What’s up this week at Oklahoma Policy Institute? The Weekly Wonk is dedicated to this week’s events, publications, and blog posts.

This week at OK Policy, we posted the second blog in a three-part series on “Oklahoma’s Unemployment Gap,” examining the persistence of racial disparities in unemployment.  Oklahoma’s Unemployment Gap (Part Two): Why the labor market isn’t colorblind, explores the causes for the state’s black-white unemployment gap and suggests reasons for its persistence.  We alerted you to an upcoming event next week – UCO will host a lecture by Andrew Ross Sorkin on August 31st, New York Times journalist and author of the book, “Too Big To Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System – and Themselves.” Read the rest of this entry »

Erin Lamey is the KIDS COUNT/Research Director for the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy. KIDS COUNT is a project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, dedicated to tracking child well-being.

Many young people entering Oklahoma’s workforce year-after-year are unprepared for the challenges that life in the “real world” brings. In fact, one out of four workforce-aged adults in Oklahoma lack the basic skills needed to succeed in an occupational training course or knowledge-based job. This is troublesome to Oklahoma employers seeking to recruit and retain qualified applicants. Employers want employees who are productive and require little supervision.

Oklahoma KIDS COUNT released a new issue brief today that discusses strategies to improve workforce development. We have highlighted four areas that research shows to be most effective in workforce development. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy’s annual Fall Children’s Legislative Forum will be held Tuesday, October 12th and Wednesday, October 13th.  The theme this year is “Protect Kids”, and the main goal of the event will be to create consensus around a set of core principles to guide decision-making during these continuing tough budget times.

The main event will be held on Wednesday,  October 13th at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond.  Child advocates will meet for a day-long session to discuss the recent  severe budget cuts and their impact on critical services for children.  In addition to briefings by state leaders and policy experts (including yours truly), participants will develop guiding principles that policymakers can use to measure how legislation might affect Oklahoma’s children. Registration for the Forum is $75; you can register online here.

The Children’s Legislative Forum will be preceded by two events on Tuesday, October 12th:

• In the afternoon (time and location TBA), OICA will host offer a briefing on the 2010 Kids Count databook providing the latest data on child well-being in Oklahoma.  This event will be free but pre-registration is required.
• At 7:00 p.m., OICA will co-host a debate featuring the State Schools Superintendent candidates along with the UCO College of Education and Professional Studies, the Early Childhood Association of Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Child Care Resource and Referral Association, and the Oklahoma Afterschool Network.   The program will be held at UCO; room to be announced.  Free of charge.

Anyone who wants to better understand the challenges facing Oklahoma children and families and make a difference in shaping future policy decisions should be sure to attend the Fall Forum.

For advocates, policymakers, and the general public, having access to reliable data is among the essential building blocks of informed discussion and debate. Last week at the Fall Forum event of the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy (OICA), participants were introduced to the new KIDS COUNT data center, a great online resource that should help guide policy discussions and decisions in Oklahoma on a whole range of issues over the coming years. Read the rest of this entry »

Note – Occasionally we plan to re-run blog posts on topical subjects that you may have missed the first time around. Recently, the Annie E. Casey released its annual Kids Count report measuring how states are faring on a range of indicators of child well-being . As the Tulsa World reported, Oklahoma’s overall ranking dropped to 44th  and we fared worse on 6 of 9 indicators than we did in 2000.  In this June blog post, we examined the disparity between our state’s growing wealth and persistently poor performance on measures of personal and social well-being.

Back in March, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released 2008 data on state personal income, which is the most widely used measure of a state’s relative prosperity. We took note of it at the time in our April Numbers You Need bulletin, focusing on Oklahoma’s rank as the state with the fourth strongest rate of growth in  personal income (5.4 percent) for the year.

Perhaps the bigger story, which hasn’t received much attention,  is that the state’s strong economic growth over the course of this decade has propelled Oklahoma from near the bottom to the middle rungs of states in per capita personal income. As recently as 2000, Oklahoma ranked 42nd in state per capita personal income at $23,582. Between 2000 and 2008, Oklahoma’s per capita personal income jumped 51.2 percent, fourth among the states behind only Wyoming, Louisiana,  and North Dakota (all, not coincidentally, states that have shared in the boom in mineral prices of recent years). As of 2008, Oklahoma ranks 28th with per capita personal income of $36,899, which is less than $3,000 below the national average of  $39,751. Oklahoma ranks above every southern state except Florida and Texas, and has surged past not only declining Rust Belt states like Ohio (32nd), Michigan (34th)and Indiana (39th), but also such seemingly dynamic southern and western states as Oregon (31st), North Carolina (36th), Georgia (40th) and Arizona (42nd). Read the rest of this entry »