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.”

Also this week, we hosted a guest post by KIDS COUNT research director Erin Lamey on strategies to improve workforce development by investing in early childhood.  You can watch a half-hour broadcast of OETA’s Oklahoma Forum on our blog, featuring Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett and Tulsa Mayor Dewey Bartlett discussing the successes and challenges facing their cities.

In the Know, Policy Notes

• Stateline explains five ways that K-12 and college students will feel budget cuts this year.
• The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that since welfare reform fifteen years ago, the program’s role in supporting low-income families has declined dramatically.
• Jared Bernstein explains why shifting more costs to seniors is not the same as saving on health care spending.
• Miller-McCune examines the potential of mandatory teacher collaboration to improve school results.
• The Small Business Majority released a new guide for the 4 million small businesses that became eligible in 2010 for a tax credit to offset employer health plan costs.

Numbers of the Week

• 17 percent – Increase in foreclosure filings in Oklahoma between the 1st and 2nd quarter of 2011.
• 11,200 – Number of manufacturing jobs added to the Oklahoma economy between June 2010 and 2011, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the total non-farm jobs added (28,300).
• 34^th – Oklahoma’s rank nationally on students’ average ACT composite score, 2011
• 3,592 – Adults receiving a TANF cash assistance payment in Oklahoma, June 2011
• $1.500 Billion – Amount spent on programs for children aged 0 to 5 years in Oklahoma, FY 2010

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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.

Provide children with a healthy start. By the time children turn 3, approximately 85 percent of their core brain structure has developed. Healthy brain development is key to many life skills including language ability, problem solving, and social skills. A solid foundation of healthy attachments with caring adults, proper nutrition, and language development increase a child’s ability to learn. Children living in impoverished households are more likely to face challenges that hinder healthy brain growth. Parental support is critical in such households. Programs that offer parental support, such as evidence-based home visitation services, are important in protecting children in their earliest years. The state of Oklahoma invests in three home visitation programs: Children First and Start Right through the Oklahoma State Department of Health and Oklahoma Parents as Teachers through the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

Increase school readiness in Oklahoma. If a child has a healthy start they will be more likely to have the tools they need to be successful for the rest of their life. School readiness and language development are key predictors of academic success.  Children in low-income households are the least likely to receive a high-quality early childhood education. This results in a school readiness gap that begins when children enter kindergarten and never narrows. Access to early childcare programs is necessary for success.

Ensure that children read by third grade. Three out of four students who read below grade level at the end of third grade continue to read below grade level in high school. Reading proficiency at the end of third grade is also a reasonable predictor of whether or not they will graduate from high school. There is a huge gap between the reading proficiency level of children from low-income homes and children who are not low-income. This gap exists, without exception, in all 50 states in the nation, according to the KIDS COUNT Data Center. Forty-nine percent of Oklahoma’s children are low-income. Strategies that increase literacy are vital to the future success of our workforce.

Increase academic awareness and discipline in the middle grades. A recent study determined that “The level of academic achievement that students attain by eighth grade has a larger impact on their career and college readiness…than anything that happens academically in high school.” When the proper academic and social foundation is laid, students are the most successful. If remediation is delayed until high school it is seldom effective. Teaching career awareness and academic discipline before the end of middle school has been shown to increase college and career success.

By investing in these four critical areas, the high school graduation rate will improve, the college remediation rate will improve and the future of Oklahoma’s workforce will be brighter. Investing in children to ensure they reach their full potential is the key to a capable, productive and technology-driven workforce.

The opinions stated above are not necessarily those of OK Policy, its staff, or its board. This blog is a venue to help promote the discussion of ideas from various points of view and we invite your comments and contributions. To see our guidelines for blog submissions, click here.

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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.

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A partnership between OICA and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the KIDS COUNT data center provides comprehensive online national, state, and community level data and information on the well-being of children.  The site tracks 82 indicators of child well-being in such categories as education, health and safety, economic well-being, family and community, risky behaviors, and general demographics. It allows for easy comparisons of Oklahoma to other states and of each of the state’s 77 counties. From the main Oklahoma page, you can generate ranking tables, maps and trend graphs for each of the indicators that can then be incorporated into reports, presentations and grant applications. Here is one example, a map displaying the Change in Teen Birth Rates, by county, between 2005 and 2007:

In addition to introducing the Data Center website, OICA also made available the 2009 Oklahoma KidsCount factbook, which can be read and downloaded online. The factbook spotlights twelve key indicators of child well-being, including birthweight, birth to teens, child abuse and neglect, high school dropouts, violent crime arrests, and child and youth deaths. This year’s data found that Oklahoma has made progress compared to the mid- or late-1990s on nine of the twelve indicators, most notably in a nearly 50 percent drop in the rate of youth violent crime arrests.

The KIDS COUNT data center offers an invaluable resource to help us identify where we are doing well and where the most significant problems remain. In these times of growing needs and scarce resources, the importance of good data has never been greater.

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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).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if Oklahoma’s newfound prosperity is translating into stronger outcomes on the major indicators of personal and social well-being. Oklahoma continues to rank high on way too many bad things – people living in poverty, chronic health conditions, suicides, teen pregnancy, child abuse, incarceration – and low on too many good things – overall health status, percentage of residents with health insurance, college graduates, per pupil student expenditures. As of 2006, we ranked 46th among the states in per capita spending on state and local government, which hampers our ability to invest in those public structures – strong schools and universities, economic infrastructure, quality health care and mental health services – that can help us reach our common goals. This, in turn, reflects a strong aversion to taxes – in 2006, we ranked 42nd in the nation in total state and local taxes per capita and as a share of personal income.

Even if 2008 marked the peak of the state’s economic boom, it’s likely we will remain in the middle rung of states in personal income and perhaps even move further up the rankings as other states struggle with a deeper recession. It may take time for this reality of Oklahoma as something other than a poor state to set in and for us to shed old ways of thinking and abandon old excuses. But as it does, we hope that all of us can seize the opportunity to imagine and implement new policies and new approaches that will ensure that our growing wealth leads to more economic opportunities, better education and health, and greater security for all Oklahomans.

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