The New York Times assesses the attempt to measure childhood development.
Ann Hulbert writes (excerpt):
It’s 2004. Do you know how America’s children are? Thanks to researchers from Duke University and the Foundation for Child Development, there is now a Child Well-Being Index (C.W.I.), according to which kids were faring 5 percent better as of 2003 than they were in 1975.
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Unveiled at the Brookings Institution, the index was greeted as a notable innovation — a bracing dose of empiricism on a topic, the condition of America’s children, that generally invites impressionism and often a sense of fatalism. As the president of the Foundation for Child Development has put it, the C.W.I. aims to do for child well-being what the consumer price index (C.P.I.) and the G.N.P. do for economic health. The point is to quantify key quality-of-life issues and assess progress or problems by comparing the numbers over time. Ideally, such a cutting-edge index would help rescue the cause of children’s welfare from pious rhetoric and make it an urgent national priority — it’s our progeny, stupid.
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”What gets measured, gets done” is a saying in the indicator field. By that standard, the composite C.W.I., by measuring everything, is likely to do nothing — unless it is to remind us, as children themselves do every day, that assessing and boosting their well-being is anything but an exact science.