Education, Income, and Health

By Geoff Zimmerman

Earlier this year, United Way led the development of Bold Goals for our region.  The Bold Goals builds on the Agenda for Community Impact by developing bold, but attainable goals in the areas of education (preparing children, youth, and young adults to succeed in school and life), income (ensuring individuals and families achieve financial sustainability), and health (helping individuals live quality lives & achieve maximum health and independence).

In addition, United Way has just launched a new Call for Investment process that will determine its investments in community and agency partners for the 2013-2015 time period.  To support this process, and better understand the Bold Goal impact areas, United Way’s Research Council developed three short regional assessments that show, at a fairly high level, how things stand in our community in the three Bold Goal areas.

In this post, I’ll explore some of the data and highlights from the Regional Assessment for Education and the interconnections between the areas.

Our Community’s Education Bold Goals are that by the year 2020 at least:

• 85% of children will be prepared for kindergarten        
• 85% of youth will graduate from high school (prepared for life, college, and career)
• 45% of adults will have an Associate’s degree or higher

Greater Cincinnati residents should have the types and levels of education that prepare them to succeed in life. Every child should be prepared for kindergarten, youth should graduate from high school, and adults should have some type of education beyond high school. High educational performance and quality education are crucial to creating a qualified workforce, improving the quality of life for individuals and families, and achieving regional economic success.

The interconnection between education and income is hard to ignore, as evidenced by the following chart comparing educational attainment with the unemployment rate and median earnings for the nation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Current Population Survey.

If you take a minute to absorb this visual, the impact of educational attainment on individuals and communities is so clear and compelling that education must be a fundamental and long term community investment strategy.

Of course education means more than just what happens in school starting at kindergarten.  The Strive Partnership helped to advance the vision of education as a roadmap that starts in preschool and goes through college, and involving both academics and social/emotional supports.  The Regional Assessment lays out some of the local data related to the three bold goals: kindergarten readiness, high school graduation, and educational attainment. 

Kindergarten Readiness

The map below, courtesy of the Community Research Collaborative, presents a snapshot of kindergarten readiness in Hamilton, Clermont, Brown, Butler, and Warren counties in Ohio.  All Ohio schools use the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment for Literacy (KRA-L) to measure readiness and the map below presents the percent of children assessed in bands 2 & 3 (which means they test well on the assessment – band 1 represents the lowest scores).

Kindergarten readiness is perhaps one of the most important investments we can make, as it sets the foundation for all future learning.  The recent television series by WCPO on Why Early Learning Matters has some great local insights into this. 

High School Graduation

The high school graduation rate is a key outcome indicator that we track as a region to understand how many students are successfully completing high school.  It is difficult to summarize data by region because of different calculations, but the data for Cincinnati Public Schools are presented below.

Cincinnati Public Schools’ high school graduation rate has been steadily increasing, totaling an eight point increase since the baseline year. While the district’s graduation rate decreased by three points from the previous year, the gap between the district and the state remains small.

Educational Attainment

Educational attainment is an important measure of success, and one of the only measures on which we have regionally comparable data. The Bold Goal is around the percent of adults with an Associate’s degree or higher, but this isn’t meant to discount other postsecondary attainment levels.  It’s just as important to track certificates, apprenticeships, military service, and other forms of advanced training. 

The following chart shows the share of adults at selected levels of education attainment for component areas of the Cincinnati MSA. The Inner Ring is comprised of Butler, Warren, Clermont, Boone, Kenton, and Campbell counties in Ohio and Kentucky. The Outer Ring is comprised of Brown, Bracken, Pendleton, Grant, Gallatin, Ohio, Dearborn, and Franklin counties in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.

Schools in the Greater Cincinnati area continue to improve in many ways, but there is still a need for significant improvement. As a region, we are still some distance from achieving our goals: all residents should have the types and levels of education that prepare them to succeed in life, with every child prepared for kindergarten, all youth graduating from high school and all adults having some type of education beyond high school. Achieving these goals are essential, since those in the workforce need to possess the skills and education necessary to gain meaningful and consistent work in order to achieve sufficient income for themselves and their families. As well, having a strong work force in the region is essential if we are to succeed in attracting businesses to move into and grow in the area.

Comments

[Terry Grundy]

This is an excellent piece, Geoff, and really spells out in a clear way the interconnections among the indicators under the three Bold Goals. The graph on income by education level is clear as a bell and I hope all your blog readers take a moment to ponder it.

[George Vredeveld]

Geoff: Great piece. The evidence is clear and has been for a long time. The returns on education are huge. Thanks for making this even more clear.

[Diana Trapp]

It would be informative to see how student loan debt relates to level of education; this is one of the barriers. Thanks.