WASHINGTON — Americans who want their children to get a good education and do well in life should move to a state with high taxes, preferably in New England.

If they live in a low-tax state, especially in the South, their child's prospects are considerably dimmer.

Why? Because some states don't tax enough, and Americans don't believe in equalization.

The Every Child Matters Education Fund, a non-profit organization that lobbies for better education and services for children, released a report this week that reveals that geography is as important as race and class in determining which children succeed, and which fail.

The five highest ranking states, based on such factors as child poverty, infant mortality rates, juvenile incarceration rates and the like, were all in New England, with Vermont on top. The bottom five were all in the central South, with Louisiana coming in last.

With a few exceptions, the better performing states were located in the Northeast, or Great Lakes, while the poorer performers were in the South or the West.

"There's a strong correlation here between successful outcomes and the accident of the state you were born in," observed Michael Petit, the organization's president.

"What we're asking is, are these children American children first, or are they Maine children or Mississippi children?"

As always, race is a factor in determining poverty. States with high percentages of African-American and Hispanic citizens had the lowest scores. But one statistic had troubling implications for those who believe governments should tax citizens as little as possible.

States with a high tax burden did a far better job of minimizing childhood poverty than low-taxing states.

For example, third-ranking Connecticut has the country's highest combined federal, state and municipal tax burden, averaging 38.3 per cent of income. While Tennessee, taxing at 28.8 per cent, ranked 36th.

One important reason for the correlation of childhood poverty to taxation levels may lie in the progressive nature of most taxes. Poorer people pay taxes at a lower rate than wealthier people, so affluent states will appear to demonstrate a higher tax burden.

But it is also true that affluent, well-educated populations support a higher level of taxation in order to fund better public schools.

"If I go into Southern states, what I hear from people is: 'The reason why we don't invest is because we're poor,' " Mr. Petit says. "What I counter with is: 'No, the reason why you're poor is because you don't invest.' "

Another problem is that Americans, by and large, don't believe in equalization. Although some federal funding is specifically targeted to poorer states, the ethos so prevalent in Canada - at least within the federal government - of transferring wealth from more prosperous to less prosperous regions has little purchase here.

In many cases, city school boards can't even access tax revenues from the suburbs because of a lack of metropolitan government. And states do a mixed job of reapportioning their revenues to schools and neighbourhoods with the greatest needs.

As a result, there are appalling disparities between urban and suburban graduation rates.

A separate report recently released by the American Promise Alliance revealed that in America's 50 largest cities, on average only 52 per cent of Grade 9 students go on to graduate from high school, while 75 per cent of suburban students graduate.

This is one reason why, on international tests, American students not only score below their counterparts in Western Europe, Canada, Japan and Korea, but behind Poland and Croatia as well.

Far from making education a key election issue, however, student achievement - or lack of it - ranks among the bottom of politicians' priorities.

Congress has failed to renew No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush's initiative to improve outcomes in the most troubled schools, and the initiative is unlikely to be reauthorized this year.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both oppose No Child Left Behind because both rely heavily on support from teachers' unions, which oppose the testing provisions in the legislation.

Of course, the United States is also home to some of the world's finest private, and even public, schools. As with so many other things, this is a nation devoid of average.

But there is little hope that after this election, the United States will make much progress in narrowing the knowledge gap between itself and the rest of the developed world.