Vol. 15, No. 2 - Education Next https://www.educationnext.org/journal/vol-15-no-02/ A Journal of Opinion and Research About Education Policy Thu, 08 Feb 2024 19:46:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.5 https://i0.wp.com/www.educationnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/e-logo.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 Vol. 15, No. 2 - Education Next https://www.educationnext.org/journal/vol-15-no-02/ 32 32 181792879 Nathan Glazer on Revisiting the Moynihan Report https://www.educationnext.org/nathan-glazer-revisiting-moynihan-report/ Mon, 02 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/nathan-glazer-revisiting-moynihan-report/ Fifty years ago the U.S. Department of Labor issued a report that identified a surprising rate of growth in the percentage of African American children born into single-parent families.

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Fifty years ago the U.S. Department of Labor issued a report, titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” that identified a surprising rate of growth in the percentage of African American children born into single-parent families. The report was written at the instigation of an assistant secretary for labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who became a close adviser to both President Lyndon Johnson and President Richard Nixon and eventually one of the 20th century’s most distinguished members of the U.S. Senate. At the time the report was released, it was roundly condemned for having constructed racial stereotypes and misidentified “pathologies” that didn’t exist.

Revisiting this topic in 2015, the many contributors to this issue of Education Next, writing from a broad range of perspectives, reveal that single parenthood is no longer limited to one racial group but constitutes a problem, with serious consequences for children, that still needs to be addressed.

We asked Nathan Glazer, the Harvard sociologist and Education Next’s longtime book reviewer, if he would write an introduction to this issue. Professor Glazer was the senior author (writing with Moynihan) of Beyond the Melting Pot, the 1963 classic on ethnicity in New York City. He has kindly consented to let us publish these excerpts from his reply:

Moynihan collaborated with me on the book Beyond the Melting Pot in the early 1960s, an experience that may have done a good deal to orient him to family problems and family structure, which I emphasized to him in explaining the idea of the book. I was at that time strongly influenced by the culture-personality school of anthropology, which placed great weight on early family influences.

Subsequently, we remained close: we discussed his earlier Labor Department report on “One-Third of a Nation,” in which he examined the significance of the fact that one-third of potential draftees for the armed forces were ineligible, among other reasons, because of deficient education, and which may be seen as a prelude to the “Family” report. And we remained close through his academic career at Harvard, his leaves from Harvard as adviser to President Nixon on urban affairs, his time as ambassador to India and representative of the United States to the United Nations, and during his tenure as  senator from New York State.

But there is certainly nothing more I can say [than has been said in these essays] on “The Negro Family” report, the influences on it, how it was received, its influence or lack of it owing to its trashing, and how it was eventually justified and became a prophetic document. There will be nothing better on this 50th anniversary of the Moynihan Report. Under the circumstances, I have decided I really cannot weigh in, except to say “Bravo!”

I urge you to explore the many facets of an issue as compelling today as when the Moynihan Report was issued in 1965.

This article appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Peterson, P.E. (2015). Nathan Glazer on Revisiting the Moynihan Report. Education Next, 15(2), 5.

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One-Parent Students Leave School Earlier https://www.educationnext.org/one-parent-students-leave-school-earlier/ Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/one-parent-students-leave-school-earlier/ Education attainment gap widens

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This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family. The full series will appear in our Spring 2015 issue to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 release of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (generally referred to as the Moynihan Report).

ednext_XV_2_duncan_img01One of the most alarming social trends in the past 40 years is the increasing educational disadvantage of children raised in low-income families. Differences between low- and high-income children in reading and math achievement are much larger now than they were several decades ago, as are differences in college graduation rates.

What might account for these increasing achievement and attainment gaps? One obvious suspect is income inequality itself, which has increased dramatically during the same period. But income inequality is hardly the only factor that may be widening the gaps. We focus here on the central concern of the Moynihan Report: the rise of single-parent families, which has been much more rapid among those with low incomes than among those with high incomes, and indeed has fueled some of the increasing income inequality.

The Moynihan Report focused on black families, but the rise in single-parent families transcends racial and ethnic boundaries. Data from the Current Population Survey show that between 1960 and 2013, the proportion of black children living with a single parent more than doubled (from 22 percent to 55 percent); for white children, the percentage more than tripled (from 7 percent to 22 percent).

Turning from race to class differences, we find that more than half (51 percent) of low-income children entering adolescence were living in single-parent families around the time the Moynihan Report was published. This figure jumped to 75 percent over the next three decades. The corresponding increase for adolescents in high-income families over that period is much smaller, from 3 percent to 6 percent. If the single-parent family structure adversely affects children’s educational outcomes, then the difference in trends across income groups could possibly account for more of the growing gap in educational attainment between rich and poor children than income inequality itself.

In the analysis presented below, we examine the relationships between children’s completed schooling and a number of factors, including single-parent family structure. We find that, while statistically significant, the strength of the relationship between living with a single-parent family and educational attainment is comparable to the relationships for family size and the age of the mother at the time of the child’s birth and weaker than the relationship for maternal schooling. Troublingly, however, the negative relationship between living with a single parent and educational attainment has increased markedly since the time the Moynihan Report was published. In other words, American children raised in single-parent homes appear to be at a greater disadvantage educationally than ever before.

The Data

Our analysis is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), spanning 31 cohorts of children born between 1954 and 1985. The PSID has followed a nationally representative sample of families and their children since 1968. Our sample consists of 6,072 individuals from whom information was collected on parental income and other characteristics between the ages of 14 and 16 and on completed schooling at age 24. Our key measure is the amount of time between the ages of 14 and 16  that the child lived with a single parent. Throughout our analyses, we adjust for three other family characteristics that may separately influence a child’s educational attainment: mother’s age at the child’s birth, level of schooling the mother had completed when the child was 14 years old, and number of siblings born to the child’s mother. In some analyses, we also adjust for the average parental income when the child was between the ages of 14 and 16. Additional control variables include the child’s sex and race/ethnicity, whether the child was the mother’s firstborn, and the age of the child’s mother at her first birth.

On average over the 31-year period, children the PSID followed into early adulthood completed 13.2 years of schooling by age 24, and 22.4 percent had completed college. They spent 22 percent of the years between ages 14 and 16 living with a single parent, with 26 percent spending any of those years living with a single parent. And their mothers were about 26 when these children were born and had completed 12.2 years of education by the time their children were 14 years old.

The educational attainment gap for adults who lived in single-parent families in adolescence widened considerably over this period. Figure 1a shows the evolution of the gap in years of completed schooling by age 24 between children who, between the ages of 14 and 16, never lived with a single parent and those who lived with a single parent at least one of the three years. While both groups saw increases in years of completed schooling over time, the gap between them widened from 0.63 years for those who were age 24 in 1978 to 1.32 years for those who were age 24 in 2009. This widening appears to accelerate around the mid- to late 1990s. Figure 1b shows similar trends in college completion rates, with the gap between the groups roughly doubling over the 31 years, from 12 to 26 percentage points.

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The Role of Single-Parent Families

While the gap in educational attainment by family structure has widened over time, factors beyond family structure may be responsible for that trend. Figure 2 shows the results of our efforts to explain the amount of schooling children completed through five factors: family structure, mother’s age at child’s birth, mother’s years of education, the number of siblings, and parental income. When modeling the relationship between these variables and educational attainment, we control for mother’s age at first birth and whether the individual was the firstborn, along with gender and race or ethnicity. Finally, we report the results of models with and without adjusting for differences in parental income to show to what extent the estimated relationships between each of the factors and educational attainment might reflect associated differences in income. For example, we would think differently about the nature of disadvantages imparted by single-parent family structure if all of the association between living in a single-parent family and completed schooling could be accounted for by lower family income.

To facilitate comparisons across the five key explanatory variables, which are measured in different units, the figures report the change in completed schooling associated with an increase of one standard deviation in each one. For the single-parent family measure, this represents an increase of 40 percentage points (1.2 years) in the amount of time between the ages of 14 and 16 the child spent living with a single parent. The comparable changes for the other variables are 5.7 years for the mother’s age at child’s birth, 2.6 years for mother’s years of education, 2.1 for number of siblings, and a 69 percent increase in parental income.

Figure 2a shows that, holding constant all demographic measures other than income, an increase of one standard deviation in the single-parent measure is associated with a drop in children’s completed schooling of one-quarter of a year. Similar results are obtained for changes in maternal age at birth and number of siblings. In contrast, an equivalent change in the amount of maternal schooling adds about three-quarters of a year to children’s completed schooling. Including the income variable in the model all but eliminates the estimated relationship between single-parent family structure and educational attainment, suggesting that differences in parental income play a key role in the educational disadvantage facing students raised in single-parent families. Adjusting for differences in parental income makes little difference for the other key variables.

Findings are similar with respect to college graduation (see Figure 2b). Here again, maternal schooling is the dominant predictor of differences in educational attainment. An increase of one standard deviation in the level of maternal schooling increases the likelihood of graduating from college by 14 percentage points, nearly three times as much as the corresponding effect for single-parent family structure (5 percentage points). Once again, including the income variable in the model greatly reduces the estimated relationship between single-parent family structure and educational attainment.
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While these findings may seem to call into question the importance of family structure on its own for predicting children’s educational attainment, two qualifications are in order. First, recall that Figure 2 shows the change in completed schooling associated with a change of one standard deviation in each of the relevant predictors. For the single-parent family variable, this amounts to an increase of 1.2 years in the amount of time children spent living with one parent between the ages of 14 and 16. The vast majority of children in our sample, however, spent either none of those years or all three of those years in a single-parent family. Spending all three years in a single-parent family, as opposed to none, was associated with completing 0.63 fewer years of schooling and a reduction of 13 percentage points in the probability of graduating from college in models that do not control for family income.

ednext_XV_2_duncan_fig03-smallSecond, the predictive power of single-parent family structure appears to have increased over time. The results for living with a single parent illustrated in Figure 2 combine data for all 31 cohorts. If we divide the period into three spans of about 10 years (1968–78, 1979–88, and 1989–99), we find that the estimated relationship between the single-parent family structure variable and educational attainment more than tripled in size, from -0.11 for the earliest cohorts to -0.43 in the latest cohorts (see Figure 3). By the final time span, living with a single parent all three years between ages 14 and 16, rather than none, was associated with completing 0.92 fewer years of schooling compared to 0.31 fewer years in the first period.

The estimated relationship between the single-parent family structure variable and the probability of graduating from college doubled. By the final time span, living with a single parent all three years between ages 14 and 16, rather than none, was associated with reduced probability of graduating from college of 16.6 percentage points compared to a reduction of 8.1 percentage points in the first period.

The relationships with educational attainment for the three other key factors—maternal age at the child’s birth, maternal education, and number of siblings—were also changing over the 31-year period, although generally by less than that for single-parent family structure. The associations between maternal age at birth and children’s completed schooling nearly doubled in size, from 0.13 for the earliest cohorts to 0.23 in the latest cohorts. The association for maternal education also increased modestly, while the association for number of siblings fell to zero for the latest two cohorts.

Conclusion

Single-parent families are much more prevalent now than at the time the Moynihan Report was published. They are still far more likely to be found among low-income families than among high-income families, but they have become more common among both whites and blacks.

Our analysis focused on the relationships between completed schooling and a number of characteristics, including living with a single parent as adolescents. We find that the estimated relationships between living with a single parent and educational attainment are similar to those for family size and the age of the mother at the time of the child’s birth but considerably smaller than the effects of the mother’s level of education. Importantly, however, the negative relationship between the single-parent family and children’s completed schooling appears to be larger now than when the Moynihan Report was published. We need to continue to monitor these patterns and examine what it is about family resources and processes in single-parent families that may result in low levels of educational attainment for children.

Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest is research associate professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Greg J. Duncan is professor of education at the University of California, Irvine. Ariel Kalil is professor at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago.

This article appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Ziol-Guest, K.M., Duncan, G.J., and Kalil, A. (2015). One-Parent Students Leave School Earlier: Educational attainment gap widens. Education Next, 15(2), 36-41.

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Was Moynihan Right? https://www.educationnext.org/was-moynihan-right/ Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/was-moynihan-right/ What happens to children of unmarried mothers

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This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family. The full series will appear in our Spring 2015 issue to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 release of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (generally referred to as the Moynihan Report).

200119436-002In his 1965 report on the black family, Daniel Patrick Moynihan highlighted the rising fraction of black children growing up in households headed by unmarried mothers. He attributed the increase largely to the precarious economic position of black men, many of whom were no longer able to play their traditional role as their family’s primary breadwinner. Moynihan argued that growing up in homes without a male breadwinner reduced black children’s chances of climbing out of poverty, and that the spread of such families would make it hard for blacks to take advantage of the legal and institutional changes flowing from the civil rights revolution.

Moynihan’s claim that growing up in a fatherless family reduced a child’s chances of educational and economic success was furiously denounced when the report appeared in 1965, with many critics calling Moynihan a racist. For the next two decades few scholars chose to investigate the effects of father absence, lest they too be demonized if their findings supported Moynihan’s argument. Fortunately, America’s best-known black sociologist, William Julius Wilson, broke this taboo in 1987, providing a candid assessment of the black family and its problems in The Truly Disadvantaged. Since then, social scientists have accumulated a lot more evidence on the effects of family structure. This article will offer some educated guesses about what that evidence means.

What Has Changed?

Moynihan was clearly prescient in thinking that America’s black families were changing in fundamental ways. In 1965, when Moynihan’s report was released, roughly 25 percent of black children and 5 percent of white children lived in families headed by an unmarried mother. These percentages rose rapidly over the next two decades, reaching about 50 percent among blacks and 15 percent among whites by the early 1980s. After that, the rate of increase among blacks slowed. Fifty-four percent of black children were being raised by an unmarried mother in the early 1990s; about 50 percent were in 2003. The level has remained close to 50 percent since 2003. Among whites, the rate also rose slowly until the mid-1990s but has fluctuated between about 18 and 20 percent since then (see Figure 1).

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As whites constitute a substantial majority of Americans, whites also comprise the largest share of single-mother families. The racial makeup of single-mother families has not changed very much over time. In 1970, 31 percent of single-mother families were black, 68 percent were white, and 1 percent were “other race.” In 2013, the figures were 30 percent black, 62 percent white, and 8 percent “other.”

Readers should bear in mind that the terms “unmarried” and “single” refer to a mother’s marital status, not to whether she lives with a partner. Thus, living with a “single” mother does not necessarily mean that a child is living in a “fatherless household.” Unmarried couples living with children, that is, parents or partners who cohabit, were relatively rare in 1960. They have become increasingly common in the last 20 years. Recent estimates indicate that roughly one-quarter of all children living with an unmarried mother are living with a mother who has a live-in partner. This figure is about 33 percent among white children, 12 percent among black children, and 29 percent among Hispanic children.

Figure 1 shows children’s living arrangements in specific years, but it does not tell us what percentage of children ever live with a single mother while they are growing up. Demographers estimate that more than half of all American children are now likely to live with a single mother at some point before they reach age 18, even though only 24 percent live with a single mother in any one year. The difference between the two estimates reflects the fact that married mothers often separate, divorce, or (less often) become widows, while unmarried mothers often marry or remarry. As a result, many children live with a single mother for only a few years.

The transitory nature of marital status becomes even clearer if we compare the fraction of children born to unmarried mothers in a given year with the fraction living with an unmarried mother in subsequent years. Figure 2 shows trends in the percentage of mothers who were unmarried at the time they gave birth to a child. In 1960, only 5 percent of all births were to unmarried mothers. By 2010, the number was nearly 41 percent. The trend leveled off for all births in 1994 but rose again after 2000, with paths diverging by race and ethnicity.

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By 1990, roughly 70 percent of all black births were to unmarried mothers, and the figure has hovered near 70 percent since that time. Yet in 2013, only about 50 percent of black children under age 18 were living with an unmarried mother. Some of the “missing” 20 percent were living with their fathers, because their mother had married their father after the child was born. But in many cases, the mother had married someone else before her child’s 18th birthday. Although the fraction of children born to unmarried mothers has not risen among blacks since the 1990s, it has continued to increase among whites and Hispanics, nearing 36 percent for whites and topping 50 percent for Hispanics by 2012.

The meaning of single motherhood has also changed since the 1960s. Today’s single mothers are far less likely than their predecessors to have ever been married. In 1960, 95 percent of single mothers had been married at some point in the past. The major sources of single motherhood were separation from a spouse, divorce, and widowhood, in that order. By 2013, only half of all single mothers had ever been married.

The historical shift from formerly married to never-married mothers has meant that single motherhood usually occurs earlier in a child’s life. Mothers who marry and then divorce typically spend a number of years with their husband before separating. Today, many women become single mothers when their first child is born. The shift to never-married motherhood has probably weakened the economic and emotional ties between children and their absent fathers.

A second change is that unmarried motherhood has spread fastest among mothers who have not completed college. Between 1980 and 2010 the fraction of black children living with an unmarried mother rose from 55 to 66 percent (10 points) among those whose mother had not finished high school, from 43 to 50 percent (7 points) among those whose mother had finished high school but not college, and from 23 to 28 percent (5 points) among those whose mother had graduated from a four-year college. Among white children with mothers who had not finished high school, the estimated fraction living with an unmarried mother rose only from 16.9 percent in 1980 to 18.2 percent in 2010, but the 2010 estimate is based on a small sample, and we cannot rule out the possibility that the true increase was considerably larger. The increase was from 10 to 21 percent among white children with mothers who had finished high school but not college, and from 6.7 to 7.3 percent among white children whose mothers had completed college (see Figure 3).

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The fact that single motherhood is increasing faster among women with less than a college degree means that children growing up with a single mother are likely to be doubly disadvantaged. They spend less time and receive less money from their biological fathers than children who live with their fathers. At the same time, the primary breadwinner in the family—the mother—has lower earnings than the typical mother in a married-parent family. The official poverty rate in 2013 among all families with children was 40 percent if the family was headed by an unmarried mother and only 8 percent if the family was headed by a married couple (see Figure 4). Among blacks, the rates were 46 percent in single-mother families and 12 percent in married-parent families. Among Hispanics, the figures were 47 percent and 18 percent, and among whites the rates were 32 percent and 4 percent, respectively.

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The Fragile Family

Recent evidence on the impact of these trends comes from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which is following a cohort of nearly 5,000 children born in large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000. Roughly three-quarters of these children were born to unmarried parents. Just under 50 percent of the parents are black, while about 35 percent are Hispanic. Researchers interview parents and assess children every few years to learn about family dynamics and gauge the health and well-being of the participants.

The study finds that couples who are cohabiting at the time of the child’s birth split up much sooner than couples who were married. Nearly half of cohabiting parents break up within five years of the child’s birth, compared to only 20 percent of married parents. Once a mother’s relationship with her baby’s father ends, she is likely to form relationships with new partners, and she typically has one or more children with a new partner. Of course, divorced mothers also form new partnerships and often have children with their new partners. But the interval before this occurs is usually longer among divorced mothers than among mothers who are cohabiting or living alone at the time of their child’s birth. Among the latter group, 61 percent live with a new partner and 11 percent live with three or more new partners before the child is five years old. Among mothers who are married at the time of a birth, those proportions are only 8 percent and 1 percent, respectively.

The high rate of partner turnover during a mother’s peak fertility years means not only that her children now experience more changes in the adults with whom they live, but also that they are now more likely to have half siblings, who have different fathers, paternal grandparents, and other relatives. Half siblings and their kin create additional complexity in children’s families. In the Fragile Families study, 60 percent of children born to unmarried mothers had a half sibling by the time they were five years old, and 23 percent had half siblings fathered by two or more different men. Among children born to married mothers, the comparable figures are 18 and 6 percent.

High levels of instability and complexity have important consequences for children’s home environment and the quality of the parenting they receive. Both the departure of a father and the arrival of a mother’s new partner disrupt family routines and are stressful for most children, regardless of whether the father is married to their mother or merely cohabiting with her. A nonresident father may also be less willing to keep paying child support if he believes his payments will be shared with another man’s child. Such problems are magnified in families with several nonresident fathers.

Among fathers in the study who were married to their child’s mother when the child was born but were not living with the child nine years later, three-quarters were still providing some economic support for their child, according to an analysis by Rutgers University professor Lenna Nepomnyaschy. Among fathers who were cohabiting with the mother when their child was born but were living elsewhere nine years later, only 60 percent were providing some economic support, the same as the percentage among fathers who had never lived with their child.

The Effect on Children

Was Moynihan right in suggesting that children whose parents divorce or never marry have more than their share of problems? This question has been hotly debated ever since the publication of Moynihan’s report. On the one hand, growing up without both biological parents is clearly associated with worse average outcomes for children than growing up with them. Specifically, children growing up with a single mother are exposed to more family instability and complexity, they have more behavior problems, and they are less likely to finish high school or attend college than children raised by both of their parents. On the other hand, these differences in children’s behavior and success might well be traceable to differences that would exist even if the biological father were present.

In recent years, researchers have begun to use what they call “quasi-experimental” approaches to estimate the causal impact of growing up apart from one’s biological father. Some studies compare the outcomes of children living in states with liberal versus restrictive divorce laws. Others compare siblings who were different ages in the year when their father moved out. Still others compare the same child before and after the father left the child’s household. One important limitation of these studies is that while they all focus on children who are not living with both of their biological parents, they differ with respect to their comparison group, whether it is children raised by their mother alone, by their mother and a new spouse, or by their mother and a new partner to whom she is not married. Nonetheless, when taken together these studies are beginning to tell a consistent story. A recent review of 45 studies using quasi-experimental methods concluded that growing up apart from one’s father does reduce a child’s life chances in many domains.

The review’s authors examined the effects of a father’s absence on outcomes in four domains: educational attainment, mental health, labor market performance, and family formation. Growing up with only one biological parent reduces a child’s chances of graduating from high school by about 40 percent, which is similar to the effect of having a mother who did not finish high school rather than one who did. The absence of one’s biological father has not been shown to affect a child’s verbal and math test scores, however.  The evidence for other indicators of educational performance, such as high school grades, skipping school, and college aspirations, is mixed, with some studies finding that father absence lowers school attendance and aspirations and others finding no effect. Most studies find larger effects on boys than on girls.

How might we reconcile the fact that a father’s absence affects high school graduation with the lack of evidence that it affects test scores? The answer appears to be that a father’s absence increases antisocial behavior, such as aggression, rule breaking, delinquency, and illegal drug use. These antisocial behaviors affect high school completion independent of a child’s verbal and math scores. Thus it appears that a father’s absence lowers children’s educational attainment not by altering their scores on cognitive tests but by disrupting their social and emotional adjustment and reducing their ability or willingness to exercise self-control. The effects of growing up without both parents on aggression, rule breaking, and delinquency are also larger for boys than for girls. Since these traits predict both college attendance and graduation, the spread of single-parent families over the past few decades may have contributed to the growing gender gap in college attendance and graduation. The gender gap in college completion is much more pronounced among children raised by single mothers than among children raised in two-parent families.

University of Chicago researcher Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan of the National University of Singapore investigated several mechanisms that might explain how a father’s absence could affect the educational attainment of sons more than daughters. They found that single mothers spend more time with girls and feel closer to girls than to boys, for example. More important, boys are far more sensitive than girls to parenting practices such as spending time with a child, emotional closeness, and avoiding harsh discipline. These practices, which are much more common in families that include a father, partly explain why boys with absent fathers have more behavior problems and are more likely to be suspended from school. Boys also respond more negatively than girls to having been raised by a teenage mother and to having grown up in a family with below-average income. Single motherhood is highly correlated with both teenage childbearing and low income, so these differences presumably help explain the unusually negative consequences for boys of growing up with a single mother.

There is no strong evidence that single motherhood has different effects on black children than on white children.
There is no strong evidence that single motherhood has different effects on black children than on white children.

When we turn to black-white differences in the effects of single motherhood on children, we might expect the effects to be more negative for black than for white children, particularly for black boys, because single black mothers are younger, less educated, and poorer than single white mothers. Yet the fact that single motherhood has long been more common among blacks than whites could also have helped black families develop better systems for coping with a father’s absence. Consistent with these conflicting hypotheses, there is no strong evidence either that single motherhood has different effects on black children than on white children or that the effects are the same. A few studies find weaker effects for blacks, and other studies find no significant racial difference.

There is consistent evidence that a father’s absence reduces a child’s chances of employment, but the evidence on whether it affects the earnings of those who do find work is inconclusive. Similarly, there is solid evidence that absence of a father during childhood increases the chances that a child will divorce as an adult and that a daughter will have a nonmarital birth. The evidence on whether a father’s absence affects the likelihood that a child will marry is inconclusive.

Is Marriage the Solution?

These findings do not mean that children would necessarily be better-off if their biological parents were married. Children with unmarried mothers are more likely than other children to have a biological father who is in prison, beats his partner, cannot find or keep a steady job, and/or makes his living by selling drugs. None of these characteristics is associated with good outcomes for children. Sara Jaffee, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues found that living with a father who engages in high levels of antisocial behavior increases children’s conduct problems. While problems of this kind may sometimes diminish if a mother marries such a father—living with the mother and child may motivate the father to change his behavior, for example—there are also many instances in which that does not happen.

Furthermore, even when a child’s absent father is a model citizen, the mother often has problems that marriage cannot solve. Unmarried mothers have seldom done well in school, many lack even a high school diploma, and few have completed college. If these mothers find work, their earnings are usually lower than those of married mothers who work, and their hours are often long, erratic, or both. Unmarried mothers are also more likely than married mothers to have physical and mental health problems, and probably less likely to have habits or skills that help children escape from poverty. Of course, trying to raise children alone on a tiny budget is likely to exacerbate whatever problems a mother had initially. But marrying the man who fathered her child may magnify a mother’s problems rather than solve them.

What Can Be Done? 

Unmarried parents are not that different from married parents in their behavior. Both groups value marriage, both spend a long time searching for a suitable marriage partner, and both engage in premarital sex and cohabitation. The key difference is that one group often has children while they are searching for a suitable partner, whereas the other group more often has children only after they marry.

Changing this dynamic would require two things. First, we would need to give less-educated women a good reason to postpone motherhood. The women who are currently postponing motherhood are typically investing in education and careers. These women use contraceptive methods that are more reliable, and they use these methods more consistently. Postponing fertility in these ways would also have benefits for women who currently do not do so. They would be more mature when they became mothers, and they would probably do a better job of selecting suitable partners.

Nonetheless, postponing fertility will not solve the problem of nonmarital childbearing unless the economic prospects of the young men who father the children also improve. Women are not likely to marry men whom they view as poor providers, regardless of their own earning capacity. Thus, in addition to encouraging young women to delay motherhood, we also need to improve the economic prospects of their prospective husbands, especially those with no more than a high school diploma. This will not be easy. But it would improve the lives of the men in question, perhaps reduce their level of antisocial behavior, and improve the lives of their children, through all the benefits that flow from a stable home.

Sara McLanahan is professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. Christopher Jencks is professor of social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.      

This article appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

McLanahan, S., and Jencks, C. (2015). Was Moynihan Right? What happens to the children of unmarried mothers. Education Next, 15(2), 14-20.

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How Can Schools Address America’s Marriage Crisis? https://www.educationnext.org/schools-address-americas-marriage-crisis-careers/ Fri, 06 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/schools-address-americas-marriage-crisis-careers/ Prepare young people for rewarding careers

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This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family. The full series will appear in our Spring 2015 issue to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 release of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (generally referred to as the Moynihan Report).

ednext_XV_2_petrilli_img01This may seem like a ridiculous question. How can schools possibly persuade more adults to marry? And not have children out of wedlock? Fifty years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan himself decided it was inadvisable to offer solutions to problems afflicting the “Negro family.” Since then, our familial challenges have only grown deeper and wider, with 4 in 10 American babies now born to unwed mothers, including a majority of all children born to women in their 20s, and almost one-third of white babies. There are no obvious or easy prescriptions for reversing these trends.

And why put this on the schools? One could argue that reducing teenage pregnancy is a reasonable job for our education system—and that if we could encourage girls to wait until they were in their 20s, and educated, to have babies, they might also wait for marriage. Well, teenage pregnancy rates are down 50 percent from their peak in 1990. High-school graduation rates are up, from 65 percent in the early 1990s to 80 percent today. Yet out-of-wedlock birth rates are as high as ever—we merely pushed early childbearing from the late teens to the early 20s. Now, the young adults who are having babies before marriage haven’t had any contact with the K–12 system for two years or more.

Yet for educators and education policymakers to ignore the issue of marriage seems irresponsible. We tell ourselves that one of the great purposes of education reform is to lift poor children out of poverty. Today’s main strategy is to prepare many more low-income youngsters for college. According to the Pew Economic Mobility Project, 90 percent of low-income children who attain a four-year college degree escape the lowest income quintile as adults, versus just 53 percent of the non–degree holders. Put another way, individuals who grow up in low-income families are almost five times as likely to become low-income adults if they fail to complete a four-year college degree.

The problem, however, is that just 10 to 15 percent of low-income children actually complete a college degree. An analysis by Andrew Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute finds that about one-third of low-income students start college but don’t finish. Kelly argues convincingly that a college degree is a “big payoff, low probability” strategy for economic mobility. Surely it can’t be the only arrow in our quiver.

So what if “college as a springboard to the middle class” isn’t the only strategy? What about “marriage as a springboard to the middle class”? Particularly marriage before childbearing? Or what Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution call the “success sequence”: get at least a high school diploma, work full time, and wait till you are at least 21 and married before having children. They estimate that 98 percent of individuals who follow those three norms will not be poor, and almost three-quarters will be solidly middle class. On the flip side, three-quarters of young people who fail to follow any of those norms will be poor, and almost none will be middle class.

Maybe it’s not so ridiculous to ask, What can schools do to encourage young people to follow the success sequence, including putting marriage before children?

“Drifting” into Parenthood

Our first challenge is to understand why so many young people—especially those who are low-income—are choosing to have children before marriage. A related question is why most affluent, well-educated young adults wait till their late 20s or 30s, and for marriage, before having children. Assuming we don’t want to encourage teenage parents to marry, what can we do to encourage teenagers and those in their early 20s to wait until they are older, educated, employed, and married before having children?

Young women and men see parenthood as a chance to “start over” and to do something good with their lives, as well as to connect deeply with another human being.
Young women and men see parenthood as a chance to “start over” and to do something good with their lives, as well as to connect deeply with another human being.

This has been the subject of vast debate—and increasingly sophisticated research—for decades. A foundational question is, Are young adults “choosing” to have children, or is it happening by accident, because they are having sex without using birth control? Are they deciding to start a family, or are they “drifting into sex and parenthood,” in the words of Sawhill?

The current consensus is that most young people having children before marriage aren’t exactly doing so on purpose, but they also aren’t trying very hard to prevent it. It’s not that they don’t understand how birth control works, or fail to use it in the heat of the moment (though that’s part of it). Rather, they make a somewhat-conscious decision to stop using birth control once they have been “associating” with someone for a while.

Some of the best work on this subject comes from Johns Hopkins sociologist Kathryn Edin. She and her co-authors spent years living in low-income and working-class Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey, neighborhoods, where they met and interviewed young parents, white and black. They found that most young people weren’t sad when they learned that they—or their girlfriends—were pregnant; they treated the news with excitement, rather than with regret.

So have the baby, and raise the baby, they did. But didn’t they know they were consigning their children and themselves to a life of hardship? Didn’t they understand that if they were going to “climb the mountain to college”—or even to a decently paying job—doing so with a baby in a stroller would make the ascent that much tougher?

What Edin and her co-authors show is that the young women and men see parenthood as a chance to “start over” and to do something good with their lives, as well as to connect deeply with another human being. “In these decaying, inner-city neighborhoods, motherhood is the primary vocation for young women, and those who strive to do it well are often transformed by the process,” she and Maria Kefalas write. Furthermore, “Children provide the one relationship poor women believe they can count on to last. Men may disappoint them. Friends may betray them. Even kin may withdraw from them. But they staunchly believe that little can destroy the bond between a mother and child.”

Edin and Timothy Nelson pick up this theme: “Fatherhood offers the opportunity to connect with a child—an unsullied version of oneself—in an intensely meaningful way. But fatherhood is also a tool, almost a magic wand that youth…can use to neutralize the ‘negativity’ that surrounds them as they come of age in chaotic and violence-charged neighborhoods like East Camden.”

Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, these hopeful attitudes eventually give way to the grinding reality of daily life. Most of the romantic relationships between the parents fall apart within a few years. The dads desperately want to spend time with their kids—but not with their kids’ mothers—an arrangement that eventually proves untenable. And so another generation of children is raised in poverty, with single mothers doing most of the child care and trying to make ends meet, and fathers having additional babies with other women in a fruitless quest to “start fresh” and “do the right thing.”

What might be done to change this dynamic? Edin (like Sawhill) is a proponent of making low-cost, long-acting birth control available to young people, and there’s good reason to believe that it can reduce unplanned pregnancies significantly. But the most important “intervention,” according to Edin, is hope: a realistic plan for a life trajectory that is more compelling than early motherhood and fatherhood. (William Damon, at Stanford University, calls this “purpose.”) This means, among other things, having meaningful opportunities for higher education and interesting, decently paid work.

Hope, and purpose, are why affluent, well-educated young men and women wait until their late 20s or early 30s to have children. For them, having a baby before finishing their educations or launching their careers is something of a catastrophe—a huge wrench in their plans and aspirations. They would risk missing out on all manner of fun and fulfilling experiences—college, international travel, living in a big city, enjoying the singles life, climbing the ladder—if they were raising a child.

A key issue is motivation. In particular, how can we motivate young women, and particularly young low-income women, to wait until they are older, educated, employed, and married before they have children? The answer? First, help those young women develop strong prospects for interesting, decently paid careers. And second, give those young women access to “marriageable men”—young men who themselves have strong career prospects. So let’s start there.

What Schools Can Do

Schools can boost the education and employment prospects of disadvantaged youth. The push to get many more young people—especially those from challenging backgrounds—“to and through” college is well documented—and well meaning. There’s little doubt that this should remain a major focus of education reform—and when it’s successful, will encourage many more young people to delay childbearing, which increases their odds at getting married before starting a family.

High-quality career and technical education is a solid pathway to remunerative and satisfying work.
High-quality career and technical education is a solid pathway to remunerative and satisfying work.

But it need not be our only strategy for helping adolescents find their way to a rewarding, middle-class career and stable family life. High-quality career and technical education (CTE) is another solid pathway to remunerative and satisfying work—jobs that are worth working toward, and thus that can motivate delayed childbearing.

As scholars such as Harvard’s Robert Schwartz and Georgetown’s Anthony Carnevale have shown, “middle skills” jobs remain plentiful and pay well in the U.S. economy—accounting for roughly 30 percent of the jobs likely to be available over the next decade. These are positions that generally require a postsecondary certificate but not a four-year degree, in fields such as health care and information technology. Employers regularly struggle to fill these roles, in large part because of America’s underdeveloped—and often ignored—technical training system. European countries such as Germany, Norway, and the Netherlands prepare between 40 and 70 percent of their young people for technical jobs by the age of 20. Yet in the U.S. we remain obsessed with the four-year college degree; fewer students are concentrating in career and technical education at the high school level in America than they were 20 years ago.

That’s a huge lost opportunity, as gold-standard studies of career academy programs have shown. In this model, students in grades 9–12 enroll in “smaller learning communities,” generally within large comprehensive high schools, which combine academic and technical training. The academies are organized around career clusters and partner directly with local employers. A randomized evaluation by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) found significant positive outcomes for academies’ participants, most of whom were low-income, African American, and/or Hispanic. Among the program’s long-term benefits, which were strongest for minority men, were higher earnings, greater hours worked, and stronger attachment to the labor market.

Perhaps most intriguingly, MDRC found that the young men who years earlier had graduated from a career academy were 33 percent more likely to be married, and living with their spouse, than their peers in a control group. Whether that was because the graduates developed skills that helped them form more stable relationships, or became more “marriageable” because of their stronger career prospects, the lesson is clear: work works. As does high-quality CTE.

Of course, it’s not as simple as creating more career academies. Students entering these programs must possess strong math, reading, and writing skills. They also need to be well behaved and willing to work hard. That means that our elementary and middle schools need to help many more students get ready for rigorous programs in high school—academically, socially, and otherwise. It’s not any easier to prepare students for great CTE programs than it is to prepare them for great college-prep programs. Thus the larger education-reform agenda—higher standards, greater accountability, stronger teachers, solid curricula, especially in grades pre-K–8—remains essential.

Schools can also help their students develop “performance character”—drive and prudence in particular. Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves explains why these attributes are so essential:

People with drive are able to stick with a task, even when it gets boring or difficult; they work hard and don’t leave a job unfinished. Drive includes not just the ability to work hard (industriousness) but also the ability to overcome setbacks and to keep going (resilience).

Prudent people are able to defer gratification and plan for the future; they can make sacrifices today in order to ensure a better tomorrow. The better developed a person’s character strength of prudence, the less they suffer from what economists call “present bias,” the tendency to underweight future utility. They can both plan for the future and exert self-control in the moment to reach their long-term goals.

Reeves and others point to evidence indicating the importance of drive. For example, the fact that students’ high-school grade-point averages predict college completion better than SAT scores may be one indication that hard work and resilience pay off, even more than talent. The evidence for “prudence” is even stronger, ranging from Walter Mischel’s work on delayed gratification to Angela Duckworth’s findings about the importance of grit and self-control for long-term success.

It stands to reason that young people with the drive to work hard at school and on the job and the prudence to delay childbirth—either by eschewing sex or by making good birth-control decisions—are going to be more likely to climb the ladder to upward mobility, and potentially to marry.

So how can schools teach these skills and habits? The old-fashioned way is, of course, through religion. Catholic schools in particular have long been singled out by social scientists for their strong results in terms of graduation and college-going rates. These strong long-term outcomes—which tend to be much more significant than any short-term test-score gains—likely reflect Catholic schools’ focus on discipline and character as much as their excellent academics. In the early 1980s, James Coleman and his colleagues found that Catholic-school students were significantly more likely to report that their schools’ approach to discipline was “excellent or good” than their public-school peers. Later research by Anthony Bryk confirmed this view with Catholic-school administrators, who were much less likely to report student-behavior problems than their public-school colleagues.

Catholic schools in particular have long been singled out for their strong results in terms of graduation and college-going rates.
Catholic schools in particular have long been singled out for their strong results in terms of graduation and college-going rates.

A 2012 study by David Figlio and Jens Ludwig found that Catholic high-school students were less likely to participate in risky behaviors, including teen sexual activity, arrests, and the use of cocaine. They speculated why this might be so. One possibility is the most obvious: Catholic schools put the fear of God into their students. Religious instruction “could affect students’ ‘tastes’ for misbehavior, or increase the perceived costs of misbehavior by defining a number of activities as sins that have eternal consequences.” And of course there is the role of positive peer pressure—by “exposing them to more pro-social peer groups,” particularly by selecting out and/or expelling students more likely to engage in risky behaviors.

The secular, New Age way to teach character is best illustrated by KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), which has placed character education at the heart of its “no excuses” ethos. As made famous by Paul Tough’s best-selling book How Children Succeed, many KIPP schools use a “character growth card” to help teachers, students, and parents work together to develop specific character strengths, such as grit, optimism, and curiosity. Some KIPP schools are incorporating mindfulness training and even yoga to help their students build self-control so they can make better choices toward their long-term success.

Don’t Forget the Extracurriculars

There’s one more way schools can help students develop important character strengths, while keeping them off the streets: provide an excellent suite of extracurricular offerings. This might be one secret to Catholic schools’ success; Figlio and Ludwig report that students in Catholic schools “spend more time on homework and extracurricular activities than those in public schools…Private schools may thus reduce delinquency if only because of an ‘incapacitation effect’—teens who are doing homework or running track are not out looking for trouble.”

Some KIPP schools are incorporating mindfulness training and even yoga to help their students build self-control so they can make better choices toward their long-term success.
Some KIPP schools are incorporating mindfulness training and even yoga to help their students build self-control so they can make better choices toward their long-term success.

Extracurricular activities, including athletics, appear to be important for public school students, too; as June Kronholz reported in these pages (“Academic Value of Non-Academics,” features, Winter 2012), studies have long found that disadvantaged students who participate in extracurriculars are less likely to drop out of high school, use tobacco or alcohol, or get pregnant, and are more likely to score well on tests, attend college, and complete college. Granted, it’s hard to tease out the selection bias of these studies; it’s tough to know whether participating in these activities caused teenagers to make better choices, or whether teenagers who made good life choices also chose to participate in sports and other extracurriculars.

But as Kronholz explains, some studies attempt to correct for such bias, and still find compelling outcomes. For instance, research by Columbia University scientist Margo Gardner examined the issue, using “propensity scoring,” and found that the odds of attending college were almost twice as high for students who participated in school-related activities for at least two years; such students were also dramatically more likely to complete college and significantly more likely to vote as adults.

It is therefore counterproductive, if not tragic, that schools serving high concentrations of poor students are less likely to offer extracurricular activities. In an innovative 2009 study, researchers Elizabeth Stearns and Elizabeth J. Glennie at the University of North Carolina scoured yearbooks and state administrative data to determine the number of activities offered, and percentage of students participating, in each high school in North Carolina. High-poverty schools offered fewer activities and showed lower participation rates than their low-poverty peers. It’s hard to know whether that’s due to lack of funding or an obsession with more academic, college-oriented pursuits, but it’s clearly a lost opportunity that could and should be remedied.

Where There Is Hope

Studies have long found that disadvantaged students who participate in extracur- riculars are more likely to score well on tests, attend college, and complete college.
Studies have long found that disadvantaged students who participate in extracurriculars are more likely to score well on tests, attend college, and complete college.

So maybe schools should try to address America’s marriage crisis. At the very least, they can help to instill a sense of hope and optimism in their students—by getting them ready for college and/or a satisfying career, by embracing high-quality technical education, and by developing in them character traits like drive and prudence, both via classroom instruction and through extracurricular activities. All of these actions, done well, are almost certain to help push back the average age of childbearing, which will help the next generation do better academically and economically.

Not all of these actions are easy to implement within our traditional public-school system, though, which clearly cannot teach religion but also struggles to enforce high expectations around student behavior. School choice, then, must be an important part of this strategy, because it allows parents and their children to opt into schools, including religious schools, that share their values. Importantly, school choice also avoids the specter of “the system” tracking certain students into certain programs (like technical training). A much better approach is to allow students and families to select into schools and programs that they themselves find compelling.

But will these steps actually lead to a renaissance in marriage? That’s harder to know, and the honest answer is “maybe at the margins.” We may have a better shot at turning around our marriage trends if young people are waiting longer to have children, picking up important skills and work experiences along the way. And those individuals will, on average, be better parents than if they had children as teenagers or early 20-somethings, with few skills under their belts or job prospects on their horizons.

Fixing our marriage problem isn’t a job for schools alone, of course. If we’re serious about getting more people to tie the knot, we’ll also tackle prison reform (to help make more men “marriageable”), wage supports (ditto), and tax reform (to remove marriage penalties). But in the meantime, our schools can help give their graduates a reason to wait to become parents, and possibly put them on a path to saying “I do.”

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This article appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Petrilli, M.J. (2015). How Can Schools Address America’s Marriage Crisis? Prepare young people for rewarding careers. Education Next, 15(2), 56-62.

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Purposeful Parenthood https://www.educationnext.org/purposeful-parenthood/ Fri, 06 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/purposeful-parenthood/ Better planning benefits new parents and their children

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This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family. The full series will appear in our Spring 2015 issue to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 release of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (generally referred to as the Moynihan Report).

ednext_XV_2_Sawhill_img01Fifty years ago, in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan presciently warned that the breakdown of the family was becoming a key source of disadvantage in the African American community. He received intense criticism at the time. Yet the trends he identified have not gone away. Indeed, they have “trickled up” to encompass not just a much larger fraction of the African American community but a large swath of the white community as well. Still, the racial gaps remain large. The proportion of black children born outside marriage was 72 percent in 2012, while the white proportion was 36 percent (see “Was Moynihan Right?features, Spring 2015, Figure 2).

The effects on children of the increase in single parents is no longer much debated. They do less well in school, are less likely to graduate, and are more likely to be involved in crime, teen pregnancy, and other behaviors that make it harder to succeed in life. Not every child raised by a single parent will suffer from the experience, but, on average, a lone parent has fewer resources—both time and money—with which to raise a child. Poverty rates for single-parent families are five times those for married-parent families (see “Was Moynihan Right?features, Spring 2015, Figure 4). The growth of such families since 1970 has increased the overall child poverty rate by about 5 percentage points (from 20 to 25 percent).

Rates of social mobility are also lower for these families. Harvard researcher Raj Chetty and his colleagues find that the incidence of single parenthood in a community is one of the most powerful predictors of geographic differences in social mobility in the United States. And our research at the Brookings Institution also shows that social mobility is much higher for the children of continuously married parents than for those who grow up with discontinuously married or never-married parents. Moynihan was especially concerned about the large number of boys growing up in “broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future….” Recent research suggests that boys are indeed more affected than girls by the lack of a male role model in the family. If true, this sets the stage for a cycle of poverty in which mother-headed families produce boys who go on to father their own children outside marriage.

But what does all of this have to do with education? Rates of unwed childbearing and divorce are much lower among well-educated than among less-educated women. The proportion of first births that occur outside of marriage is only 12 percent for those who are college graduates but 58 percent for everyone else. So more and better education is one clear path to reducing unwed parenthood and the growth of single-parent families in the future.

Why Does Education Matter? 

Education clearly improves the economic prospects of men and women, making them more marriageable. But the commonly heard argument that the declining economic prospects of men are the culprit in this story about unwed births is too simple. It doesn’t explain why some young adults feel they are too poor to marry but believe they can afford to raise a child. Or why marriage was so much more prevalent in an earlier era, when everyone had fewer resources.

One reason that education may help to increase marriage rates is that the better-educated tend to have more egalitarian gender roles, which makes marriage more appealing, especially to women. For women who work outside the home, flexible parenting arrangements help them avoid having to “do it all” and the resentment that engenders.

Finally, and critically, in my view, the better-educated are much more successful at avoiding the arrival of a baby before they are in a committed relationship and ready to be parents. An unwed birth, not divorce, is now the most common entry point into single parenthood. Although the mother may be living with the child’s father at the time of the birth, these cohabiting relationships are very fragile. By the time the child is age five, about half of cohabiting parents will have split up. More education sharply reduces the drifting into unstable relationships and the single parenthood that this often produces.

The relationship between education and the ability to plan a family goes in both directions. If young adults had more education, there would be less drifting and fewer unwed births. And if there were better family planning, young people could finish their schooling. There would then be more purposeful parenthood, more children ready for school when they enroll, and, later on, better-educated young adults making better parenting decisions of their own.

Education Out of School

While education is critically important, if we focus only on what can be done during the schooling years to improve educational outcomes, we will likely fail. Not all human-capital development occurs in a classroom; some of it occurs in the home. Children from underprivileged backgrounds typically start school way behind their more-fortunate peers. These gaps tend to persist as children move through school and pose enormous challenges to teachers and other school personnel. We need to focus attention on what happens to a child long before he or she starts school.

Starting earlier means focusing on what occurs before a child enters any form of schooling, including a pre-K program. Let’s call the prior period pre-pre-K, a term coined by my colleague Richard Reeves. It spans from infancy through toddlerhood. During this period, development is rapid, and the home environment looms large. The quality of parenting matters a lot. Some parenting or home-visiting programs have improved the quality of parenting and thus a child’s later outcomes, including readiness for school. But not all such programs are effective, and they face an uphill struggle: the evidence suggests that class differences in parenting styles are growing, rather than diminishing.

The developmental stage prior to infancy is the prenatal period, from conception to birth. Scientists have just begun to diagram the underlying mechanics, but the consequences of events during pregnancy are numerous and clear. In a study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, for example, the most anxious 15 percent of participating mothers were twice as likely to deliver children with behavioral concerns like ADHD; the effect remained even after controlling for the mothers’ postnatal stress. Another study found that prenatally stressed nine-year-olds have less gray-matter density in regions associated with cognitive function. David Figlio, with three other researchers, has examined the effects of prenatal health on school success, using 14,000 pairs of Florida twins. The twins with lower birth weights, a proxy for worse prenatal health, scored consistently lower on reading and math tests through 8th grade. The twins’ gender, race, and socioeconomic class did not change the results, nor did their schools’ quality.

During the pre-pre-K period, which spans infancy through toddlerhood, development is rapid and the home environment looms large. The quality of parenting matters a lot.
During the pre-pre-K period, which spans infancy through toddlerhood, development is rapid and the home environment looms large.
The quality of parenting matters a lot.

 

Further upstream still are the circumstances of the parents-to-be. Have they finished school? Are they emotionally mature and financially independent? Did they choose to have children with someone they can envision living with in a committed relationship for the time it takes to raise the child? Did they plan to have the child? In short, are they reasonably well prepared to take on the most important task any adult ever undertakes?

In Generation Unbound, I show that a large fraction of young adults are “drifting” into sex and parenthood without having thought very much, if at all, about these questions. About half of new parents under 30 are unmarried (although often in cohabiting relationships). Among these unmarried parents-to-be, more than 70 percent began the pregnancy unintentionally, according to their own reports. Many are still in school (either high school or college); 21 percent of nonmarital births are to women under age 20.

When unmarried parents are asked why they haven’t married, many say that it is because they can’t “afford” to. Why they think it takes less money to raise a child than to marry is a major puzzle. It seems that marriage, while still celebrated in the abstract, is viewed as a distant goal—the capstone not the cornerstone of a successful life, as Johns Hopkins professor Andrew Cherlin notes. In the meantime, children are being raised in environments marked by inadequate resources and unstable relationships. No wonder that when they get to school, children are often not ready to learn. Schools are asked to compensate for the failure of children’s first teachers—their parents—to instill in them the attitudes and habits, the love of learning, and the ability to interact constructively with others that success in school requires.

Reconnecting Marriage and Parenting

Can we encourage more planning and less drifting among young adults and perhaps bring back marriage, or at least a long-term committed relationship, as the standard precursor to bearing and raising children in the U.S.?

No one knows. According to some, there is a dearth of so-called marriageable men, defined as those who are employed. But there is an even greater dearth of marriageable women, defined as not having children from a previous relationship: using these metrics, there are only 62 marriageable women for every 100 marriageable men. But there are reasons to be optimistic and reasons to be pessimistic about the future.

On the optimistic side, well-educated elites are still marrying. This model could eventually trickle down to the less well educated. Marriage still has many benefits for both adults and children. Moreover, marriage is a legally and socially supported institution in our culture and an integral part of many people’s religious faith.

On the pessimistic side, major demographic trends, once they gain a certain momentum, are hard to reverse. The youngest generation is marrying less than older ones, suggesting that the retreat from marriage will continue. Other advanced countries are also seeing a decline in marriage, suggesting the trend has little to do with policies specific to the U.S. And opportunities for women that enable them to support themselves and establish identities separate from those of wife and mother are still increasing. Perhaps most distressing, single parenthood may replicate itself intergenerationally by reducing the life chances of children, especially boys with absent fathers.

What might we do to ensure that more children are born to adults who are ready to be parents and in a stable and committed relationship?

There seem to be two schools of thought about this. Liberals contend that single parents are here to stay and need more assistance. Conservatives want to restore marriage as the primary institution for raising children. I do not disagree with their goal, but we have no real agenda for achieving it. Marriage education programs and efforts to make taxes and benefit programs more marriage-friendly have not moved the needle much, if at all. For example, President George W. Bush launched a Healthy Marriage Initiative in 2002 that funded programs to encourage or sustain marriage among low-income families using counseling and relationship education. One carefully evaluated program, Building Strong Families, focused on unwed parents but had no effect on their marriage rates. Perhaps government is not the best source of marriage-promotion efforts. Religious and civic organizations, on the other hand, have a role to play, but they are working against some powerful trends in the other direction.

Both conservatives and liberals support strengthening the education and training system to ensure that young adults will have the kind of opportunities that will motivate them to avoid early parenthood and make marriage more likely. Especially important is making sure that well-paying jobs are available to young men, thereby making them more marriageable. More career and technical education, apprenticeships, and wage subsidies for childless individuals have all been proposed as possible contributors to this goal. Whether they will work or not to slow the growth of single-parent families remains to be seen.

My own view is that much more attention needs to be given to changing drifters into planners, that is, to encouraging young adults to think more about whether, when, and with whom to have children. Backed up by the availability of newer and much more effective forms of birth control, and reasonable educational and career opportunities for young men and women, this is a realistic goal. It should help to reconnect marriage and parenting by encouraging young adults to wait until they have met Mr. or Ms. Right before having children.

The Role of Birth Control

It is not just marriage that improves a child’s life chances, but family planning as well. Once couples are able to plan together when to have children, it improves a child’s education and adult earning ability. In a series of papers, University of Michigan professor Martha Bailey found that the diffusion of effective forms of birth control, such as the pill, after legal and financial restraints on its use were lifted in the 1960s and 1970s, enabled young men and women to adjust the number and timing of their children to better reflect their preferences. This, in turn, enabled their children to obtain more education and higher incomes. Bailey suggests several mechanisms for these impacts on a child’s education and income as an adult. When parents achieve their own goals, their families are smaller, which enables them to extend their own educational and labor-market experiences, and to invest more time or resources in each child. In addition, there is a smaller youth cohort. This smaller cohort limits competition for public resources, including teacher time (e.g., class size) and college slots. Finally, young adults are able to delay marriage, much as the well-educated are doing today, leading to better and more stable matches. Bailey finds that the increased availability and lower costs of family planning in the 1960s and 1970s produced a 2- to 3-percent increase in family income for all of the children in an affected cohort, and perhaps a 20- to 30-percent gain for those children who benefited most directly from their parents’ greater access to birth control. She notes that “an important component of these income gains reflects increases in children’s educational attainment.”

The chief actor in this historical drama was the invention and diffusion of the pill. Now, a second family-planning revolution is in the offing, led by long-acting reversible contraceptives (or LARCs), such as IUDs. Where they have been made affordable, and women have been educated about their safety and effectiveness, usage has climbed dramatically and unintended pregnancy rates have fallen sharply. They enable women to pursue more education, to get more experience on the job, and to marry unencumbered by a child from a prior relationship. High schools and community colleges could be doing more to educate young people about their contraceptive options, but their efforts need to be supplemented with good online resources. These and popular media are proving to be effective ways of getting out new messages and information. The TV reality show 16 and Pregnant was responsible for one-third of the reduction in the teen birth rate in 2009–10, according to a study by economists Phillip Levine, at Wellesley College, and Melissa Kearney, at the University of Maryland.

Is birth control a magic bullet? No. There will always be some people who want a baby, even though they are not prepared to raise her, and there will always be others, who despite not being ready for parenthood, do not choose to avail themselves of the most effective and easy ways of preventing it. But I believe a lot of the discussion about the value of children in low-income communities is based on small samples of highly disadvantaged individuals and should not be extrapolated to the half of all births that are now occurring outside of marriage among the youngest generation. The hard data, as opposed to the more qualitative evidence, show that the majority of unwed births are unintended. And unintended pregnancy and birth rates are especially high among low-income and minority women. If we could lower their unintended pregnancy rates to the level experienced by college-educated women, we could reduce the proportion of children born outside of marriage by 25 percent.

ednext_XV_2_Sawhill_fig01-small

Of course, we should work on expanding educational and job opportunities at the same time to increase the motivation to avoid early pregnancy, but I know of no other approach that could have as large an effect on unwed childbearing as better birth control and at the same time save money for the government. Specifically, we need to educate women about their contraceptive choices (many don’t know about IUDs, and those who do are often misinformed about their safety and effectiveness), make them available at no cost to the recipient, and train the medical community on the best clinical practices. Where these three ingredients have been present, the results have been impressive. Unintended pregnancies, including among the disadvantaged, have dropped, and so have Medicaid and other government expenditures. A study of the Colorado Family Planning Initiative by Sue Ricketts and her colleagues found that expanding access to LARCs decreased births to unmarried disadvantaged young women by 27 percent between 2009 and 2011. The CHOICE project in St. Louis found that women who used LARCs or contraceptive shots had far lower rates of unintended pregnancy than users of other popular methods (see Figure 1).

My hope is that 30 years from now this new family-planning revolution will have the same degree of impact on parenting behavior, income, and children’s educational achievement as the advent of the pill. My only regret is that neither Senator Moynihan nor I will be here to see whether my optimism is warranted.

Isabel Sawhill is senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage.

This article appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Sawhill, I. (2015). Purposeful Parenthood: Better planning benefits new parents and their children. Education Next, 15(2), 51-55.

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The Meaning of Community at Democracy Prep https://www.educationnext.org/meaning-community-democracy-prep/ Thu, 05 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/meaning-community-democracy-prep/ School culture supports students and their families

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Her favorite movie is Frozen. She can recite almost every line. After learning one day that her favorite song is “Let It Go,” I encouraged her to sing it in her near-empty classroom at Democracy Prep Endurance, a charter middle school in central Harlem where I am a social worker and Hope is an 8th grader.

Kalima DeSuze
Kalima DeSuze

She walked up to the front of the room, picked up a pencil, positioned herself as any diva would, and started to belt it out. Her words were a little hard to understand, but her rhythm was undeniable and her exuberance unmistakable, so words didn’t matter. This young girl has Down syndrome.

Children with Down syndrome often suffer from a false sense of inadequacy and a fear of building relationships. As she was going into the last stanza, Hope’s class was filling the room. She turned her back, her makeshift mic visibly shaking, and continued to sing. The class snapped her up—our signal of support—and although she couldn’t see it, there were almost 30 sets of fingers moving wildly in the air to send her love and encouragement.

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote, “We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” Democracy Prep Endurance is our village; we are “each other’s business.” We are committed to truly seeing one another. This is particularly important for young people like Hope. She’s different, and difference is not easily accepted or understood.

I saw in Hope’s turning her back a response to years of bullying and teasing, the inevitable “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” and the general meanness of people who simply don’t understand her.

Hope is being raised by her dad. Her mom is largely absent from her life; the void is real and tangible. With the exception of Democracy Prep Endurance and her afterschool program, Hope and her dad operate as a small island. He works a full-time job and pulls second shift once he picks her up in the afternoon.

Like many single parents I work with, he texts at all hours. I don’t mind. I am available even when it’s inconvenient; life doesn’t happen on a schedule. Meeting and understanding the parents of our scholars is critical to my work.

One morning, Hope’s dad said outright, “I need your help. There are things I can’t talk to her about; she needs a woman.” He had officially welcomed me onto his island; he expanded his village.

More often than not, despite possibly having similar family dynamics, there are clear class, race, and educational differences between families and our staff. Humility demands that we remain conscious of our privilege and power in relation to the families we serve. So, instead of bolting to answer, I acknowledged his angst and set out to explore what Hope’s dad actually knows about “this woman stuff.” It was an interesting conversation filled with laughter and moments of silence, yet so human.

Many of our students (known here as “scholars”) come from complicated family systems with myriad obstacles: single parenting, immigration struggles, foster placements, homelessness, and unemployment. Our scholars often carry with them family histories rooted in unimaginable trauma. They’ve internalized expectations that are so low that, before we do the work of educating, we must do the work of loving these young people back into their full humanity, to believing they are much more than they have been told they are.

Before she walked off her imaginary stage, I asked Hope to open her eyes. I wanted her to see the love and support in the room. She sucked her teeth as she walked past me, and I saw a small smirk in her left cheek. She was happy, yet reluctant, to trust her village.

She mouthed thank you to her classmates in response to their “that was nice” or “you go, Hope!” Her smile became more pronounced as she took the risk of seeing them as if for the first time. Even if for a split second, I know she considered us part of her village and that was progress. “We are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

Kalima DeSuze is an activist and educator committed to gender, economic, and social equality.

This article appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

DeSuze, K. (2015). The Meaning of Community at Democracy Prep: School culture supports students and their families. Education Next, 15(2), 79.

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More Harm Than Good https://www.educationnext.org/more-harm-than-good-please-stop-helping-us-review-jason-l-riley/ Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/more-harm-than-good-please-stop-helping-us-review-jason-l-riley/ A review of "Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed," by Jason L. Riley

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ednext_XV_2_stewart_coverPlease Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed
By Jason L. Riley
Encounter Books, 2014, $23.99; 184 pages.

As reviewed by Thomas Stewart

Jason Riley challenges the value of affirmative action and liberal social reform precisely 50 years after their birth as part of the “Great Society” conceived by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration in 1964 and 1965. At the time, it was said that it would take 40 to 50 years to truly measure their impact. That time span has now passed, and Riley’s verdict is a harsh one.

The book reminds the reader of the challenges facing many African Americans today, including high unemployment, staggering neighborhood crime and violence, and large percentages of children growing up in low-income single-parent households. As a reviewer for Education Next, I was particularly interested in Riley’s treatment of education policy and its consequences. Among the education topics he discusses are the black-white achievement gap, education reform strategies, improving outcomes for African American students, and affirmative action in higher education.

The general premise of Please Stop Helping Us is that “liberal” social policies specifically targeting African Americans have done more harm than good. He “examines the track record of the political left’s serial altruism over the past half century.” Riley evaluates these policies by combining evidence from leading social-science research with personal stories about his experiences as a black male. He provides moving examples of what it was like for him growing up in a single-parent household, being teased for acting and sounding white because of his commitment to academic excellence, and having direct encounters with both sides of crime and violence in America. I find his stories and many of his claims compelling, and I encourage anyone interested in these matters to pick up a copy, as it challenges conventional wisdom at every turn.

Still, the work has its limitations. First, his charge against liberal advocates is overly generalized. Often he seems to treat any and all Democrats as equally guilty. With regard to K–12 education reform, for example, it is not accurate to cast all Democrats as people who oppose charter schools and school vouchers. Riley offers the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) as an example of a school-choice initiative denounced by “liberals.” But the reality is a good deal more nuanced than that, as my own research has shown. The OSP is the first federally funded voucher program in America, and it was launched in the District of Columbia in 2004. The District of Columbia is a heavily Democratic-leaning school district and city, and OSP would not have been established there without the support of key leading local Democrats. Many of these leaders, in fact, came together to create a “three-sector [education] strategy” that focused on 1) securing greater federal support for traditional public schools, 2) creating a facilities fund for public charters, and 3) providing low-income families a scholarship or voucher to attend private schools. The goal was to create “one of the best systems of schools in the country.” The author must give these liberals due credit here.

Riley also lacks clarity regarding who is the “us” in the title and his criteria for assessing the impact of “help” or affirmative action. The title of Riley’s book suggests that help is a bad word, and I agree that blind, uninformed, and politically motivated sources of help have led to some egregiously misdirected public policies. But once again a more nuanced analysis is called for. Not all forms of help are equally misguided. Government programs can be delivered in ways that range from highly paternalistic to completely hands-off. Riley seems to prefer the latter, but neither extreme is the ideal design for interventions geared toward income-disadvantaged urban families.

Riley’s critique of affirmative action is right on target, though he sometimes vacillates between treating African Americans as a monolithic community and a community made up of either low-income or middle-class members. It is my understanding that affirmative action in higher education was an extension of the War on Poverty, which was expected to provide students from low-income families with greater access to predominantly white colleges and universities. It was assumed that low-income, first-generation African American college graduates would return to their families and communities, providing inspiration and uplift for others. But in the early 1970s many universities circumvented the original spirit of affirmative action by recruiting African American students from more affluent backgrounds and those who had attended majority-white high schools. It was thought that these students could be more easily assimilated into the university world. Thus, in practice, affirmative action did not enlarge but rather cut the neighborhood-to-college pipeline for talented, low-income African Americans, who could fulfill the original spirit of the concept.

Overall, the author’s critique of affirmative action exposes the limitations of liberal public policies. As he notes, “Much more disturbing is that half a century after the civil rights battles were fought and won, liberalism remains much more interested in making excuses for blacks than in reevaluating efforts to help them.” His many examples stand as an indictment of liberal proponents of the country’s affirmative action and other social programs.

Less obviously, it also stands as a critique, even more specifically, of African American parents, leaders, and organizations. Riley argues in no uncertain language that “black cultural attitudes toward work, authority, dress, sex and violence have also proven counterproductive, inhibiting the development of the kind of human capital that has led to socioeconomic advancement for other groups.” With the bleak picture of the African American community that he paints, one might conclude that Riley’s book offers only a dim light to guide us forward. Yet his greatest contribution is to raise a critical question: How do we change the mind-set and behaviors of specific members of the African American community? Highlighting the hard questions is the first step toward answering them. For this, Riley should be commended.

Thomas Stewart is president of Patten University in Oakland, California, and co-author with Patrick J. Wolf of The School Choice Journey: School Vouchers and the Empowerment of Urban Families (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

This article appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Stewart, T. (2015). More Harm Than Good: Great Society policies have largely failed African Americans. Education Next, 15(2), 75-76.

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Black Men and the Struggle for Work https://www.educationnext.org/black-men-struggle-work/ Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/black-men-struggle-work/ Social and economic barriers persist

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This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family. The full series will appear in our Spring 2015 issue to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 release of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (generally referred to as the Moynihan Report).

ednext_XV_2_wilson_img01Driven by deep dissatisfaction with the economic and social condition of the black family, Daniel Patrick Moynihan hoped, with the release of his 1965 report, to stimulate a national discussion linking economic disadvantage and family instability. Although Moynihan focused on the structural causes of the fragmentation of the black family, critics associated his report with the “culture of poverty” thesis, which implies that poverty is passed from one generation to the next through learned behavior.

A number of those critics emphasized Moynihan’s suggestion that the problem “may indeed have begun to feed on itself.” From 1948 to 1962, the unemployment rate among black males and the number of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) cases were positively correlated, but after 1962, the number of new AFDC cases continued to rise even as black male unemployment declined. “With this one statistical correlation, by far the most highly publicized in the Report,” states historian Alice O’Connor, “Moynihan sealed the argument that the ‘pathology’ had become self-perpetuation.”

Still, Moynihan’s main concern in the report involved black exclusion from opportunities that fortify economic self-sufficiency. Unlike conservative analysts, he combined economic and cultural explanations for the persistence of poverty. Nevertheless, the controversy that surrounded the report undermined for decades serious research on the complexity of the problem.

A 1987 study by one of this article’s authors, William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, rekindled the debate with its discussion of institutional and cultural dynamics in the social transformation of the inner city. Research undertaken since that time has reinforced the need for more coordinated, government-directed efforts to dismantle structures that reinforce racial and class-based biases and inequalities. To this end, Moynihan’s call for an expansion of such things as youth employment opportunities, improvements in high-quality education programs, greater housing options, and a broadening of income supplements to combat inequality is as pertinent today as it was in 1965.

Concentrated Disadvantage and Socialization in the Inner City 

The Truly Disadvantaged chronicles the rise of poor black single women with children, the decline in marriage among the poor, the increase in concentrated urban black poverty, and escalating joblessness among young black males. It links sociodemographic changes in the inner city to shifts in the labor market, the outmigration of higher-income black and white families, and the concomitant decline in services available to poor black families left behind. The analysis suggests that in such neighborhoods, many households lack the resources necessary to sustain stable family life, but it links that fact to structural factors such as persistent exclusion from employment opportunities, social networks, and institutions that are essential for economic mobility.

Both Moynihan and subsequent researchers have acknowledged the critical significance of the family as the primary socializing influence on children and youth. The data show that the percentage of children growing up in single-parent homes has continued to increase (see “Was Moynihan Right?” features, Spring 2015, Figure 1). Trends are similar for all races and classes, but the percentages remain highest among families in poor, minority neighborhoods. Indeed, the issue is so acute that law professors June Carbone of the University of Minnesota and Naomi Cahn of George Washington University have recently opined that “marriage has disappeared from the poorest communities” in the U.S.

The numbers by themselves are stark, but when considered in isolation, they do not provide a comprehensive understanding of the major social and economic forces buffeting inner-city black families. In particular, the dramatic mismatch between skill level and employment opportunities among black males has further undermined marriageability in the inner-city black community. In these neighborhoods, poor black children are increasingly likely to grow up in family units whose dire financial circumstances affect every aspect of their physical, emotional, and cognitive development. Their caregivers’ abilities to envision and execute a concerted strategy to ensure their children escape poverty is constrained by their own social location, economic circumstances, and restricted access to information.

The Role of Institutions

ednext_XV_2_wilson_fig01-smallMany of society’s intermediary institutions, whether intended to support social and economic advancement or punish antisocial behavior, have a disproportionate impact on poor black families. Such organizations include public schools, social service agencies, and juvenile and criminal justice systems. Even at the earliest stages in their cognitive development, inner-city black children are less likely to be enrolled in a high-quality child-care arrangement, which puts them at an enormous disadvantage compared to their white and better-off counterparts. Low-income caregivers do not have access to a broad range of choices among high-quality providers of this crucial service. Compared to their higher-income neighbors, caregivers in poorer communities have fewer options when it comes to the provision of regulated child care, and these programs are also disproportionately more likely to experience funding cuts during periods of austerity. Child-care choices among poor inner-city residents are also constrained by issues of trust and safety that often outweigh quality. Inadequate preschool education has important implications for the social and academic domains of child development, and the negative ramifications can last well into adulthood.

When they enter primary school, low-income, inner-city black youth are clustered in failing schools. They are more likely to be suspended or enrolled in special education classes, less likely to graduate from high school on time, and, indeed, more likely to drop out of school altogether.

Consequently, as they enter adulthood, many young blacks, particularly males, are less likely to enter the workforce or postsecondary educational institutions. As Figure 1 indicates, young black males have experienced unemployment and been disconnected from schools and vocational institutions at rates ranging from 20 to 32 percent. By 2011, after the end of the last recession, more than one-quarter of young black males were neither employed nor enrolled in school or vocational educational training. The rates for white and Hispanic young people were also very high, around 20 percent, but throughout most of the past few decades rates of disconnection among black youth have been higher than for the other two groups.

ednext_XV_2_wilson_fig02-smallFurthermore, many government institutions that have an impact on the lives of poor black families focus more on regulating and controlling behavior than on improving skills and providing opportunity. Poor families who qualify for cash or noncash means-tested benefits are disproportionately exposed to rules that inhibit job seeking and discourage two-parent households.

Moreover, black youth are more likely than their peers to be confined in secure detention and correctional facilities. Admittedly, detention rates since 1977 have been steadily declining for all youth. There are a number of plausible explanations for the decline, including the downward shift in the violent-crime rate among youth in recent years. And the juvenile justice system is now more focused on prevention and rehabilitation as opposed to the harsh sentencing approach of prior decades. That said, black youth, in comparison to white youth, are still disproportionately more likely to be arrested. Furthermore, young black arrestees, compared to their white counterparts, are also more likely to have their case formally adjudicated by the courts, and, following a hearing, they are disproportionately more likely to be placed in an out-of-home detention facility. Black youth were nearly five times as likely to be in detention or correctional facilities in 2011 than white youth (see Figure 2).

ednext_XV_2_wilson_fig03-smallContact with school-based disciplinary committees and the juvenile justice system is just a harbinger of a much more ominous trend that is gutting low-income minority communities of their male residents. As a group, black men were six times more likely than white men to be incarcerated in 2010, and blacks constitute nearly half of all people jailed and imprisoned in the U.S. today. The difference between black and white incarceration rates for young men varies greatly by education level (see Figure 3). Research conducted by sociologists Bruce Western and Becky Pettit shows a dramatic rise in incarceration rates for young black male high-school dropouts over time. By 2008, approximately 37 percent, or three in eight, were behind bars. The one bit of good news is the noticeable drop—from 11 to 9 percent from 2000 to 2008—in the detention rate of young black males with a high school diploma. Among blacks with some college, the rate falls to around 2 percent, similar to that for young men from other racial and educational backgrounds.

ednext_XV_2_wilson_fig04-smallAs a result of the escalating incarceration rates among less-educated black males, poor black children are more likely than white or Hispanic children to experience a period when at least one of their parents is incarcerated. As seen in Figure 4, rates for black children with an incarcerated parent more than quadrupled from 1980 to 2008. It should also be noted that close to half of black children with fathers who were high school dropouts had an incarcerated father at some point. The overall implications, therefore, are that poor black children and youth in disadvantaged communities are embedded in family and institutional arrangements that result in socialization experiences that are fundamentally different from those of their peers.

The Role of Neighborhoods

Inner-city neighborhoods are often where all of these dynamics collide, yet youth exposed to these influences are expected to share the aspirations and expectations of their counterparts in better-off communities and to acquire the capacity to make the choices necessary to realize them. Low-income parents are often severely constrained in their ability to help guide their children’s engagement with critical facilitators of upward mobility, such as schools, and it is left to youth themselves to formulate and exercise strategic choices that might prove to be avenues out of poverty. These youth are seriously impeded, however, as a result of the gap between the knowledge they accumulate in the restrictive social environment in which they operate and the skills and know-how they need to transcend it.

In high-poverty neighborhoods, the effect on negative youth outcomes increases significantly. Chronically poor neighborhoods, those with poverty rates at or above 40 percent, have higher rates of school dropout, teenage pregnancy, and crime, and lower scores on cognitive and verbal skill tests and health indicators among school-age children. As Figure 5 reveals, many poor black and Hispanic children remain disproportionately exposed to conditions in high-poverty neighborhoods with all their deleterious impacts on family well-being.

ednext_XV_2_wilson_fig05-small

Between 1990 and 2000—a period of economic growth, tight labor markets, and changes in government welfare policies—the percentage of poor black children living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty declined from 24 percent to 15 percent. The improvement was short-lived, however, and the concentration of poor black children in high-poverty neighborhoods began to increase again in the next decade. Although not as sharp, the trend line for all black children followed a similar pattern, showing the increased likelihood that black children across all socioeconomic strata reside in disadvantaged neighborhoods compared to poor and nonpoor white children.

The residential distribution of poor (and nonpoor) Hispanic children followed a somewhat different pattern from that of blacks, influenced, in part, by a 29 percent growth in this population since 2000 and their subsequent migration to less blighted regions in the U.S. Like black children, however, Hispanic children of any socioeconomic background are disproportionately more likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods than white children.

Addressing the Need

Confronting poverty and inequality in the inner city requires that we recognize the complex, interrelated problems facing poor black families. This necessitates an effective, sustained, and coordinated mission of government-funded institutions to support opportunities for economic self-sufficiency among the poor, which has yet to be realized. Recently, the Obama administration funded numerous efforts to revitalize poor, underresourced neighborhoods by expanding “ladders of opportunity” for youth of color. For example, Choice and Promise Neighborhoods, Promise Zones, and the Strong Cities, Strong Communities initiatives seek to enhance family and community ties and better embed households in networks of institutional supports to improve the in-school and extracurricular experiences of school-age children. Building on neighborhood-empowerment efforts dating from the 1960s, these initiatives seek to create enhanced social contexts that extend choice-making capacity and practical opportunities to act on them. Just as importantly, this emphasis on coalition building has motivated the formation of new alliances among important service providers and community-based organizations that recognize the enormous potential that such collaborations can realize.

To confront poverty and inequality in the inner city, we must recognize the complex, interrelated problems facing poor black families.
To confront poverty and inequality in the inner city, we must recognize the complex, interrelated problems facing poor black families.

Many of these initiatives represent innovative attempts by the federal government to bring the combined resources of interagency collaboration to bear on tackling intractable social problems. It is therefore surprising that a more concerted effort is not being made by the administration to tout its significant investments and advances in this regard, and articulate an overarching framework that integrates all of these initiatives and formulates a rationale for how they may complement and inform one another in a cohesive, long-range fashion.

Thus far, the Obama administration’s efforts to address the social and physical isolation of disadvantaged and disenfranchised poor families of color lack the size and focus that Moynihan vigorously championed. Many of the administration’s place-based strategies can best be considered as multisite demonstration programs, since they only reach a fraction of the beleaguered neighborhoods and disenfranchised children and youth that reside in them. Congress has seriously hampered the replication and expansion of these programs by refusing the administration’s repeated requests for additional funds.

Fifty years ago, Moynihan worried that too much responsibility was being placed on community-action programs to address the problems of persistent family poverty. Moynihan implied that these initiatives only go part of the way toward influencing the choice sets available to the poor, as well as the actions such choices energize. Indeed, the combined effects of the multiple forces that we touched upon, ones that disproportionately prevail upon too many poor, urban children of color are not going to be solved by incremental approaches. Under current conditions, many societal institutions exacerbate the disadvantaged status of poor families rather than provide pathways to self-sufficiency and equality of opportunity. Increased efforts must be devoted to rectifying the large-scale fragmentation and lack of uniformity in the mission and practice of schools, social service agencies, and workforce development centers that are intended to support the social and economic mobility of disadvantaged families.

Regrettably, the misinterpretation and intense criticism of the implicit “culture of poverty” observations in Moynihan’s report precluded a serious public discussion of the need to tackle these impediments to the progress of the poor. Even more regrettable, the need to acknowledge and address them is all the more urgent 50 years later.

James M. Quane is associate director of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program at Harvard University. William Julius Wilson is professor of sociology at Harvard University and director of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program. Jackelyn Hwang is a doctoral candidate in sociology and social policy at Harvard University.

This article appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Quane, J.M., Wilson, W.J., and Hwang, J. (2015). Black Men and the Struggle for Work: Social and economic barriers persist. Education Next, 15(2), 22-29.

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A Tribute to Martha Derthick https://www.educationnext.org/tribute-martha-derthick/ Mon, 02 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/tribute-martha-derthick/ With Martha Derthick’s passing on January 12, 2015, America lost one of its preeminent scholars of American politics.

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With Martha Derthick’s passing on January 12, 2015, America lost one of its preeminent scholars of American politics. Her friends, colleagues, and students lost an irreplaceable source of wisdom and encouragement. And at Education Next, where Martha had been a co-author of the Legal Beat column, we lost an outstanding contributor to our understanding of the legal underpinnings of education policy.

ednext_XV_2_derthick_img01A native of Ohio, Martha graduated from Hiram College in 1954 and then attended graduate school at Radcliffe. After receiving her PhD under V.O. Key in 1962, she taught at several institutions including Stanford and Harvard but spent most of her career at the Brookings Institution, serving as director of its Governance Studies Program from 1978 to 1983, and at the University of Virginia, where she was the Julia Allen Cooper Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs until her retirement in 1999.

Martha was a scholar of great breadth and originality. A truncated list of the topics she studied includes tobacco politics, the National Guard, the Social Security Administration, policy implementation, and deregulation. Throughout her career federalism remained a central concern. “Americans chose,” she once wrote, “to be both one great nation and many relatively quite small, local communities.” No one understood better than Martha the tensions, challenges, and opportunities that choice created for the American Republic, and she devoted much of her scholarship to exploring how the contradictory impulses of centralization and decentralization could complement each other. She was an acute student and often passionate defender of local institutions, including America’s schools. It is at the local level, she believed, that character is molded, enabling individuals to become worthy citizens.

Wide praise and recognition followed Martha’s work. Policymaking for Social Security, which won the Gladys Kammerer of the American Political Science Association (APSA), is her best-known and is generally considered her most important book. She argued, against the prevailing consensus, that the political success of Social Security was not inevitable but was shaped by administrative behavior, institutional autonomy, and voters’ preferences. Two of her many books, The Influence of Federal Grants and The Politics of Deregulation, received the National Academy of Public Administration’s Brownlow Award. Both volumes are credited with opening significant new approaches to the study of American politics. Her research led the APSA to honor her in 1992 with the John Gaus Award for a lifetime of exemplary scholarship.

Those fortunate enough to be Martha’s students found in her an exceptionally generous and nurturing mentor. She took great interest in our success and happiness long after we left her classroom. In the classroom, her devotion to her students could make her an intimidating presence, particularly when she returned papers. From her father, a reporter and editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, she inherited a distaste for prose that was not crisp and precise. Shoddy execution and vague expression always received her censure. But no criticisms were more valued than hers. She was constitutionally incapable of false praise and only offered honest evaluation. Her students took great satisfaction when they met her expectations and now fondly and gratefully recall her delightful directness.

In my case, her directness proved life-changing. My first year in graduate school, I proposed an arid theoretical treatment of federalism as a presentation topic for her seminar on intergovernmental relations. She smiled and said, “Josh, that will put me to sleep.” She recommended another topic she thought would be more fruitful and interesting. As always, she was correct. That topic turned into a dissertation and later a book.

No recollection of Martha would be complete without mentioning her love of gardening (space does not permit discussing her devotion to basketball). In Charlottesville, she located a piece of undeveloped land that years earlier had been a distinguished garden. There she saw, where others could only see a terrifying mass of poison ivy, a garden that for decades had been overtaken by weeds. She restored the garden, improved it, and then designed and built a house to showcase it. Subsequently, her garden won awards, and her house received architectural praise. Fittingly, her last article, “Azaleas in the Life and Work of Beatrix Farrand,” was just published in The Azalean.

For the past nine years, it has been my great honor to be her collaborator in the pages of Education Next.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.

This article appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Dunn, J. (2015). A Tribute to Martha Derthick. Education Next, 15(2), 80.

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Family Breakdown and Poverty https://www.educationnext.org/family-breakdown-poverty/ Fri, 30 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/family-breakdown-poverty/ To flourish, our nation must face some hard truths

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This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family. The full series will appear in our Spring 2015 issue to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 release of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (generally referred to as the Moynihan Report).

ednext_XV_2_george_img01As a general rule, assistant secretaries in the Labor Department do not produce lasting historical documents. The so-called Moynihan Report, produced by Assistant Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the winter of 1965 and published under the title “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” is surely the only exception to that rule. But it is quite an exception.

The Moynihan Report gained notice and notoriety almost immediately. Its statistical analysis was cited, and its call to action was repeated, by President Lyndon Johnson within a few months of its publication—again, an uncommon fate for a Labor Department report. But its analysis was just as quickly resisted and disputed in the government and in the academy. Moynihan was accused of arguing that low-income black families were simply causing their own problems and of trying to undermine the civil rights movement. The social psychologist William Ryan actually coined the now-common phrase “blaming the victim” (which he used as a title for a 1971 book) specifically to describe the Moynihan Report.

Of course, Moynihan did no such thing. To the extent that he attributed blame at all, it was to the long and ugly legacy of slavery and to the persistence of racism in American life. Both, he argued, had worked to undermine the standing of black men, and thereby their roles in their own families, and to deform the structure of family life in the black community.

But Moynihan’s aim was in any case less to assign blame than to describe a peculiar problem. The problem first presented itself to Moynihan and his team in the form of a surprising divergence in the black community between unemployment rates and welfare application rates (which coincided with rates of single motherhood, since essentially only unmarried mothers could apply for the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program). Until the late 1950s, the two indexes had risen and fallen together. But starting in the late ’50s, welfare rolls increased even when unemployment was low and the economy was strong.

Moynihan came to understand that he was seeing something new and deeply troubling. Most impressive in retrospect is that he understood that this emerging pattern was troubling above all not for economic reasons, but for deeper and more significant reasons—reasons that are ultimately cultural. “The fundamental problem,” he wrote, “is that of family structure. The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.” Communities affected, he worried, faced “massive deterioration of the fabric of society and its institutions.” Such deterioration, should it prove in fact to be occurring, would constitute “the single most important social fact of the United States today.”

In the decades since Moynihan wrote those words, his work has been held up as an example of prophetic social science, and of constructive policy analysis. And his case has served as the foundation for efforts to focus attention and resources on strengthening family formation among the poor. But both the controversy surrounding the report and the continued attention devoted to it have acted to obscure somewhat the key achievement of Moynihan’s work and so, too, its foremost lesson for our own time.

Until the late 1950s, unemployment rates and welfare application rates had risen and fallen together. But starting in the late ’50s, welfare rolls increased even when unemployment was low and the economy was strong.
Until the late 1950s, unemployment rates and welfare application rates had risen and fallen together. But starting in the late ’50s, welfare rolls increased even when unemployment was low and the economy was strong.

The strength of the report was not in its analysis of the causes underlying the collapse of the family among lower-income African Americans. Moynihan was convinced that what he was witnessing was fundamentally a phenomenon of the black community, and so could be explained by the tragic history of African Americans, which rendered black families uniquely vulnerable to the kind of social and economic pressures many faced in poor urban environments.

There is of course no question that the savage inhumanity to which African Americans were subjected in our country for much of its history and the racism that has persisted far longer have had detrimental effects on the black community and on its families. But the particular pattern Moynihan began to observe in the 1960s has not in fact been limited to the black community. In the half century since he wrote, the pattern has shown itself in the lives of poor Americans of all races. The problems remain worst in the black community, and the history and realities of racism that Moynihan pointed to are surely important contributing factors, but the challenge of family disintegration plainly runs deeper and broader than that. Family breakdown appears to be a prevailing feature of modern American poverty. In this sense, Moynihan’s analysis of causes was not quite on target.

Focus on the Problem

The report is also notable for not proposing solutions to the disturbing set of problems it laid out, although the author did suggest policy prescriptions elsewhere. Indeed, Moynihan specifically committed the report to stick to diagnosis. “The object of this study has been to define a problem, rather than propose solutions to it,” he wrote. And the chief reason for doing so, he argued, was that “there are many persons, within and without the Government, who do not feel the problem exists, at least in any serious degree. These persons feel that, with the legal obstacles to assimilation out of the way, matters will take care of themselves in the normal course of events.”

And here we find the true core of Moynihan’s contribution. It was, simply put, to tell the truth, both about what emerging facts seemed to suggest about a troubling social trend and about the foreseeable implications of that trend for the lives of the people involved. The family appeared to be breaking down among lower-income black Americans, and to Moynihan broken families meant broken communities and broken lives. Both elements of that diagnosis were crucial, and both were hard pills to swallow.

The latter element in particular—the importance of the family to the health and flourishing of society—has been controversial in the half century that followed Moynihan’s report. Roughly halfway through that period, in 1992, Moynihan himself took up that controversy in a speech delivered at the University of Chicago (and later reprinted in the Public Interest). He was blunt. Despite President Johnson’s personal interest in his arguments, Moynihan said, the years that immediately followed his report—the era of the Great Society—brought an approach to social science and to public policy that made the problem he had diagnosed much more difficult to address effectively, and even to talk about honestly. Simply put, he said, the Great Society era “gave great influence in social policy to viewpoints that rejected the proposition that family structure might be a social issue.”

That was an understatement. The most striking, even shocking, feature of the sociological (and to some degree economic) literature in the several decades following Moynihan’s report is the sheer lack of interest in the question of what the breakdown of the family among the poor, which no one could deny was occurring, might mean in the lives of those involved. The few exceptions acted merely to prove the rule.

Those exceptions included the work of Moynihan himself during his academic career; most of the other people responsible for exceptional attention to this problem followed a path similar to his. “Think, for example, of the writing in the early editions of the Public Interest,” Moynihan noted in that 1992 lecture. “Almost without exception, the authors were political liberals who had stumbled upon things that weren’t entirely pleasing to them but which, as the song goes, could not be denied.” Many people, of course, did deny them. But ultimately, Moynihan suggested, facts were facts and their consequences could not help but follow.

Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976, Moynihan secured a seat on the Senate Finance Committee during his first term and served as its chairman from 1993 to 1995.
Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976, Moynihan secured a seat on the Senate Finance Committee during his first term and served as its chairman
from 1993 to 1995.

When he delivered the lecture, reflecting on his report some 27 years after its publication, Moynihan might have had some reason to suppose that his small band of truth tellers was finally getting heard. In retrospect, those early years of the 1990s seem like they might have been the apex of that band’s influence and stature in the public square. Moynihan was chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, with jurisdiction over welfare and entitlement policy, among much else. James Q. Wilson and James S. Coleman, both members of that original Public Interest circle, were, respectively, president of the American Political Science Association and president of the American Sociological Association. The Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1992 spoke about family breakdown and welfare in terms that even some Republicans had not always been comfortable with. And the academic wall of silence seemed to be cracking just a little, perhaps especially after William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) was released and sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur’s book Growing Up with a Single Parent (1994) powerfully documented the detrimental effects of family breakdown on children. It could well have appeared as though the tide was finally turning, and the vital importance of family structure would finally find its place in public policy and the public debate. Moynihan, in that moment, seemed almost optimistic.

But it was not to be. Family structure would remain off-limits, even as the underlying trends evolved to encompass more of the populace. Since the early 1990s, the fact that births out of wedlock are not fundamentally a matter of race has become far clearer. In 2010, 72 percent of African American births were to unwed mothers, but so were 53 percent of Hispanic births and 36 percent of white births—all far higher figures than those Moynihan saw in the black community in 1965, when he described a 25 percent rate as a social disaster. In our nation as a whole, 41 percent of children born in 2010 were born to unmarried mothers.

And the rate is growing faster among whites than among other groups: between 1992 (when Moynihan delivered his mildly hopeful lecture) and 2010, births to unwed black mothers rose modestly from 68 to 72 percentage points, but births to unwed white mothers saw a dramatic jump from 23 to 36 percent, an increase of more than 50 percent (see “Was Moynihan Right?” features, Spring 2015, Figure 2).

And what is more, the academy has not in fact grown much more hospitable to the notion that family structure is an essential social concern. Although some ground was surely gained in the 1980s and ’90s, much of it has been lost since, as taboos about studying and discussing the implications of family structure have again been hardening. Indeed, even many Republican politicians now shy away from arguments about the importance of marriage for fear of veering into the debate over same-sex marriage.

But as Moynihan noted half a century ago, one cannot deny either the data about family formation or the centrality of the family to the flourishing of society and its members. And today, far more than when Moynihan penned his report, the implications of these facts are grim and essential to understand.

Mapping the Consequences

It is customary to describe the consequences of social trends in economic terms, and that is surely one useful way to illustrate their costs. Some 40 percent of children raised by single mothers are living in poverty, according to the Census Bureau, while roughly 8 percent of children raised by married parents are poor (see “Was Moynihan Right?” features, Spring 2015, Figure 4).

Another way to think about the consequences of these trends is to look at the sociological and psychological effects. Children who grow up in single-parent families are significantly more likely to exhibit behavioral problems, to drop out of school, to experience mental-health problems, to attempt suicide, and to be out of the workforce as young adults. And as Brookings Institution scholar Ron Haskins has argued, this appears to be very much connected to the challenges that single parents face. “Married parents—in part simply because there are two of them—have an easier time being better parents,” Haskins argues. They can share the burdens and responsibilities of parenthood and can combine their efforts to set clear rules and reinforce them with consequences. Clearly, they have more time and energy.

If broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered.
If broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered.

None of this, of course, is to downplay the extraordinary and often heroic efforts of many single mothers to help their children avert negative consequences. On the contrary, findings like these help us see just how daunting the challenges faced by mothers raising children alone can be.

But describing the crisis of the family among low-income Americans in these economic and sociological terms may itself be a way of avoiding the deeper problem of which these are but symptoms. The family is the core character-forming institution of every human society. It is the source of the most basic order, structure, discipline, support, and loving guidance that every human being requires. It is essential to human flourishing, and its weakening puts at risk the very possibility of a society worthy of the name. It is hard to imagine how any of the social problems that take up the time and efforts of policymakers—problems of economic mobility, educational attainment, employment, inequality, and on and on—could be seriously mitigated without some significant reversal of the trends in family breakdown. These are ultimately human problems, problems of the soul, at least as much as they are economic and social problems. And the first step toward seriously taking them on must be a reinvigoration of our commitment to the family.

Exceptions to the traditional form of the family can of course be successful—guided by the traditional model. But if that norm itself is undone, if broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered. And this is precisely what is now happening across wide swaths of American society.

The Future of the Family

The facts about the collapse of the family among America’s poor are deeply discomfiting for the Left and the Right alike. They are uncomfortable for the Left because liberals don’t want to acknowledge what they show us about the importance of the family structure and about the need to reinforce it. And they are uncomfortable for the Right because conservatives don’t want to acknowledge what they show us about the destructive effects of persistent poverty, and about the difficulty of helping people rise out of it. These are facts that suggest both the importance of the family and the need for public action, and so they are perfectly suited to being ignored by everyone in our politics.

Moynihan could see that danger half a century ago, and his report was meant to warn of it. His concluding words, although shaped by his sense that race was at the core of the phenomena he had discerned, still ring through the decades. He wrote,

The policy of the United States is to bring the Negro American to full and equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship. To this end, the programs of the Federal government bearing on this objective shall be designed to have the effect, directly or indirectly, of enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family.

The promise of America, Moynihan understood, is unreachable in the absence of strong and stable families. That call should now be generalized into a case for making the strength of the family a key national priority. The lessons of the past half century, and especially of the Great Society’s mostly failed experiments in social policy, can help us think more clearly about the means by which this end could be pursued. But the end was well laid out by Moynihan’s prescient words. The end should be the reinforcement and recovery of the core institution of our society, and every society.

Putting that end at the center of our politics must begin by stating plainly that the future of the family will determine the future of the country. That may seem like a simple and straightforward fact. But as Daniel Patrick Moynihan showed half a century ago, responsible and constructive social science often consists of simply stating such facts, and making it difficult for people to deny or ignore them. His report offers a model of truth telling from which we all could stand to learn.

Robert George is professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University. Yuval Levin is the editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. 

This article appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

George, R.P., and Levin, Y. (2015). Family Breakdown and Poverty: To flourish, our nation must face some hard truths. Education Next, 15(2), 30-35.

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