The IEL Policy Exchange seminar, What Are the Policy Implications of the New National Indicators of Child Well-Being?, brought together nearly 60 participants from Executive Branch agencies, Congressional committee offices and nonprofit organizations to discuss America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being. For a list of seminar participants, see Appendix A.
The seminar featured a distinguished bipartisan panel who commented on this report by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics:
- Ron Haskins, staff of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Ways and Means;
- Con Hogan, of the Vermont Agency of Human Services and the American Public Welfare Association;
- Anna Kondratas, of the Urban Institute;
- Wendell Primus, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; and
- Katherine Wallman, of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The panelists’ remarks sparked a wide-ranging and open discussion about how collecting and reporting data can-and should-directly influence the way government works. Too often, public perceptions turn on a riveting but atypical anecdote that makes a good story, but bad social policy. Too rarely do the hard facts have sufficient energy to galvanize public opinion, much less public action. America’s Children is a promising effort to bridge this gap by painting a coherent picture of the lot of children in America that informs the public and helps leaders sort the statistical wheat from chaff.
"How many of us are used to having discussions where you try to look at the connections among these issues?" Con Hogan remarked at the seminar. "We just get lost in our own silos. We may not come up with the answers here, but we’re going to have a much better perspective."
The Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics
In the fall of 1994, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the heads of six federal statistical and research agencies created the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. The Forum-which President Clinton formally created through an April, 1997 Executive Order-now has participants from 16 federal agencies, as well as partners from private research organizations. The Forum’s mission is to foster coordination, collaboration and integration among the federal statistical agencies that collect and report data about children and families.
The Forum meets two or three times each year. Through three staff groups, it works to:
- Improve the reporting and dissemination of data about children across the agencies;
- Develop priorities to improve data collection about children and youth; and
- Meet the challenge of producing state and local data about children.
The Forum’s work to develop meaningful child and family indicators that can promote, as well as measure, accountability for results is not an isolated federal phenomenon. Efforts to develop indicators of children’s well-being have sprung up at the local, state and national levels in the past few years as the federal government has devolved more responsibility to states and localities. Redefining Progress, a California-based nonprofit organization, is focusing on developing state and local indicators. The President’s Council on Environmental Quality is developing indicators of sustainable development that include measures of social conditions as well as economic and environmental quality. The Kids Count project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation is a national and state-by-state effort to track the status of children in the United States. And a network of state-level Kids Count projects provides a detailed community-by-community picture of the condition of children.
The IEL Policy Exchange has followed and supported the work of the Forum since it began. Policy Exchange staff have actively participated in meetings of the Forum and its subcommittees: for example, providing suggestions for disaggregating data by specific gender, ethnic, and regional populations to help policy makers understand the important "story." The work of the Forum complements the continuing interest of the Policy Exchange in promoting accountability for results in programs and policies affecting children, youth and families.
America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being
America’s Children, released in July of 1997, reflects the commitment and involvement of members of the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. It was prepared by the Forum’s Reporting Committee with input from many other agency staff members, and technical assistance from Child Trends, Inc., a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that studies children, youth and families.
America’s Children includes 25 key indicators of the condition of children, organized into four clusters: economic security, health, behavior and social environment, and educational status.
With assistance from federal policy makers, foundations, academic researchers, and state and local children’s service providers, the Forum developed tough guidelines to select the final indicators. They required that the indicators be:
- Easy to understand by a variety of audiences;
- Objectively based on substantial research connecting them to child well-being and based on reliable data;
- Balanced so that no single area of children’s lives dominates the report;
- Measured regularly so that they can be updated and show trends over time; and
- Representative of large segments of the population, rather than one particular group.
Data for the key indicators come primarily from national surveys and from birth and death records maintained at the federal level. Although state and local agencies often have administrative data on important areas of children’s lives, the report did not use these data since their availability and quality can be affected by both policy differences across localities and resource constraints.
The Forum’s report complements other key data collection efforts at the national, state and local levels. In creating America’s Children, the Forum aimed to raise awareness of the condition of children in the United States to the same level of attention as the national economy. "The Federal Government measures the condition of our economy and our environment with great frequency and in varied ways," the report states. "The Nation’s children deserve no less."
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