A new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows while children of color in Iowa fare slightly better than their white peers nationally, in the state they are trailing them in nearly every area.
The Race for Results report shows persistent gaps between kids of color and their white peers in safe places to live and play, access to affordable education from preschool to college, and the availability of training for the skills they need to make ends meet later in life. Common Good Iowa’s Anne Discher says the state’s children of color face disparate outcomes that jeopardize their well-being, and says Iowa fares only slightly better than neighboring states…
Children of color represent 1 of every 4 children in Iowa. The report says Black children in the state ranked twenty-sixth of forty-six states that participated. Latinos ranked twelfth and white kids ranked eighteenth.
The Race for Results report calls on Congress to expand the federal child tax credit. When lawmakers did that during the pandemic, it lifted 2-point-1 million children out of poverty, sending the child poverty rate down to 5-point-two percent, the lowest on record. In Iowa, Discher says kids are missing out on key developmental milestones largely due to a dramatic shift in the state’s economic direction…
This is the third edition of the Race for Results report, and contains child-focused data collected during and right after the pandemic.
(credit to Iowa News Service)
