The Annie E. Casey Foundation released its latest Kids Count Report yesterday that looks at child well-being across the country. For the first time, its researchers broke down the numbers across ethnic and racial groups and found disparities nationwide when it comes to how our children are faring.
For Michigan’s youth, the results were particularly abysmal, especially for African American children, where only two states - Wisconsin and Mississippi – had worse numbers. In Michigan, about 70 percent of African American children live in high poverty areas.
Jane Zehnder-Merrell, director of the Kids Count in Michigan project at the Michigan League for Public Policy, says this is the first year that the national project has done a report that compares states on the basis of race and ethnicity.