Counting kids

No disrespect to the watchers of the digital divide, the race divide, the geographic divide (Two Maines) or all the other divides, but the education divide may be this state’s most serious gap. That was shown again this week in the 2000 Kids Count Data Book, that annual reminder of how states treat their children and how they might do better.

Maine, overall, does a good job, especially with infants. Its Kids Count rank of 10th in the nation is surprising only in that it is used to being ranked in the top five. Where it fails, however, is not in the direct care of children but in whether their parents have the opportunity to succeed. Often, they do not, and Maine ranks a dismal 36th in the number of children who live with underemployed parents. That number has actually increased a percentage point to 29 percent between the recession of 1990 and the economic good times of ’97.

Poverty — which usually is what underemployment means and which, as a Kids Count statistic has also increased for Maine — brings with it a whole range of physical and social ills. Poor kids, for instance, are more likely to be sick, and therefore miss school and fall behind academically. That may not sound like a particularly monumental problem, but it is because, more than ever before, academic success is linked to income.

A generation ago, a high school education could be enough to land entry-level work in manufacturing, with the real possibility of moving up quickly to earn well above the state average — a comfortable life, even if the work was hard or sometimes dangerous. Not only isn’t that sort of advancement likely anymore, during the last 20 years workers with a high school diploma or less have lost a substantial amount of real income — their paychecks in 2000 don’t go nearly as far as an equivalent worker’s paycheck did in 1980. Unfortunately, Maine is the nation’s worst in workers who lack higher education and, not coincidentally, has one of the lowest average incomes.

Maine doesn’t need Alan Greenspan to tell it that the economy is signaling loudly that lower-level service jobs are not worth much, even with rock-bottom unemployment, and cannot be counted on to feed a family. In fact, while the percentage of underemployed parents in Maine has remained about the same for the last decade, Maine’s Kids Count rank in this category has fallen from a middling 24th to the current 36, suggesting that the rest of the country is moving on economically while Maine stays still.

The Kids Count book shows that Maine cannot afford to stand still much longer. Either it, too, looks upon low-level service employment as a transition to better-paying work based on higher education, or the good news about its children usually found in the data book will become a thing of the past.