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QUESTION: statistics for showing "how Baltimore is such a hard city on children"

Submitted by lia on Fri, 10/10/2008 - 12:03pm
question / pregunta: 

Submitted for a patron:
Question: do you have, or can you point in great radical dirrections, to gain statistics for showing "how Baltimore is such a hard city on children" - I want to compile a long list of statistics on child poverty, and issues that show rascism and classism filtering down. I KNOW its hard to live here, and hard for children, because I live, and have raised a child, here. (and I am writing an essay for the local indie media newspaper which the deadline already passed but there is still a little time left) but when I try to research statistics I am surprised how hard it is - how there is a diversity in numbers - how nothing is in one spot.

Has no one ever gathered a bunch of numbers for children living in Baltimore city?

I searched for a whole day and I should contact my local library but I am finding that statistics are harder and trickier than I thought - not used to working with them.

I would like to compile a page of numbers that speak for themselves, teh way Z magazine once did to show how the welfare reform propaganda was bullshit (this was a long time ago) and to illuminate the inequality. my essay talks about stuff but has no statistics to back it up - plus the editor said it would be great to do a whole side bar of this stuff.

how many children in sub-poverty
how the greatest reason to put a woman in poverty is to be a mother
how a disproportionate number of the poor is children
how baltimore has the greatest inequality in funding schools from the city to the suburbs (I actually Have this statistic)
how many children's parents are in prison

statistics to show racism and classism and all that.

I know this is really broad - a giant question. I am sorry, just having a hard time and surprised there are not more resources out there for stuff I thought would be easy to find (plus statistics need to be put into perspective. when there is debate even on how many kids drop out - from 30 to 68 percent (its definitely more on the 68 percent) and then they have the census which will say the city has one percent latinos but others more in the know say its twice as much as that.

so if there is any resources where someone has worked through these issues and put time into it and its more up to date - I wonder!

THANK YOU! Any help will be good - fast is best - but even if it comes past the deadline I will still use it in political work to organize to support parents and children.

Answers

Answer posted by: laura

One place to start would be the poverty statistics for Baltimore from the Census Department.

Kids Count from the Annie E. Casey Foundation also has some statistics on children in Baltimore.

These will not answer all your questions, but other RadRef volunteers may have further ideas, and I will keep looking!

Answer posted by: jbeek

There's a display glitch somewhere. The links work if you click the answer open.

Answer posted by: MRM

Take a look at Vital Signs ("Indicators that Take the Pulse of Baltimore City Neighborhoods"), which is put out by the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance at the University of Baltimore. There's a section for Children and Family Health, Safety and Well-being.

I also did a search in periodical databases using a combination of the keywords "baltimore" (in the Subject or Location fields) and "children" and "poverty," just to see what was out there. Depending on how much additional research you want to do, you may find it useful to replicate such a search (your public library probably subscribes to at least one of these databases that index scholarly journals as well as more general-interest magazines; the ones I tried were EBSCO's Academic Search Premier and ProQuest's Alt-Press Watch).

I didn't find anything really "radical," but, for example, there are these articles:

"'There is tragedy on both sides of the layoffs': Privatization and the Urban Crisis in Baltimore" by Jane Berger
International Labor and Working Class History (Spring 2007)

"Summer Setback: Race, Poverty, School Composition, and Mathematics Achievement in the First Two Years of School" by Doris R. Entwisle and Karl L. Alexander
American Sociological Review (February 1992)

And here is a very academic article that does not address Baltimore specifically, but you may still find it helpful in your work (it also has an extensive bibliography of research on children and poverty):

"The Influence of Neighborhood Poverty During Childhood on Fertility, Education, and Earnings Outcomes" by George Galster et al
Housing Studies (September 2007)