Tennessee is number five

Among the ten states with the highest unemployment rates in 2011 among residents 20 to 24. Appropriately enough, from a geographic perspective anyway, Tennessee ranked between Kentucky (#6) and North Carolina (#4).  From 24/7 Wall Street.

Ten States Where Young People Can’t Find Work

Historically, things are as bad for young adults in these states as they have been in at least 29 years. Compared to 2001, when the nation was in the middle of its last major recession, the national unemployment rate was roughly the same as it was in 2011. However, the unemployment rate for 20 to 24 year olds was substantially higher. In nine of the states on our list, unemployment rates among this age group were higher than in 1981. In four cases, it is five percentage points higher. 

There appear to be several common trends among the states on our list. Those states with high unemployment among the young have some of the highest proportions of residents without at least a high school diploma. All of the top three states with high youth unemployment were among the 10 with the lowest percentage of 20 to 24 year olds with high school diplomas. 

These states are also, for the most part, extremely poor. Six of them have among the lowest median income in the country. Mississippi, which had the highest youth unemployment in the country in 2011, also had the lowest median income in the country in 2010, the most recent available year. As evidence of the extreme poverty in these states, many of these states have among the highest percentages of residents receiving food stamps. In Tennessee, for example, 17% of residents received food stamps in 2010, the second-highest proportion in the country. . . . 

For Tennessee’s youth, the unemployment rate went up 2.7 percentage points between 2010 and 2011, the second-highest jump in the country. The state has some of the smallest proportions of people holding bachelor’s or advanced degrees, and the second-highest proportion of people on food stamps or enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at 17%. Tennessee’s state government has recently undertaken an initiative called the Pathways to Prosperity Network to help young people get jobs by focusing on career preparation for high school students who do not go to college.

This is why in Tennessee

We're thankful for states like Mississippi. We stay ahead of them in educational rankings. But it's really not funny; it's a tragedy.  From Time.

Mississippi Learning: Why the State's Students Start Behind — and Stay Behind

Thirty years after Mississippi established statewide kindergarten and made school attendance compulsory starting in first grade, classroom readiness remains a major obstacle to student success in this state, which has the highest rate of childhood poverty in the country and test scores that are consistently among the nation's worst. 

Although neighboring states have made great strides in early education, Mississippi remains the only state in the South — and just one of 11 in the country — that doesn't fund any pre-k programs. Researchers have found that high-quality pre-k programs can improve long-term outcomes for low-income children and help close an achievement gap for minorities that tends to worsen over time. Being able to stand in line, listen to directions or make eye contact with the teacher play in an important role when it comes time to try to teach kids how to read and write. And a lack of school readiness is evident the minute children walk in on the first day of kindergarten, says Kaye Sowell, who has taught for 30 years in Rankin County. "I've had to chase children into the street," she says. "I have kids who don't know their given name and can't recognize it in print. They can't go through the lunch line without holding it up. You can't fathom it unless you've lived it." 

Failure to prepare children for kindergarten or first grade costs the state a lot of money. One of every 14 kindergarteners and one of every 15 first-graders in Mississippi repeated the school year in 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available. From 1999 to 2008, the state spent $383 million on children who had to repeat kindergarten or first grade, according to the Southern Education Foundation. Children like Akeeleon start so far behind they may never catch up, and those who repeat one or more grades are much more likely than their classmates to drop out of school, decades of research have shown.