The states that have reduced their child poverty rates by more than 30 percent since 1993 include Tennessee, Michigan, Arkansas, South Carolina, Mississippi, Kentucky, Illinois, and New Jersey. Michigan is a prime example of a state that improved its child poverty rate in the 1993-1998 period but failed to recover much of the ground lost to child poverty from 1979-1993, when its poverty rate increased by 121 percent.

Over the longer term, the child poverty rate has increased by over 40 percent in at least a dozen states since 1979. States that have been hit hard by increases in child poverty ranged from large states such as California (up 62 percent), Ohio (up 50 percent), Pennsylvania (up 49 percent), Michigan (up 37 percent), and New York (up 28 percent), to smaller states such as Iowa, Arizona, Minnesota, and Oregon (where increases ranged from 73 to 111 percent). The handful of states that defied the long-term trend and have reduced their child poverty rates since 1979 include New Jersey, Illinois, Arkansas, and South Dakota.

The long-term increase in child poverty had a particularly harsh impact in California, where the number of children in poverty grew from just under 900,000 in 1979 to 2.15 million in 1998, accounting for over 40 percent of the national increase of 3 million children in poverty over the past two decades. One in six poor children in the U.S. now lives in California compared to 1 in 11 in 1979.

California was one of 13 states where the number of children in poverty changed by more than 100,000 from 1979 to 1998. The number of children in poverty increased by over 375,000 in Texas, by well over 200,000 in Arizona and New York, and by over 100,000 in Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, and Oregon. New Jersey, Illinois, and Alabama all reduced the number of children in poverty by more than 100,000.

One key finding in the report is that poverty is less concentrated in a few regions of the U.S. than it was in 1979, when almost all states with high levels of child poverty were in the South. "The South is no longer the poverty zone that it was in 1979," said Neil Bennett, NCCP's senior advisor for demographic research and analysis and one of the report's co-authors with Hsien Hen Lu, an associate research scientist at NCCP. In 1979, seven of nine states with poverty rates significantly higher than the national average were in the South. Today only two of six states (Louisiana and West Virginia) in that category are in the South.

"The progress in reducing child poverty in the South as well as in New Jersey and Illinois tells us that this is not an intractable problem," said Larry Aber, the director of NCCP. "Researchers and policymakers need to learn from those states that are making real inroads against child poverty. What we learn could be the key to dramatically reducing child poverty throughout the United States," added Dr. Aber.

Northeast: New Jersey's child poverty rate fell by 37 percent while New York's rate increased by 28 percent and Pennsylvania's rate went up by 49 percent.

Midwest: South Dakota's child poverty rate decreased by nearly 40 percent during the same period that Iowa's rate doubled and Minnesota's rate increased by over 80 percent. Illinois and Ohio also exhibited very different trends in their child poverty rates; Ohio's rate increased by half and Illinois' rate decreased by one-third.

South: The child poverty rate fell significantly in Arkansas but increased in West Virginia and the District of Columbia. The child poverty rate in West Virginia (27.5 percent) is three times the rate in Virginia (9 percent).

West: There have been significant increases in the child poverty rate in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Oregon, and Idaho since 1979. Arizona, California, and New Mexico all have child poverty rates that are significantly higher than the national average while Alaska and Washington are significantly below the national average.

The improvements in child poverty rates since 1993 lag well behind reductions in welfare caseloads over the same period. The 17 percent decrease in the national child poverty rate from 1993-1998 is far less than the 47 percent decrease in state welfare caseloads over the same period. "If we can cut the welfare caseload in half, we ought to be able to cut the child poverty rate in half also," said Dr. Aber.

In some states, notably Illinois, New Jersey, and Tennessee, welfare caseloads decreased by roughly one-half as child poverty rates declined by 33 percent to 39 percent. But several other states cut their welfare caseloads by more than half without any improvement in their child poverty rate, including North Dakota, Idaho, Georgia, Montana, Oregon, Alabama, Colorado, North Carolina, and Arizona.

"These stubbornly high rates of child poverty should concern every American citizen as well as our federal and state governments," said Dr. Aber, "because poverty places a glass ceiling on children's readiness for school, educational achievement, and future workforce potential."