The economic life of a child at home has a direct relationship to how things go at school. That’s one of several takeaways from the latest “Kids Count Data Book” from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which looks at several factors influencing children’s wellbeing.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation found that between 2019 and 2022, some measures, like the number of kids with health insurance, improved. Others, like “children whose parents lack secure employment,” stayed about the same.

“But, in the area of education, we’ve seen some really concerning data,” said Leslie Boissiere, vice president of external affairs for the foundation. “Kids are not entering the classroom with their basic needs met — secure housing, enough to eat, access to transportation. And, as a result of that, their academic achievement is suffering.”

That layers on top of pandemic learning loss. Aileen Carr with the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality blames some of these declines on Congress.

“The policy choices that we made in response to the pandemic made a real difference. And then we went backwards,” she said.

Carr gave the example of the expansion of the child tax credit, which Congress allowed to expire at the end of 2021, triggering a record jump in federal child poverty rates the following year.