Red (southern) states' kids worse off:

As in politics, red on the state level is not a good thing (for kids):

http://www.aecf.org/kidscount/sld/index.jsp

Results can be viewed as a map, ranking, or line graph. Start with a category...

• Education
• Employment and Income
• Health
• Health Insurance
• Immigrant Children
• Population and Family Characteristics
• Poverty
• Youth Risk Factors

New and Updated Indicators
(6/27/06) Find out how your state ranks in the 2006 Kids Count Data Book in an interactive online data base. State Level Data Online now features all information contained in the 2006 Kids Count Data Book, including: overall state rank, US findings by race and the new children in family-based child care.

Let's see... according to this board and all their fucking stats - my son is stupid, has stupid parents, can't breath, can't think, can't do SHIT.

You know - these are stats. They're based on money and it just simply doesn't take as much fucking money to live in the South.

Apples and oranges, people. Stop with the shit propaganda against the South.

My son could read at four. He is being considered to skip a grade and, not only am I Southern and we live in the South, but I was a sinlge Mom (who SMOKES) for five of my son's seven years on this earth.

Such bullshit.

Stats suck.

On Edit: I know I get defensive about this crap, but it's not all hell down here. In fact, it's a nice place to live. I'd rather live where I do than some congested place in New York. I may not make the best living in the world, but it's decent. I have a house. Had a house the whole time I was single - after my divorce and before my re-marriage. I just really get tired of seeing this stuff posted here.

What if I started posting how obnoxious Northerners are? How rude they are? And, I say this being married to a "damn Yankee," whom I adore (but, he'd agree).

Sorry for the blast. I'm just so fed-up-to-here with the Southern bashing. We're not all redneck idiot fools!

unless you live in downtown nyc or SF and pay $3,000 a month for a tiny 1200 sq ft apartment. :sarcasm:

Afterall, if your in a Red state, have a nice home and a yard, we really don't want your vote anyway.

(or so it seems)

I hear ya all the way.

education, not that anyone is stupid, or a lousy parent. The Monkey says "No Child Left Behind" but some TX kids ARE being left behind, and some FL kids too, as well as some of those in other states.

Of course, you can go to any state in the union, perhaps with the exception of VT (I think they equalize their dough across the state, so one town doesn't have advantage over others) and find lousy schools, as they are mostly funded by towns and cities, and the feds kick in some, but never enough. You can also go to any state and find good schools, where townsfolk vote to toss some extra dough in the pot via property tax increases or whatever. But on average, the red states (or to be precise, some significant numbers of large towns and cities with lower income inhabitants in the red states) get shortchanged--not by parents, not by hardworking teachers, not by the kids, but by the GOP cretins in power who'd rather toss the money to a crony than improve the educational assets of the state in question, for the poor as well as the middle class and up.

Those stats? I think they paint the God-honest truth.

Mississippi and others are too damn poor to afford as high quality an education system as that of Massachusetts or New York, but the problem is the majority in states like Mississippi vote to cut education spending, and it's making problems worse. Ideally, education standards nationwide would be higher and at an equal footing regardless of location, but that requires the feds to make-up the difference that poor states can't, but again, that's not possible if you vote to cut your own education spending.

This "tax little, spend small" mentality is rather prevalent around these parts, and people bitch and complain about no help from the feds. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

It's socially repressive in that every other goddamn person is so damn interested in what you can do in your own private life. I don't care if Adam and Steve should or should not be allowed to marry, and I don't care about the state wanting to tell women if they can or can't get an abortion, and I don't much care about the state shoveling the shit it calls "morality" or "family values" through legislation.

Smoked around your child for first five years. yep real intelligent.....

is stats. Doesn't mean that your kid is _______. My state is the state where you are most likely to be killed running around from a pile of reasons. So what? We are the fifth most corrupt state in the union. I'm not a gangster but my state government is. Stats are measures against which improvement (or not) can be pitted. Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the USA. The south has the highest. Can't change that. Its the facts. I can give you a boatload of stereotypes for my home state of California and my grow up state of Oregon. Many of them are based on facts. I dislike them but they are true. Sad to say.

Taken from a previous post:

"I’ve given some thought to exactly why southern pride is the way it is and why so many southerners take pride in things that might leave a northerner aghast or, at the very best, indifferent. I’ve started with the premise that just about every individual goes through this life with their own personal yardstick for measuring its success. And, although what that yardstick measures varies from person to person, there are some common themes and most of themes are tangible in some way. Material wealth, philanthropy, providing for your family, raising a not-too-screwed-up kid, etc. In doing some state by state comparisons, though, it becomes apparent that the South is a pretty sucky place to be if you base your sense of self worth on these measures. One statistical study found there to be a direct correlation between red vs. blue states and infant mortality, with infant mortality being twice as likely in red states, primarily due to the South. Poverty is rampant everywhere, but what northern city can boast that 50% of its working age population is unemployed? Quality education for your kids or yourself in the South? That’s a hard thing to come by, and generally costs too much to be accessible to most families. Income is lower in the South, total mortality higher, health care quality lower, rate of teen death by suicide, homicide and accident are all higher. By virtually any tangible index you care to measure, the South is the idiot stepchild of the nation. I think when you take away the ability of people to care for the needs of their families, their children and even themselves, you end up with a bunch of people who start to measure their sense of self worth based on less tangible things like Christian morals and “family values." Not that these things are necessarily bad. But, when they’re all that you have, you cling to them too tightly and may even get a bit overbearing and fanatical about it."

More to the point, I suspect this works in reverse as well. Provide people with the means to obtain a quality education, provide for their families, ensure a better future for their children and they become a little less fanatical about things that don't directly affect their lives (like Spongebob's sexual orientation, for example).

BTW-I have been subjected to some fairly nasty North bashing by Southerners myself.

Call it tough love, call it hubris, whatever. My state of Kentucky is a gorgeous place with hills and valleys defy the Midwestern imagination. We have offered the world gifts in music (ie Dwight Yoakham), acting(George Clooney), and literature(Wendell Berry).But, we also keep Mitch "Moneybags" McConnell, Jim Bunning, Anne Northup, Ron Lewis, and that walking punchline Ernie Fletcher in office. We've had Homeland Security drills at goat shows(!), and we legalized concealed weapons. And, every election, we choose to get nickel-and-dimed by the government and participate in senseless slaughter in foreign lands, so long as "dem dar quarz" don't get married in Paducah. So, when people fail to realize that we're the home of George Clooney, but know off the bat that Billy Ray Cyrus is from here, I don't blame them. This state perpetuates the stereotypes it's allegedly offended by.

It disguises a lot and feeds stereotypes. It also over-generalizes.

Take New York State. If you broke it out by school district--and that's how it would properly be done, there was even a vaguely similar map posted here a few days ago that had an insanely detailed PDFed map 'lurking' behind it--you'd find the politically blue areas are educationally red, and vice-versa.

In rural areas of Texas you'd find kids that don't meet the criteria they established, and so they're 'at risk'. But that's because the criteria don't quite fit. Some are homeschooled; others work in the family business, but don't draw a regular income. No job, no school, at risk.

You look at it by race, and you get a different picture, numerous maps superimposed, with far more 'red' on some, and far more 'blue' on the other. It makes for a messy picture, one that's devilishly hard to understand and even harder to deal with in an intelligent way at the policy level.

One must make it as simple as possible, but not simpler than possible.