On February 28, 2019, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) released a consensus study, A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty, which has been described as “the most important report on child poverty in years.” Congress mandated the National Academies to analyze the negative developmental outcomes and economic consequences of child poverty, the effectiveness of current efforts to reduce child poverty, including both domestic and international efforts, and then come up with a set of recommendations to cut our child poverty rate in half within a decade.
The study committee finds that no single policy or program change on its own can cut our national child poverty rate in half within a decade. However, the study committee models four different combinations of policy and program changes and finds that, using an adjusted Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), two of these combinations can achieve this goal.
To accompany the study, the NASEM released a data explorer tool that models the impact of the four policy and program combinations on SPM state child poverty rates, including deep child poverty.
These fact sheets detail those findings for each state and the District of Columbia—one denoting the supplemental child poverty rate and one for the supplemental deep child poverty rate (children live in deep poverty when their families have incomes less than half of the poverty line).