If you were raising a black child in the U.S., which metropolitan area would be best at helping your child thrive? Which would be worst? What if you were raising an Hispanic child? Or an Asian child? Or a white child?

A new HSPH report scores the living conditions experienced by children in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, and exposes a consistently dismal picture for black and Hispanic children. So bad, in fact, that rarely do the very best metro areas for black and Hispanic children perform even close to the average level for white children.

"American children grow up in the same country, but under vastly different circumstances," said Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, HSPH Associate Professor of Society, Human Development, and Health, and co-author of the report. "Children are our future, and we are failing them, particularly black and Hispanic children, whose entire range of resources and opportunities is more limited than that of other groups."

The report, "Children Left Behind: How Metropolitan Areas Are Failing America's Children," is available for download, along with a separate PDF of graphs and charts. The web site and report were unveiled at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on January 24. See box at bottom for more information on the site.

See the profiles and rankings of metro areas in terms of specific socioeconomic indicators at DiversityData.org.

Overall, across the 100 largest metro areas in the country, black children have the worst scores for indicators of health, family income and home ownership, neighborhood income and home ownership, residential and school segregation, and school poverty. In most cases, Hispanic children are the next worse off.

Said co-author Barbara Krimgold of the Center for the Advancement of Health (CFAH), "We were stunned at the extent to which black and white children grow up in different worlds with radically different life chances." In addition to Krimgold and Acevedo-Garcia, the report's authors are Nancy McArdle of HSPH, Theresa Osypuk of the University of Michigan, and Bonnie Lefkowitz, a consultant to CFAH.

DISADVANTAGED AT BIRTH

Both black and Hispanic children face a childhood of particularly tough challenges. "There is a racial/ethnic hierarchy in terms of opportunities and resources," said Acevedo-Garcia. "You can think of black and Hispanic children as never getting a break in some metro areas."

Black children are at particular risk from birth because they are far more likely to be born underweight and/or premature, increasing the chance that they will experience physical or learning disabilities. The most prevalent low birthweight rate for black newborns in the report was nine to 12 percent, found in 66 percent of the metros, compared to three to six percent for white babies in 95 percent of the metros.

"We can think of healthy birthweight as an endowment given to children, and in this, we are failing black children from the get-go," said Acevedo-Garcia.

Surprisingly, considering the challenging socioeconomic conditions in which Hispanic mothers sometimes live, their children tend to be born at healthy weights. This phenomenon, dubbed the "Hispanic health paradox," is not well understood, said Acevedo-Garcia, and while the phenomenon provides Hispanic children with a start similar to white children, the initial advantage is subsumed by subsequent disadvantages.

HOME LIFE

Black children are more likely to live in neighborhoods with larger proportions of single-female-headed families than children in other racial/ethnic groups. Why does this matter? Because of two significant inequities. American women on average continue to lag behind men in rates of education levels, workforce participation, and wages. In 2005, the poverty rate for children living in female-headed households without a husband present was 43 percent compared to nine percent for children living in married-couple households. And the U.S. usually does not provide enough government financial support to keep families with only one parent, or families with only one working parent, or families with two low-wage parents, above the poverty level, asserted Krimgold.

A family's ownership of a home also plays a role in a child's environment. And here again, there are vast differences among racial/ethnic groups within the country's largest metro areas. In most areas, more than 70 percent of white families with children own their homes. However, in nearly all metros areas, the homeownership rates of black families is only 50 percent or less. Asian families do fairly well. In nearly three-quarters of metro areas, at least 60 percent of Asian families own their homes, but in only about seven percent of areas do Hispanic families have such homeownership rates, according to the report.

"The wealth of most Americans is tied to owning their homes," said Acevedo-Garcia. "Even if you were able to shift the home ownership rates for families of black children to the highest levels found for black families across metro areas, these families' rates would be lower than the average rates for white families."

SEPARATED BY CIRCUMSTANCE

Segregation by law ended in the U.S. in the 1960s, but de facto segregation persists. Black and Hispanic children live in different neighborhoods than do white and Asian children, according to the report. For the largest 100 metro areas with more than 5,000 black children in the U.S., 72 percent of black children and 56 percent of Hispanic children would need to move to a different neighborhood to be fully integrated with white children.

Schools experience de facto segregation as well. Although less than half (48 percent) of primary school students in the largest metropolitan areas are white, the average white student attends a school where most fellow students are also white. Similarly, although just a fifth of primary school students in the largest metropolitan areas are black, in 40 percent of the areas studied, the average black student attends a school that has a mostly black population. Of all groups, Asian students tend to be the most integrated and to attend schools that most closely mirror the composition of students in the metropolitan areas where they live.

IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT MONEY

Perhaps the most striking finding that emerges from the report is the nature of impoverishment in the metro areas. America's child poverty rates are the second highest among developed countries, according to UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre. And, according to the HSPH report, black and Hispanic children are much more likely to live in families whose income falls under the federal poverty line.

The poverty divide is double-edged. Not only are black and Hispanic children more likely to live in poor families, they are also more likely to live in impoverished neighborhoods. The report's authors call the situation "double jeapordy," and while some Americans may assume that poor children must automatically live in poor neighborhoods, that is often not the case with poor white children.

According to the report, in only four percent of metro areas do the majority of poor white children live in low-income neighborhoods. In about half of metro areas, the majority of poor Asian children live in low-income neighborhoods. Yet, in virtually all metro areas, the majority of poor black children live in low-income neighborhoods, and in 86 percent of metro areas, the majority of poor Hispanic children live in low-income neighborhoods.

The gap is in fact so startling that poor white children fare better than all black children in terms of neighborhood poverty levels. The report notes that the most prevalent neighborhood poverty rate facing poor white children (10 to 15 percent in 57 percent of metro areas) is lower than the most prevalent neighborhood poverty rate facing all black children, whether they are poor or not (15 to 20 percent in 37 percent of metro areas.)

"What this tells us is that family income alone does not explain how children end up in impoverished neighborhoods," said Acevedo-Garcia.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS

The authors of "Children Left Behind: How Metropolitan Areas Are Failing America's Children" describe multiple policy implications for what they have discovered. They emphasize the importance of relieving child poverty and note the federal government's ability to increase eligibility and benefits under the Earned Income Tax Credit, Transitional Aid for Needy Families program, Medicaid, and the State Child Health Insurance Program.

The authors also suggest that government at local, state, and federal levels can remove barriers and provide incentives to ameliorate residential and school segregation and to support home ownership by promoting neighborhood choice and mobility, preserving school integration programs, and changing the way No Child Left Behind and other educational efforts are funded to equalize expenditures across local jurisdictions.

"If nothing else, this report shows that black and Hispanic children confront multiple layers of risk," said Acevedo-Garcia. "The evidence for solutions is in the data. Some of the best metropolitan areas for some groups of children are the worst for other groups. This means that there is room for improving access to neighborhoods with better resources for the least advantaged black and Hispanic children."

The report "Children Left Behind" is the first analysis in a series planned to be drawn from DiversityData.org.

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