typically fall short. Because infants and toddlers do not appear in school enrollment data like older children do, visibility may be a contributing factor. They are easier to ignore and more difficult to count.
Observing this in city after city gives the impression that American policymakers have become strangely at ease with the notion that child poverty is a permanent aspect of urban life rather than an issue that can be resolved. It is worthwhile to question that comfort. Despite their significance to American civic and economic life, the cities on these lists are failing in ways that directly jeopardize their own futures. A city is not simply falling behind if it is unable to invest in its youngest citizens. It’s borrowing against a debt that will be repaid for decades to come in courtrooms, hospitals, and classrooms.
