Each year the Annie E. Casey Foundation publishes the KIDS COUNT Data Book, which presents the best available data on the educational, social, economic, and physical condition of children in the United States. By providing policymakers and citizens with updated, state-by-state indicators of child well-being, KIDS COUNT seeks to encourage greater public accountability for youth outcomes and to enrich local, state, and national discussions about ways of securing better futures for all children.

Although the indicators in the KIDS COUNT Data Book provide a national picture of the condition of children and enable state-by-state comparisons of child and youth outcomes, these measures frequently mask important variations in child well-being within a state--for example, differences in rural areas, suburbs, and cities. One of the ways the Casey Foundation addresses this limitation of the national Data Book is by providing support to a network of state-level KIDS COUNT grantees--organizations and partnerships in 48 states and the District of Columbia that collect, analyze, and disseminate detailed state and local data on the status of children. Another way is the publication of this report, CITY KIDS COUNT, which presents the best available data on children living in the 50 largest cities in the United States.

In this publication, each city is assessed in terms of 10 key indicators of child well-being, which are shown on the right-hand page for each city. As with the national Data Book, these indicators focus on outcome measures of children's educational, social, economic, and physical well-being. On the left-hand page, several demographic, social, and background measures are shown for each city. In selecting indicators and background information, we used measures that were consistent for all cities.

A significant share of all U.S. children--one-sixth in 1990--and a disproportionate share of disadvantaged children live in 1 of the 50 largest cities. The 50-city averages for 10 key indicators of child well-being are shown in Table 1, along with the national figure for each indicator. For every measure the average value for the 50 cities shows that kids living in large cities are more likely to be worse off than kids in the nation as a whole.

Although many factors put children at risk, nothing predicts bad outcomes for a kid more powerfully than growing up poor.1 Although child poverty has been increasing everywhere in the United States, it has been rising most consequentially in large cities. Between 1969 and 1989, the child poverty rate in the 50 largest cities increased from 18 to 27 percent, while the national child poverty rate grew from 15 to 18 percent.

Kids in central cities2 are twice as likely as their suburban peers to be part of a female-headed household--36 percent compared with 17 percent in 1996. Children growing up in such households face much greater odds of dropping out of school or, in the case of young women, becoming unmarried mothers.3

The statistics on education for children in large cities are equally revealing. Current Census Bureau data show that among teenagers 16 to 19 years old, dropping out is almost twice as prevalent in the cities as it is in the suburbs (14 percent compared to 8 percent). And according to a recent report by the U.S. Department of Education, "Urban 8th graders scored lower on achievement tests than suburban or rural 8th graders, even when the higher poverty concentrations of urban public schools were taken into account."4

Perhaps the most troubling finding of this report is that roughly one-half of all children in the country who live in distressed neighborhoods, defined as communities with high concentrations of poverty, female-headed families, unemployment, and welfare dependency,5 reside in 1 of the 50 largest cities. Although these neighborhoods include individuals and families with extraordinary resilience and resourcefulness, the negative synergy of multiple risk factors in these communities increases the likelihood that kids growing up there will be unprepared to parent successfully, to be productively employed, and to contribute to civic life.

Between 1970 and 1990, the percent of children residing in distressed neighborhoods in the 50 largest cities rose from 3 percent to 17 percent. Thus, in 1990 about 1.6 million children under the age of 15 were growing up in distressed neighborhoods in the cities that are the focus of this publication.

The percent of urban children living in distressed neighborhoods cited in Table 1 is an average that masks large variations among individual cities. For example, in 1990 there was zero percent in Albuquerque and Virginia Beach, compared to 62 percent (the highest) in Detroit, 46 percent in Cleveland, and 41 percent in Buffalo (see Table 2). In 15 cities, more than one-fourth of all kids under age 15 were growing up in a distressed neighborhood.

Although a detailed prescription for the economic and social ills of our cities is beyond the scope of this report, this much is clear: Conditions in communities have a powerful influence on the ability of families to raise their children well. Because multiple risk factors in distressed communities make poor outcomes for kids living there so predictable, meaningful efforts to improve conditions in these urban communities must address a comprehensive range of issues, including human services, social capital, physical and economic infrastructure, institutional resources, and civic activity.

The nation has entered a social-policy era when states will have an expanded opportunity to design their own strategies to alleviate poverty, promote family strengths, encourage employment, and foster effective education. In assuming the challenges of this national experiment in devolution, states will confront what the data in this report make manifest: Central cities and troubled urban neighborhoods face many of the most urgent problems state and local governments are being asked to address.

Put more plainly, states that make a genuine effort to decrease dependency, reduce teen pregnancy rates, encourage family formation, and improve educational achievement will need to target much of their ingenuity, attention, and resources on the concentrations of vulnerable families and at-risk children that characterize too many of America's urban neighborhoods. Indeed, it may be fair to predict that the willingness of states to rise to the challenge of making troubled city neighborhoods a priority for innovation and investment will largely determine whether devolution itself succeeds or fails.