Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation
by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan
Corwin, 2021, $40, 280 pages

As reviewed by Steve Rees

If you pick up Street Data hoping to learn how to make sense of education data, you will be disappointed. Despite its title, Street Data contains hardly any numbers at all. In fact, the book is a frontal assault on the use of quantitative data, especially test scores, and objective empirical inquiry to inform education decisions. Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan, who describe themselves as “diversity warriors,” urge teachers and leaders to stop accepting the use of numbers to measure learning and schooling and to start thinking instead like cultural anthropologists. They urge readers to listen to students and observe their behaviors, with grand ambitions in mind. “The purpose of this book,” they write, “is to offer a next-generation model of equity and deep learning, emerging from a simple concept: street data… Street data embodies both an ethos and a change methodology that will transform how we analyze, diagnose, and assess everything from student learning to district improvement to policy.”

The authors’ zeal for “transformation” and laudable opposition to racism may help explain why the book, published in late 2021, has climbed to the top of Amazon’s sales rankings in the category of education administration. But I suspect the book’s enduring popularity also reflects larger forces at work among education professionals: a deep skepticism of evidence-based decision making and a resurgent movement against standardized testing and accountability policies, which, after all, require counting. That’s worrisome.

What leads “diversity warriors” to oppose empirical inquiry?

Surprisingly for a volume aimed at practitioners, the book begins with a philosophical preface that asks, “How do we know what we know?” The authors assert that we too often reduce our understanding of what we know to that which adheres to “the Western theory of knowledge known as empiricism—which emphasizes the role of sensory evidence and patterns in the formation of ideas rather than innate ideas or traditions—and its relative, the scientific paradigm of positivism.”

Safir and Dugan draw a parallel between early anthropologists’ exploitative research on indigenous people and the way school systems assess student learning. In the authors’ telling, those who measure students are akin to Western researchers who imposed their cultural values on native populations. By extension, tests, surveys, and indicators of student behavior are instruments of control akin to the film footage, notebooks, and photographic records kept by anthropologists. This parallelism isn’t the beginning of their critique of measurement in education; it is the entirety of their argument.

If Safir and Dugan were aiming to persuade readers, they would have constructed evidence-based arguments against testing and other forms of quantitative data collection. Instead they invoke buzzwords and cite sources as if they hold magical powers. To defend their rejection of evidence as a foundation of knowledge, they rely mainly on Afrocentric epistemology, a choice that is both bizarre and unconvincing. Simply affirming “spirituality, communalism, cooperation, ethics, and morality” and African American liberation as a counterpoint to measurement and empirical inquiry is unpersuasive. The book reads more like a hymnal with Biblical citations than a work of scholarship based on reasoned argument. It requires that the reader embrace its assertions as a matter of faith.

What exactly do Safir and Dugan mean by street data? “Street data is a decolonizing form of knowledge that honors Indigenous, Afrocentric, and other non-Western ways of knowing.” They continue: “At the heart of this book lies an existential question: Why do we rely on current forms of data, and what would happen if we simply stopped . . . and embraced a new model?”

Come now. We rely on “current forms of data” to answer important questions about students, teachers, and the policies that structure their work. We rely on those data when deciding to what degree class-sizes affect learning. We rely on them when judging how schools are doing at advancing emerging bilingual students towards English fluency. To call this an “existential question” is hyperbolic. To pose “Indigenous” and “Afrocentric ways of knowing” as being in opposition to empiricism is not just an error of historical interpretation—empiricism was born among the pre-Socratics in Greece and advanced in Egypt—it is racial reductionism. The authors denigrate everything they view as European or “white” while presenting everything not white as praiseworthy. Reasoning this shallow should raise hackles, not boost a book to top-tier sales rankings.

When anti-measurement leads to anti-reasoning

I recall the consequences of the politics of identity fifty years ago, and its reincarnation today seems painfully familiar. I came of age in the 1960s. I enjoyed my years of reading Frantz Fanon, Paolo Freire, Kwame Nkrumah, Leroi Jones, Malcolm X, and more. I joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in high school, was a member of Students for a Democratic Society in the late 1960s and was active in the antiwar movement. I have seen where racial reductionism can lead to a biological determinism that reduces all things human to the bodies we are born with. Those who embrace the ideas of Black intellectuals as inherently good because of their “Blackness” become the bigots they decry. Unlike Safir and Dugan, I believe that a heart that beats for a cause and a mind that reasons with numbers and words can coexist in the same body.

I am also lead author of Mismeasuring Schools’ Vital Signs, which makes a case for reducing the misuses and misrepresentations of evidence on students, teachers and schools. And yes, I am an empirical practitioner who supports district and school leaders in making proper sense of the data they possess. It is no surprise that I find myself on the opposite side of the fence from Safir and Dugan on many matters. Yet I agree with some of their observations:

• The focus on achievement gaps has reinforced bigoted ideas (e.g., that ethnicity causes differences in students’ test scores).
• The reduction of human interactions to numbers can become a mania and lead to badly built evidence and wrong conclusions.
• Student voices are too often ignored by those who teach and who lead schools and districts.
• Students’ capabilities often go unnoticed, unassessed, unrewarded.

Even so, I am troubled by Safir and Dugan’s use of simple assertions where they owe their readers arguments. They cite only like-minded authors and seem to be quoting them not to advance an argument but to signify respect. Absent from their analysis is any regard for the value of standardized assessment or the needs of parents and students to validate whether teacher-assigned grades are a fair measure of students’ knowledge and skills. Quite annoying is their unnecessary invention of original terms to create a peculiar meta-language that will soon be understandable only to those who already agree with them.

What does the book’s popularity tell us about teaching?

What concerns me most is the evidence-resistant nature of the K–12 teaching profession and the field of education management. Education scholar John Hattie put the question clearly in his 2008 book Visible Learning. After describing the medical profession’s struggle to mature and its reliance for centuries on simple trial and error to feel its way toward effective diagnosis and treatment, Hattie concludes that “evidence-based medicine was the mechanism for driving out dogma, as dogma does not destroy itself.” He then wonders when education will have its own moment of growing up, its own evidence-based transition: “The key question is whether teaching can shift from an immature to a mature profession, from opinions to evidence, from subjective judgments and personal contact to critique of judgments.”

Street Data’s popularity may be a sign that Hattie’s “key question” will not be answered in the affirmative anytime soon. The debate between those who favor intuitive knowledge (what Safir and Dugan call “innate ideas”) and those who favor evidence-based paths to decisions (the empirical reasoning group) has not yet occurred. Where are the debates at conferences of scholars or practitioners? Where are the debates in print?

Right now, the anti-testing forces appear to be winning. More than two decades of misunderstanding and misusing test results have taken a toll. The pro-testing forces haven’t even established a beach head, let alone returned fire. Not even the test publishers are standing up to defend the proper uses of assessment, though some scholars have: James W. Popham and Howard Wainer, for example. Ellen Mandinach and Edith Gummer have revealed the absence of curricula about assessment and data analysis in schools of education. But advocates of data-driven decision-making have never really faced their adversaries. The arguments of the two sides just sail past each other. Now testing itself occupies a defensive position.

I’m left with Hattie’s question if teaching can “shift from an immature to a mature profession, from opinions to evidence.” Medicine has made the leap. So has baseball. Even statistics had its moment of reckoning, a robust debate lasting nearly 100 years about whether the concept of statistical significance had done more harm than good and had no reason to exist. The debate was settled in March 2019 with a decisive thumbs-down to statistical significance, announced in an editorial and supported by 43 essays. I hope to live to see an equally robust debate over measurement and empirical paths to knowledge in K–12 education. Let’s get started.

Steve Rees is the founder of  School Wise Press and its K12 Measures project, and is the co-author of Mismeasuring Schools’ Vital Signs, written with Jill Wynns.

A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation
by Rachel Louise Martin
Simon & Schuster, 2023, $30; 362 pages.

As reviewed by Matthew Levey

We know of the nine Black students who bravely enrolled at Little Rock Central High School in the fall of 1957, despite the Arkansas governor’s attempts to bar them. Many recall Norman Rockwell’s portrait of first-grader Ruby Bridges walking past a wall splattered with a tomato and a scribbled racial slur on her way to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960. But the 1956 desegregation of Clinton High School in Anderson County, Tennessee, preceded both events. While it received extensive media coverage at the time, including photo essays in Look and an hour-long See it Now documentary by Edward R. Murrow, it has since been forgotten.

Rachel Louise Martin attended elementary school not far from Clinton. Researching in her university’s extensive civil rights archives for an oral history of the era, Martin was struck that Clinton was not mentioned once. With A Most Tolerant Little Town, she seeks to honor the 12 students and their families who led this early integration fight and to draw lessons for today’s reformers.

While the specifics are little known, the story is familiar. In 1950, Joheather McSwain and four other Black students sued Anderson County on the grounds that bussing them one hour away to a failing all-Black high school in a different county was separate and unequal. At trial they lost; white students, the judge said, were often bussed just as far. But in 1954, as McSwain’s appeal was winding through the Federal courts, the Supreme Court reached a decision on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In January 1956, a judge ordered Clinton High School to enroll Black students that fall, consistent with the mandate to desegregate with “all deliberate speed.

That August, 12 Black families risked their lives to integrate Clinton. They and their children faced unreconstructed racists who shouted slurs, burned crosses, and pressured politicians to preserve their “way of life.” Terrorists made bombs with dynamite stolen from local mines; luckily, some did not explode, but many did. And through it all, a handful of imperfect white leaders allied with the students to end segregation.

Martin centers A Most Tolerant Little Town on the students. For her, they are the ones who desegregated the school, not the lawyers, judges, and National Guardsmen. They did not seek martyrdom but simply wanted to be treated equally. Yet they saw many of their neighbors turn on them, both with vicious acts and by ignoring the injustice being perpetrated. The experience left them with what today we might call post-traumatic stress. “In a larger town,” Martin writes, “each faction could have retreated into their own community. . . . In Clinton this wasn’t possible, [so they] stopped talking about those years.”

But even as she elevates the bravery of the students, Martin acknowledges the critical role of three white leaders.

Born in 1899 in a tiny mining town in northeastern Tennessee, Federal Judge Robert Love Taylor was named for his uncle, a Union-supporting Tennessee governor. His father also served as governor. Like most white men of his era, Bob Taylor did not believe in racial equality, but he understood the primacy of the Brown decision. As Martin writes, Taylor

wished he could speak out, could tell everyone that yes, of course he believed in white supremacy. But the bench was to be above politics and personal convictions. . . . If the judge had spoken, he would have told everyone he agreed with the law-and-order white leaders in Clinton: integration might be bad, but lawlessness was worse.

Facing down slurs, taunts, and threats of violence, the 12 Black students enrolled at Clinton High in September 1956. Rather than work with principal D. J. Brittain Jr. to plan for the students’ safety, the school board mailed a letter to the Justice Department abdicating responsibility for the events. (Celdon Medaris, a teacher and daughter of the former mayor, called them “pantywaists.”) This abdication “convinced the virulent segregationists that D. J. had a choice.” But unlike most of his neighbors, Brittain “had never believed the county would win” the McSwain lawsuit. As he saw it, “his only option was to obey the law, whether he agreed with it or not. And if he was going to obey the law, then he would do so with the efficiency with which he did everything else.”

A former football coach, Brittain told the high school team, “When you lose, you lose. You go ahead and play the game by the new rules.” In the months ahead, the football players, all white, proved valuable protectors of the Black students. The only explanation for Brittain’s “race traitorship” that the segregationists of Clinton could adduce was that he was a Jew.

A third ally to the students and their families was Paul Turner, the pastor of Clinton’s First Baptist Church. While he did not believe in racial equality either, he told his congregation, “It is important to be a Christian first and a segregationist second,” and he pleaded with Willard Tills, a leading white supremacist, to drop his activities. “I cannot see how a conscientious Christian can be part of mob violence.”

Instead, Tills dropped his membership in the church. In November, after Turner escorted the Black students to school one day, he was savagely beaten by a mob that included Tills. The following July, an all-white jury convicted Tills and six others on the first ballot, much to the surprise of most observers.

Bobby Cain, the only senior among the original 12 Black students to make it through the year, graduated in May. That September he began studying sociology at what is today Tennessee State University.

A month later, at 4:30 on a Sunday morning, terrorists blew up Clinton High School. A sloppy police investigation meant that the criminals were never caught. The school board traveled to Washington to ask President Eisenhower for rebuilding assistance, but he did not want to interrupt his bridge game. Department of Education officials offered $20,000 towards the $750,000 cost of a new school.

Brittain and Turner eventually left Clinton, to New York and Nashville, respectively. But the experience never left them. In the 1980s, they both committed suicide.

*    *    *

Johns Hopkins professor Yascha Mounk has noted our political polarization leads some to believe the situation is so desperate that the ends justify the means. We saw this in the acts of white supremacists who bombed schools, churches, and synagogues and murdered activists. More recently we have seen it in the twisted logic that led supporters of Donald Trump to assault the Capitol. But we also see it, Mounk writes, in intra-group demands for ideological purity. In a Manichean world, men with mixed motivations like Taylor, Brittain, and Turner get little sympathy.

Martin’s polemical conclusion, calling for “reconstructing every part of our society” and electing leaders “willing to intervene quickly and decisively whenever the vulnerable among us are at risk,” sits uneasily at the end of a well-researched history. But whether one agrees with her policy proposal, she has performed an important service by acknowledging the absurdity of demanding perfection from our friends and allies. “When we tell people they do not belong in our movement, that they must go out . . . and do the internal work before they can be of use to us,” she writes, “we are ignoring the ways actions themselves can invoke internal change.” Like us all, Judge Taylor, Principal Brittain, and Reverend Turner were imperfect. But their recognition that our democracy places no one above the law is a lesson as needed today as it was in 1956.

Matthew Levey founded the International Charter School and writes on K–12 education.

This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Levey, M. (2024). Tolerance in Tennessee: A compelling history of school integration considers the complexity of unlikely allies. Education Next, 24(3), 74-75.

Educational Pluralism and Democracy
by Ashley Rogers Berner
Harvard Education Press, 2024, $35; 224 pages.

As reviewed by Jonathan Zimmerman

Once upon a time, schools in America were plural in structure. Taxpayers funded Protestant, Catholic, and nonsectarian schools. Then along came the Big Bad Public School, which stamped out this glorious diversity. Fueled by waves of anti-Catholic nativism, educators like Horace Mann imposed a “unitary” system that restricted tax dollars to state-sponsored schools. And the rest, as they say, is history.

That’s the story Ashley Berner tells in her smart, brisk, and deeply heartfelt book, Educational Pluralism and Democracy. The time has come, she says, to lay Mann’s system to rest. Building on the seminal scholarship of Charles Glenn and also on her own 2017 volume, No One Way To School, Berner makes the best case I have ever read for a European-style education system in the United States. It would be marked by what she calls a “Grand Bargain”: the state agrees to fund all manner of schools—including religious institutions—and those schools agree to follow shared curricula and standards. That differentiates Berner from libertarians who simply demand maximal “choice” for parents and families, no matter the outcomes. Some choices are better than others, Berner insists, and the state has an interest in improving all of them.

She’s right about that. And in most countries around the world, she correctly notes, the state funds non-state schools to some degree or another.

But I’m still not persuaded that’s the right thing for America.

First of all, Berner gets some of her early U.S. history wrong. Before the rise of Mann’s common school movement, she asserts, different kinds of taxpayer-funded schools—including, again, religious ones—delivered “a remarkably consistent body of academic knowledge from school to school—the essence of educational pluralism.” Yes, there was a wide range of institutions. But the schooling they provided was anything but consistent; to the contrary, it was radically uneven. Most instruction occurred in one-room schoolhouses, where children of different ages memorized passages from whatever books their parents had at home. And while one student was reciting to the lone teacher—typically, a woman in her teens or early twenties—the others put buckshot in the stove, plugged the chimney with brambles, and generally made life miserable for the forlorn “school marm.” Indeed, the enormous variation in curricula and instruction was what inspired Horace Mann and his generation to establish state-run systems in the first place.

Berner is on firmer ground when she indicts the anti-Catholic bias that permeated Mann’s campaign. Many Protestants feared that “Papists” would remain beholden to Rome unless they patronized public schools, where they would allegedly learn to become loyal Americans. But the public schools taught from the King James Bible, which was anathema to Catholics. When they demanded that schools in their neighborhoods read from the Pope-sanctioned Douay Bible instead, violence erupted. In 1844, in my hometown of Philadelphia, at least 20 people were killed and over 100 injured in pitched battles between nativists and Catholics over which Bible schools would teach.

The moral of the story seems obvious, at least to Berner: let each team promote its own religion, assisted by the state, so long as everyone submits to national standards around quality. That’s how they do it in Europe, she says, where most schools—public, private, and parochial—get public money in exchange for following the same academic curriculum. In the U.S., by contrast, we reserve public funds for state-run schools but lack a shared body of knowledge that everyone has to master. Since the early 20th century, Berner complains, American educators have promoted an “anything-but-the-academic” approach that stresses “skills” rather than content. Here, too, I think her history is a bit off the mark. To be sure, theorists at hotbeds of progressive education like Teachers College, Columbia University have emphasized children’s interests and “activities” over disciplinary knowledge. But in most real-life K–12 schools, content remains king. We might not teach the right content, and we often don’t teach it well. But to say that progressive doctrine has dominated classrooms gives the progressives way more power and influence than they deserve.

I also worry that Berner might have romanticized Europe’s educational pluralism, which has sparked intense debate in recent years. The biggest controversy surrounds state-funded Muslim schools, which in some instances have taught a rigid and fundamentalist version of Islam. Berner excludes any substantive analysis of these schools as potential seedbeds of intolerance or even of terrorism. But a recent 14-country study of Islamic religious education in Europe warned that the schools often instill orthodox doctrines and ignore less conservative forms of faith. As Berner emphasizes, European countries erect “guardrails” to prevent schools from transmitting racism, sexism, and other kinds of prejudice; in Holland, for example, they are prohibited from discriminating against teachers or students on the basis of gender and sexuality. But it’s fair to ask whether the religious schools that Berner celebrates are willing to keep up their end of this bargain and what the state is willing to do to enforce it.

And what about race? Berner acknowledges that her system would allow families to patronize schools that “strengthen their identities,” and she seems okay with that. I’m not, if the result is even more racial segregation than we already have. To be sure, America’s own Constitutional guardrails aim to prevent schools from systematically discriminating against any particular racial group. But nothing would prevent families from selecting single-race schools, and Berner doesn’t seem eager to avert that either. A long line of research demonstrates that Black children perform worse academically when they’re in highly segregated environments. As Berner says, repeatedly, she wants the state to encourage good choices. To my reading, that would also require it to discourage parents from choosing schools that correspond to their race.

I also think there are some solid non-academic reasons for the state to favor schools that bring together kids from different racial, cultural, and—especially—political backgrounds. “Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together,” Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in 1974. Marshall was referring to racial integration, of course, which school districts had resisted in the years following Brown v. Board of Education. But his dictum applies equally well to the integration of political communities, especially in our own era of rabid polarization. How can our future citizens learn to speak across the Red-Blue divide unless they attend schools that bridge it? And how can that happen if the schools become their own ideological bubbles, echoing the political preferences of the families who select them?

That brings us back to the founding of the common schools and the denial of state aid to Catholic institutions, which Berner sees as the original sin of our system. Again, the anti-Catholic spirit of that moment is beyond doubt. But let’s imagine that the government had funded religious schools, as Berner wants, instead of limiting public dollars to state-run ones. It’s easy to imagine how that could have separated religious communities even further, feeding their mutual hostilities for many generations to come. Protestants and Catholics aren’t at each other’s throats any longer, at least not in the U.S. And surely one reason is that many of them attended school together, especially as parochial institutions started to lose students to state-run schools in the 20th century.

What about the future? Will the U.S. head in a more European direction, as Berner hopes, or will it hold to its distinct practices? (Irony alert: on public funding for religious schools, liberal Americans—otherwise skeptical of American exceptionalism—turn into flag-waving traditionalists. And the center-right—normally averse to “globalism”—urges us to imitate other nations.) I once hosted a visiting professor from Europe who asked me why an American student could receive federal grants to attend Georgetown or Fordham—both Catholic universities—but not to pay for their local parish high school. “Good question,” I replied. There are no easy answers.

And our system might be changing in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Carson v. Makin, which ruled that states can’t exclude religious schools from a program that pays for private education where no public school is available. I wasn’t surprised that Ashley Berner submitted an eloquent friend-of-the-court brief arguing that the religious institutions should be allowed to receive public dollars in those circumstances, just like any other private school. She has become the most persuasive ally of educational pluralism in America. We would all be wise to listen to her, whether we agree with her or not.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (2nd edition, 2022) and eight other books. Zimmerman is also a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Zimmerman, J. (2024). School, European Style: The hidden costs of adopting a pluralistic education system in America. Education Next, 24(3), 76-77.

Adam Tyner is national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is the co-author of the recent policy brief Think Again: Does “equitable” grading benefit students?

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Tyner, A. (2024). How Not to Assess the Situation: Grading and testing have gone astray, but eliminating student performance measures is the wrong prescription. Education Next, 24(2), 70-71.

David Steiner is executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy.

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Steiner, D. (2024). Successes and Setbacks in Shaker Heights: A town struggles to maintain racial equity in the face of persistent gaps in student outcomes. Education Next, 24(2), 66-67.

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Zimmerman, J. (2024). A Critical Time for Critical Thought: Students have long been caught in a tug-of-war between conformity and free thinking. Education Next, 24(2), 68-69.

The Crucible of Desegregation: The Uncertain Search for Educational Equality
by R. Shep Melnick
The University of Chicago Press, 2023, $35; 310 pages.

As reviewed by Richard D. Kahlenberg

In this thoughtful but sometimes fatalistic book, Boston College political scientist R. Shep Melnick chronicles the promise and pitfalls of the federal government’s efforts to desegregate American schools and, in so doing, upend a key component of Jim Crow.

Melnick notes that school desegregation stands alone among the various campaigns for equal educational opportunity. While initiatives such as Head Start, federal compensatory spending, support for students with disabilities, programs for English learners, Title IX for women, and the No Child Left Behind Act have sometimes attracted controversy, school desegregation was the most politically explosive effort of all. “Few issues in American politics have been debated so long or so vehemently as school desegregation,” he observes. “From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, school desegregation was the most important and most controversial education issue addressed by the federal government.”

And while court-ordered school busing has mostly ended, efforts to integrate schools have not. The litigation leading up to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision banning state-enforced separation of white and Black children first came before the U.S. Supreme Court during the administration of Harry S. Truman. Thirteen presidents later, hundreds of small school districts remain under desegregation orders.

The effort to desegregate has been noble, if often flawed in implementation, Melnick argues. The momentous Brown decision was part of a larger effort to deal with America’s “original sin of racial oppression.” Desegregation had two goals, he says, both worth pursing today: increasing educational opportunity and social mobility, and promoting social cohesion and reducing racial prejudice. School integration, as Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in one opinion, helps foster “the kind of cooperation among Americans of all races that is necessary to make the land of three hundred million people one Nation.”

Federally enforced school desegregation had some clear successes. After a period of lax enforcement in the decade after Brown, the federal government brought dramatic change to the American South. In the 1963–64 school year, only 1.2 percent of southern Black children attended school with some white children. By 1972–73, 91.3 percent did. This period coincided with large increases in test scores for Black students. And when certain school districts abandoned desegregation, such as Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, in the 1990s, researchers found a “large and statistically significant increase in crime” among poor Black male students assigned to predominantly minority schools.

If Melnick sees successes in school desegregation, however, he also sees serious flaws in implementation and examples of government overreach.

To begin with, federal judges did a poor job of defining precisely what desegregation meant. Litigants offered two competing ideas: one was procedural (defining desegregation as colorblind assignment), and the other sought results (viewing desegregation as reducing racial isolation in order to improve educational opportunities).

In the early days of desegregation, lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund advocated colorblindness. “That the Constitution is color-blind is our dedicated belief,” they wrote, arguing that “no State has any authority under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunity among its citizens.”

But over time, Southern politicians exploited that formulaic definition of desegregation to offer “freedom of choice” plans that left schools segregated. The plans were technically colorblind, because Black families in theory could choose to send their children to predominantly white schools. But Black parents who did so often lost their jobs or faced intense social intimidation. Judges concluded that colorblind choice policies were ineffective, since less than one percent of Black children attended school with any white children for nearly a decade after Brown.

Melnick concedes that judges clearly did have to pay attention to racial numbers in order to dismantle Jim Crow. So they began to order busing plans that sought to make all schools in a district reflect the broader racial makeup of the district as a whole. Judges might order, for example, that all of a district’s schools fall within 10 percentage points of the Black or white student population share in the district as a whole. In the Supreme Court, battles erupted over how long such numbers-driven, court-ordered busing plans should remain in place. In the 1990s, the Supreme Court pushed lower courts in the direction of releasing districts from school desegregation orders. And in 2007, the Supreme Court struck down racial integration plans that had been voluntarily adopted by school districts in Louisville and Seattle.

Some Black critics of racial desegregation said the plans were insulting. In one Supreme Court case, Justice Clarence Thomas famously observed, “It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.” Supporters of integration noted that while there was nothing magical about white pigmentation, because of a history of racial oppression, Black families were much more likely to be poor than white families, and concentrations of school poverty did have an important impact on the ability of students to thrive in a school.

Among the research studies on school integration in recent decades, Melnick notes, “almost all found the socioeconomic composition of the student body more important than the racial mix.” Having a cohort of parents who volunteer strengthens a school community, for example, and parental involvement correlates more highly with socioeconomic status than with race. The importance of socioeconomic factors helps make sense of another key finding that Melnick cites: desegregation in the South resulted in much larger gains in graduation rates and earnings for Black students than desegregation in the North. Because Southern school districts are typically county-based, school desegregation often encompassed affluent white suburbs. In the North, urban school districts often educated students separately from wealthy white suburbs, exempting the latter from desegregation orders. In short, Southern racial desegregation often meant socioeconomic mixing while Northern racial desegregation often did not.

Judicial busing orders, while well intentioned, proved hugely unpopular. In 1973, only 5 percent of Americans supported mandatory busing to achieve racial balance. “Not since Prohibition,” Melnick writes, “had a federal policy provoked such strong opposition.” White families who had resources often fled school desegregation orders by moving their children to a private school or a distant suburb located beyond the area covered by the order. Politicians took note. “Opposition to busing turned Congress from a quiet ally into a vocal critic,” Melnick writes.

Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal and Education Defense Fund, says opposition to busing reflected “raw racial prejudice and the protection of white supremacy.” Journalist Nikole Hannah Jones, likewise, wrote an article in the New York Times headlined, “Court-Ordered Desegregation Worked. But White Racism Made It Hard to Accept.”

Melnick concedes that white racism was sometimes a driving factor in opposition to busing but suggests that the story is more complicated. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, and Lexington, Kentucky, for instance, Black parents objected to desegregation orders in which coveted seats in magnet schools were reserved for whites. And some parents, both white and Black, did not want their young children on long bus rides to schools that might not provide a strong or welcoming learning environment.

What is to be done? If, as Melnick suggests, integrated schools are better than segregated ones; if achievement is driven more by the socioeconomic status of a student body than its race; if the courts have placed legal limits on using race in student assignment; and if mandatory integration is less likely to gain parental buy-in than voluntary efforts—what about the idea of creating schools of choice that are designed to produce a healthy socioeconomic mix? The question is all the timelier in light of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard and the seeming triumph of the colorblind interpretation of Brown.

Today, Melnick notes, some 171 school districts and charter schools, from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, rely on choice and magnet schools to bring about socioeconomic (and thereby racial) integration. These plans seek to reconcile the colorblind and racial isolation interpretations of Brown: they don’t assign students based on race, but because of the relationship between race and class in America, socioeconomic integration plans also produce racial integration. These plans are community-driven rather than court-ordered, so they have local support, which is likely to produce better results. Evidence shows, Melnick says, “that voluntary plans are more effective than those imposed by judicial or administrative fiat.”

Melnick notes in passing that housing segregation is a root cause of school segregation. In a country where 73 percent of schoolchildren attend neighborhood public schools, housing policy is school policy.

I wish Melnick had explored the issue of what to do about housing policies that actively segregate families by class and by race. Polling finds that school integration is popular in concept, but support drops when transporting students is required to achieve it. Housing reform offers important advantages that could integrate neighborhood schools.

Scholars such as Richard Rothstein have outlined the effects of 20th century redlining and racially restrictive covenants. But even to this day, the pervasive use of exclusionary zoning laws, such as bans on multifamily housing, and requirements of very large lot sizes, continue to produce income-based (and therefore racial) segregation. Communities located very close to one another can have dramatically different racial and socioeconomic makeups that are driven in large measure by arcane zoning laws that determine who can live where in America.

Reforms of exclusionary zoning laws have taken off since Minneapolis legalized multifamily housing in 2018. In red states and blue states, conservatives who don’t like government regulation and liberals who don’t like exclusion have come together to reform zoning laws.
Melnick’s even-handed approach to the school desegregation era offers insights into what went right and what went wrong on a very important set of policies. Although the volume is short on solutions, readers can take important lessons about how policymakers today can forge a better future that redeems the promise of Brown.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and nonresident scholar at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, is the author of All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice (2001) and Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism and Class Bias Builds the Walls We Don’t See (2023).

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Kahlenberg, R.D. (2024). A Noble, Flawed Effort: Chronicle of school desegregation since Brown shows policies have been both worthwhile and misguided. Education Next, 24(1), 80-82.

The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents
by Lisa Damour
Ballantine Books, 2023, $28; 256 pages.

As reviewed by Elaine Griffin

For latchkey kids like me growing up in the 1980s, teenage angst was a collective character trait. Popular songs like “Don’t You (Forget about Me)” by Simple Minds or “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by The Clash channeled our moodiness and insecurities. Movies like Footloose and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off explored teenagers’ rebellious instincts while their parents were off-screen and out of the loop. Growing up is hard, the entertainment industry told us, and our experiences confirmed that.

In 2023, kids are being schooled by the wellness industry, which now represents a larger segment of the global economy than the entertainment industry. These young people should have a much better chance of growing up happy than we did. But do they? And is it possible that the pursuit of happiness is itself part of the problem?

In her insightful new book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, clinical psychologist Lisa Damour argues that the wellness industry has contributed to a new cultural norm that simply isn’t sound or even useful: it has equated feeling good with mental health. The result, Damour asserts, is that we are “afraid of being unhappy.” In Damour’s practice, teens who are not feeling calm, relaxed, or happy confess to “failing at wellness.”

Under the influence of the wellness industry, educators have incorporated meditation, yoga, and gratitude journals into their curricula to support the wellbeing of their students, many of whom say they are anxious or depressed. Damour acknowledges that many mindfulness practices are valuable, but she cautions against thinking that they can lead to happiness or prevent negative feelings. Her reflections instead suggest that educators need to help students understand the nature of wellness as practices, not goals.

Making happiness the goal of a wellness routine is like teaching to the test: it becomes a means to an end that risks degrading the experience itself. We should expand our students’ understanding of their emotional lives and the surrounding world—using both wellness and traditional pedagogical practices—rather than focusing their attention on an illusory goal like “happiness.” By teaching kids to revel in the process of learning about their bodies, their minds, and the world, we expand their ability to accept emotions that will necessarily include the bitter and the sweet, the lows as well as the highs. In short, we should expand students’ sense of all it means to be fully human, in which the questions and uncertainties matter as much as the answers.

The social media outlets through which teens receive a lot of their mental health information promote a much more prescriptive, ends-oriented understanding of the good life. Self-proclaimed experts pedal happiness hacks or self-care products with the promise that using them will produce a kind of emotional equilibrium. Damour points out that by investing in self-care—and the accompanying goods and services—kids believe that they can prevent anxiety and emotional distress. But losing a big game, doing poorly on a test, or getting dumped are not only distressing, they are also fairly common experiences among adolescents. Damour fears that “the wellness movement has left parents and their teens unduly frightened of garden variety adversity” and therefore unable to appreciate how much we grow through failure and hardship.

Ironically, despite growing up in a wellspring of wellness information, teens today feel worse than ever.

But the wellness industry is just one factor. The Covid-19 pandemic also contributed to the rise in depression and anxiety among young people by stymieing opportunities for social engagement, Damour says. She also speculates that the plethora of prescription medication available to stave off emotional discomfort may make teens view the daily ups and downs that accompany growing up “as something that can be deterred or contained with chemical interventions.”

Damour offers a useful corrective to the idea that mental health means feeling good. She believes that context is everything, that mental health means “having the right feelings at the right time.” If a teen fails a math test, they should feel disappointment. If they score a winning goal, they should feel a sense of pride. Healthy people experience the full range of human emotions and can identify and name them.
Teenagers feel emotions more acutely than the rest of us, so dealing with difficult emotions may be particularly painful to them. Damour explains how the teenage brain amplifies emotions; strong emotions “are a feature, not a bug” in their neurological wiring. During adolescence, the emotion centers of the brain strengthen and predominate the portions of the brain that help maintain a measured perspective. This “emotional intensity actually peaks around age thirteen or fourteen” and begins to subside after that.

So, how can parents support their children through this rocky period of development? Damour’s book provides a lot of practical advice to parents on how to create more harmonious relationships with their teens.

I couldn’t help thinking, as I read her advice, that she was presenting an unattainable ideal. So don’t try to hold yourself up to the standards set by this world-renowned child psychologist. Damour’s scripted accounts of dealing with teenagers exemplify the calm and logic a professional would display in one’s clinical practice.

What Damour does best is put the phases of growing up into perspective, showing that parents’ uncomfortable exchanges with their teens have less to do with their parenting style and more to do with adolescent development.

For example, it’s helpful to know that adolescents, usually around age 13, go through something psychologists call “separation-individuation.” Damour muses that this phase should be called “the several months when your teenager can’t stand how you chew.” Damour explains that healthy adolescents need to separate from their parents and become increasingly independent. To do so, they develop their own “brand identity,” one that is intentionally distinct from their parents’ brand. Suddenly, Mom’s outfit is out of style, Dad’s car is embarrassing, and both of them listen to music that could only be characterized as geriatric (you know, like Simple Minds or The Clash).

Rest assured that this is a short and necessary stage through which teens pass on the road to independence. I had a middle school parent tell me that when her daughter criticizes her, her husband soothes his wife by saying, “It’s the hormones; they’ve poisoned her.” While Damour’s book focuses on brain development rather than hormones, the larger point remains: a teen’s outburst is “a lot less personal than it feels.” When parents are on the receiving end of harsh criticism, the author advises, they should “try to engage as little as possible.”

After reading Damour’s book, I asked her how parents might deal productively with kids as they move through this challenging phase. “To me,” she wrote, “it seems fair to tell teens that they can’t be unkind or rude. They can, however, say that they need some space.”

How can you engage positively with your teen when they are suffering and need support processing emotions? Damour gives advice that I hope will bring you relief.

Don’t swoop in and try to fix everything. Doing so won’t allow teens the opportunity to manage their emotions and develop problem-solving skills. No need to be heroic; just hone your listening skills. There is solid evidence that active listening may be all that is needed to help your child with emotional regulation.

When kids put their problems into words, they gain perspective and insight; even just speaking about their experience connects them with another person. To really listen, Damour asks parents to imagine that they are a newspaper editor who is trying to come up with a headline about the story a reporter is narrating to them. Rather than offering feedback, a headline that summarizes the story goes a long way toward making a teen feel seen and heard. When I listen to middle schoolers explain their problems to me at school, I usually provide a brief summary of what I’ve heard, starting with, “Let me see if I’ve got this right. . . .” An empathetic summing-up is often all the student needs to feel better and head back to class.

At times, however, parents and teachers aren’t dealing with highly verbal kids. Some students don’t have robust vocabularies, perhaps because they read only what is assigned for school. We are also seeing a rise in neurodivergent students, some of whom have language processing issues. When I asked Damour how we can better support these students, she said that we should “spend dedicated time expanding teens’ vocabularies for describing emotion. This can happen through direct instruction—such as when talking about the books they’ve been assigned at school—and also during interactions with teens, such as when they describe an emotion in generic terms and we respond empathically by offering a more precise word for what they are feeling.”

The importance of expanding students’ emotional vocabularies resonated with me as a middle school head who cares deeply about my students’ social and emotional development. When students share that they feel “bad,” we have very little information. They could be disheartened, apprehensive, or frustrated—three very distinct feelings—but they haven’t developed the emotional vocabulary to label their feelings accurately.
But when students can identify and articulate their feelings, they can respond proportionately and make a plan to manage them. Classroom discussions of short stories or films could support educators’ work in this area. Characters who have the right feelings at the right time illuminate and normalize the wide range of human emotions. More important, talking about characters rather than themselves allows teens a safe way to explore difficult emotions, such as sadness, anger, or shame.

For teens who just aren’t talkers, there are other methods one can employ to help them manage their feelings. Damour suggests that parents encourage their verbally reticent adolescents to channel their emotions through physical activities, like going for a run, or through more passive experiences, like listening to “mood-matching music.” Distraction is also a good way to provide some relief for intense emotions. A short stint of video-game playing may be just what a teen needs to forget about a mean group text they just read.

In the end, Damour’s advice all comes back to showing compassion. Teens are going to experience extreme highs and lows; by modeling calm and composure, parents and educators alike can do a lot to provide a steadying presence.

As I read this book, I wrote three times in the margins, “Who’s taking care of the caretaker?” In one anecdote, a mother seeks out Damour for advice when her teenage daughter becomes increasingly critical of her. The mother shared that when her daughter was expecting some friends to visit the house, she told her mother that her shirt was “dumpy” and asked her to relocate before her friends arrived and saw her. I couldn’t help but pause and think how hurtful it must have been to be on the receiving end of that comment.

So, let me add my own advice to parents and teachers of teens, based on a long career as a teacher and school administrator: be good to yourself.

Whether as a parent or as an educator, you work hard to provide a caring and stable environment for the adolescents in your life. Take some of Damour’s advice for teens and practice it yourselves. Get sufficient sleep, make time for exercise, and talk to someone who really listens to you, so that you can be your best self. Show yourself some compassion, too. You deserve that for all that you are doing to build better teens, better families, and better schools for a better future.

Elaine Griffin is the head of middle school at University School of Milwaukee.

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Griffin, E. (2024). Right Feelings,Right Time: The emotional life of a teenager is hard to navigate—for parents and teachers, too. Education Next, 24(1), 83-85.

Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See
by Richard Kahlenberg
Public Affairs, 2023, $30; 352 pages.

As reviewed by Matthew Levey

Richard Kahlenberg, a bespectacled, balding, Harvard-educated lawyer who grew up in a well-off suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota, is a curious character to be called controversial. He has long advocated for progressive education policies, particularly school integration, doing so for the last 24 years from a perch at the left-leaning Century Foundation. Two former college presidents, William G. Bowen of Princeton University and Michael S. McPherson of Macalester College, wrote that Kahlenberg “deserves more credit than anyone else for arguing vigorously and relentlessly for stronger efforts to address disparities by socioeconomic status.”

Kahlenberg supports class-based (and race-neutral) affirmative action in education. So, in 2018, when he wrote expert reports and testified for the plaintiffs in cases that led, in June 2023, to the U.S. Supreme Court barring the use of race in college admissions, his arguments seemed consonant with his prior views. Nonetheless, this spring he left his longtime employer “to pursue new opportunities.” The New York Times ran a 2,200-word profile of the breakup.

But questioning race-based affirmative action isn’t his only offense against progressive politics. In Excluded, Kahlenberg wonders why reliably liberal voters in places such as Great Neck and Scarsdale (New York), Atherton (California), and Brookline (Massachusetts) practice extreme forms of housing discrimination. “Single-family zoning,” which limits and often prevents the construction of more-affordable duplex and triplex apartments, Kahlenberg writes,

is a more indirect, but perhaps no less effective version of China’s household registration [policy]: it effectively bars many would-be migrants from seeking good jobs and pursuing the American Dream by keeping housing unaffordable in high-growth regions, at a terrible cost to individuals and society.

Lawn signs in these communities may claim all are welcome, but their zoning laws are a neon “no vacancy” sign. Kahlenberg argues that laws constraining the housing supply and excluding low-income families from living in areas with greater opportunity are a major cause of both educational disparities and housing shortages. Although the author might demur, Excluded reminds this reviewer of Ronald Reagan’s 1987 plea to Mikhail Gorbachev, standing at the Brandenburg Gate, to “tear down this wall.”

Six years ago, in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein catalogued federal policies that, for decades, made home mortgages unavailable to most people of color. Kahlenberg writes that this discrimination was compounded when, between 1916 and 1936, 1,234 cities established zoning density rules. When the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, the suburbs adopted their own density rules. Today, on one side of Nassau County’s Meadowbrook Parkway, the town of Merrick has a population density of 5,200 residents per square mile and an average household income of $184,000. Just 4 percent of families rent their homes. Across the highway in Freeport, the population density is 81 percent higher, the median income is 46 percent lower, and 33 percent of families rent.

How is this relevant to education policy? While education reformers celebrate the expansion of charter schools, vouchers, and Education Savings Accounts, most parents send their children to nearby schools. Even in Brooklyn, with one of the densest public transportation networks in the world, the school I led struggled to enroll students from neighborhoods filled with failing schools just a few miles away from us.

Excluded’s case for how zoning reform could support school choice is illustrated by several case studies. Trapped in high-poverty Springfield, Massachusetts, Samantha (for privacy reasons, Kahlenberg does not give her last name), a single mother of three, dreamed of leaving. A high school dropout, she worked as an aide at a rehabilitation hospital while her kids, two of whom have autism, struggled in schools where most students couldn’t read or add. But in 2019 Samantha caught a break and received a type of Section 8 voucher that allowed her to move to nearby Longmeadow, where the median household income is triple that of Springfield. Longmeadow students achieve at rates far above the state averages. Samantha worried that the neighbors would be wary of her low-income status, but she told Kahlenberg that “the neighbors are great. . . . They play with my kids perfectly fine.” She loves her kids’ schools.

Unfortunately, only 45 such vouchers were available in Massachusetts in 2021. School reformers should be natural allies with capitalist property owners in unleashing the power of markets to supply more housing at lower cost. Demanding full funding for the Section 8 program that helps needy families pay market rent might feel just, but this is but shouting in the wind, given Washington’s partisan gridlock. Families like Samantha’s need access to duplex and triplex apartments with more-affordable rents. Now.

In 2007 I was witness to an unplanned experiment along these lines. The elementary school serving a public housing complex in a once-redlined neighborhood two miles from my own family’s apartment had declined to the point where its low academic results coincided with dangerous structural failures. The school was shuttered, and its 400 or so students were redistributed to four of the most highly sought-after elementary schools in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country. And that’s how my son met his friend Richard.

My primary recollection of this centers on what didn’t happen. No protests, no comments about students who didn’t “belong.” I met Richard’s mother a few times when the boys played together after school. She worked at the post office. I remember that Richard could mimic the subway-train conductor’s spiel for almost any stop on the route. In middle school he and my son lost touch, but Richard eventually attended a selective high school where 40 percent of low-income graduates finish college in four years. The national average for the general population across all income brackets is 46 percent.

In many metropolitan areas, such as Dallas and Columbus, Ohio, which Kahlenberg also profiles, there are opportunities to increase school choice and improve educational outcomes by eliminating or reducing exclusionary zoning. He praises Minneapolis for eliminating single-family zoning but notes that this change was part of a package of reforms, including removing off-street parking requirements and up-zoning transit corridors, that led to the Twin Cities’ housing boom.

Zoning reform alone will not be a silver bullet that fixes American educational dysfunction. Social factors, such as family structure and parents’ prior education, will continue to influence student achievement even as areas of highly concentrated poverty are broken up. But at a time of low social cohesion and few opportunities for bipartisan political effort, freeing property owners to build more housing more easily could furnish another arrow for the reform quiver. Wise planning officials, smart philanthropists, and ambitious mayors would do well to consider Kahlenberg’s latest recommendations.

Matthew Levey founded the International Charter School and writes on K–12 education.

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Levey, M. (2024). Zoned In: Zoning reform could expand school choice and promote educational equity. Education Next, 24(1), 86-87.

It is indisputable that children are better off living with two nurturing parents who are in a stable, loving relationship compared to any other living situation. But it gets more contentious from there. Does “stability” require marriage? How important is it to live with two biological parents? What if one (or both) adults are not in love or are negative influences on their children? These questions matter, because, in the real world, the alternative to children living with a single parent is not always two nurturing, married, biological parents who are in a stable, loving relationship.

They also matter because the likelihood that a child lives with married parents has fallen markedly. In 1980, 77 percent of children in the U.S. lived with married parents. By 2019, just 63 percent did. About one in four children live in a single-parent home—for the most part, with single mothers.

The rise in single motherhood has been driven by nonmarital births, not divorce, and is concentrated among disadvantaged women. Only 12 percent of children whose mothers have graduated college live with a single mom, compared to 30 percent of children whose mothers did not graduate high school and 29 percent of children whose mothers do not have a college degree. There are stark racial differences in rates of single-parent families as well. Some 54 percent of Black children live with a single mother compared to 15 percent of white children. A Black child whose mother has a college degree is as likely to live with a single mother as children of other races whose mothers lack a high-school diploma.

These numbers come from an important new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, by University of Maryland economist Melissa S. Kearney. The decline in marriage she documents is even more pronounced than her figures suggest (see Figure 1). The deterioration of the two-parent family was well underway by 1980, beginning at least as far back as the late 1960s. Kearney’s view on how we should interpret this decline, and her reason for writing the book, is stated clearly in the preface:

Based on the overwhelming evidence at hand, I can say with the utmost confidence that the decline in marriage and the corresponding rise in the share of children being raised in one-parent homes has contributed to the economic insecurity of American families, has widened the gap in opportunities and outcomes for children from different backgrounds, and today poses economic and social challenges that we cannot afford to ignore—but may not be able to reverse.

This statement is more controversial than it should be. Of all the sources of unequal opportunity in the U.S., family structure is unique in the discomfort it causes analysts and policymakers. As Kearney notes often, the subject is taboo in many circles, and raising it opens one up to charges of stigmatizing single mothers and their children. Already, she has been subjected on social media and left-leaning corners of the Internet to the judgmental motive-questioning criticism of self-ordained defenders of the poor.

Yet these questions are critical to our understanding the lived experiences of American children and how policymakers can support their learning, health, and well-being. Should policymakers invest in programs designed to nudge parents to marry or stay married? Or, if the traditional two-parent family structure is in inevitable decline, what programs should we support in its stead?

Causes and Consequences

For what it’s worth, a majority of parents from a variety of family structures seem to agree that marriage is important for kids. A 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center, the most recent I could find with analyzable data by different family structures, asked, “When an unmarried man and woman have a child together, how important is it to you that they legally marry?” The share of mothers aged 18 to 44 saying “very” or “somewhat” important (as opposed to “not too” or “not at all” important) was 73 percent among married, separated, or widowed mothers, 56 percent among divorced or cohabiting mothers, and 56 percent among never-married mothers.

Nevertheless, Kearney’s statement is quite strong. What can we say about the substantive case made by her critics? No one disputes the evidence that Kearney (pretty cursorily) reviews showing that across a large variety of outcomes, in hundreds of studies, children who grow up with a single parent or who experience family disruption do worse than children in stable two-parent families.

For instance, one review of 47 causal studies of family structure shows that in the area of education, children living with two married parents have higher test scores and educational aspirations. They have fewer behavioral problems at school, are more likely to be prepared for class, and are less likely to be held back. Children from two-parent homes also are more likely to graduate from high school, enroll in college, and earn a degree. One especially rigorous study comparing the educational outcomes of children of identical twins—one divorced, one not—found that experiencing a parent’s divorce before age 16 reduced educational attainment by one-fourth of a year, on average.

Critics question whether these unequal outcomes are in fact caused by differences in family structure. This may seem like an easy question to answer, but thinking about specific real-world families reveals the methodological challenges to be tougher than may be apparent. Single parenthood is not distributed randomly. It may be that the kids of single parents would do even worse had their parents gotten or stayed married. For example, some parents may be abusive.  

Very few statistical analyses can account for such scenarios (see sidebar: “A complex research question”). And in my view, Kearney gives somewhat short shrift to these analytical challenges, though she concedes a lot more than her critics have suggested. However, this is a methodological point. As Kearney rightly suggests, it defies reason to think that the historic increase in single motherhood reflects a historic increase in the number of families for which single motherhood is better for kids—or that single parenthood was always better for one in four kids, and we’re fortunate today that more families choose it. For that matter, there are sophisticated studies exploiting “as good as random” variation in family structure that find negative effects.

But let’s back up. Children of single parents have worse outcomes than children living with married parents, on average. Therefore, when skeptics of family-structure studies argue that the counterfactual of having married parents would be worse (or no better), they are really saying that the children of single parents are doomed to lousy outcomes, no matter what. So even if the skeptics are right, the rise in single parenthood constitutes a crisis.

We owe children a better start in life. And that means ensuring that more children are born into likely-to-be-successful parental relationships instead of relationships where they are doomed to lousy outcomes. And as Kearney emphasizes, the parental relationships most likely to succeed will involve marriage, which entails some combination of a symbolic shared identity, religious covenant, and legal commitment device.

The Trouble With “Marriageable Men”

How do we create the conditions that foster successful marriage? Kearney’s policy proposals are heavily influenced by her diagnosis of how we got here. Broadly speaking, researchers debate whether economic factors, cultural factors, or policy choices have driven the marriage decline. Kearney devotes the most attention to economic explanations and lands in favor of improving economic conditions for men.

She embraces the “marriageable men” hypothesis first elaborated by sociologist William Julius Wilson in the mid-1980s. According to this view, single motherhood has risen because men have done increasingly worse economically, making them unattractive as husbands. It’s not so much that single women are having babies at higher rates than in the past (though they are), but rather that more of them are single—and therefore at risk of having a nonmarital birth—because the men on offer are not doing well.

The problem with this explanation is that men’s hourly wages and annual earnings are at or near all-time highs. Pay for the lowest-educated half of men stagnated or declined over a long period from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. But since then, pay has risen appreciably—median male earnings are up by 33 percent since 1979, even after adjusting for the increased cost of living.

Kearney emphasizes the disappointing trends for men with the lowest levels of education. But looking at earnings trends by education level leads to inaccurate impressions. Educational attainment has risen. Men without a high school diploma, for example, constituted 30 percent of men in 1973 but just 10 percent of men in 2019. Comparing the economic outcomes of the bottom 10 percent of men today to those of the bottom 30 percent in the past will show a worse trend than comparing the bottom 10 percent (or 30 percent) in both years.

Like other advocates of the marriageable men hypothesis, Kearney also points to the fact that men’s labor force participation—the share who are working or looking for work—has fallen. However, that trend dates to the 1940s, and little of it—according to men’s own survey responses—reflects difficulty finding work. As I have shown in other research, by an absolute economic “marriageability” threshold, men are at least as marriageable now as they were in 1979. At the same time, if “marriageable” means that a prospective husband earns some multiple of what a woman earns, then men’s marriageability has indeed declined. But that is because women have made such remarkable advances.

The distinction between an absolute marriageability threshold and a relative threshold is important for policy. Throughout The Two-Parent Privilege, Kearney asserts that men are having a terrible time in the modern economy, with statements like, “It has become increasingly difficult, for example, for someone without a high level of education or skill to achieve economic security and success in the U.S.” Correspondingly, many of her proposals are aimed at boosting men’s economic outcomes. For instance, she wants to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (an earnings subsidy for low-income workers), reduce incarceration, and step-up prisoner reentry efforts.

But is the decline in marriageability related to economic deterioration or rising affluence? If, in real terms, men are doing better than ever and only losing ground relative to the even more impressive gains made by women, the problem may be that both men and women are setting the economic bar for men’s marriageability too high. Or perhaps women’s economic gains allow them not to settle for men whose non-economic marriageability leaves a lot to be desired. To put a finer point on it, if declining marriageability is about economic deterioration, that has different implications for policy than if it is about rising affluence.

Cultural Contributions

Turning to other explanations for family decline, Kearney does believe culture is important. She presents evidence from her clever 2015 study with Phillip B. Levine showing that exposure to the MTV show 16 and Pregnant lowered teen pregnancy rates. If pop culture can reduce single parenthood, it may have been an important part of its long-run increase in the wake of the countercultural 1960s.

Kearney also cites her 2018 research with Riley Wilson on the fracking boom, which may have provided an “as good as random” boost to men’s pay in the affected geographic areas. She found that even though men’s earnings rose in these areas, rather than stimulating marriage it seems only to have increased the number of births (including those out of wedlock). Kearney contrasts this result with the effects of the Appalachian coal boom of the 1970s and 1980s, which did increase marriage. To square the two results, she speculates that the culture changed. In earlier decades, the stigma around nonmarital childbearing was stronger than it is today, so economic gains led to more marriage. Today, given changed norms around single parenthood, economic gains are insufficient to increase family stability.

Other research focusing on cultural change dates the shift in norms closer to the 1960s. Economists George A. Akerlof, Janet L. Yellen, and Michael L. Katz argue that the availability of legal abortion and the birth control pill increased pressures on women to engage in nonmarital sex and reduced pressures on men to marry women if a pregnancy resulted. Consistent with this hypothesis, Rachel Sheffield and I have documented a sharp decline in post-conception, pre-birth marriage (“shotgun marriage”). In the early 1960s, over 40 percent of births resulting from nonmarital pregnancies were preceded by a wedding. By the late 2000s, that figure had fallen to about 10 percent.

That cultural change is an important factor in the deterioration of the family is also suggested by the many parallel declines in “associational life” that have occurred over the past 50 years. Not just family life, but community, religious, civic, and institutional life have become less vibrant. Kearney’s solutions to rising family instability also target culture. She advocates “fostering a norm of two-parent homes for children,” though she doesn’t have any specific proposals for doing so beyond citing “organic” shifts in media messaging.

Policy’s Role

Finally, other researchers—most prominently, but hardly exclusively, Charles Murray—have argued that the incentives in federal safety-net programs have contributed to the increase in single parenthood. By reducing benefits when income rises, many safety-net programs discourage couples from marrying. The very existence of generous—if far from lavish—benefits also makes single parenthood more viable.

Kearney is not having it. She says it is a “mistaken assumption” that government assistance affects family structure and asserts that it is “simply untrue and unfounded” that welfare benefits have played a significant role in the rise of single parenthood.

But her cursory review of the research is far too one-sided, in my view. In one revealing passage, Kearney declares, based on her 2004 study, that family caps—a state option to limit welfare payments when beneficiaries have additional children—don’t reduce nonmarital fertility. She says as a result of states implementing family caps, the lives of single mothers “were made more difficult by a public policy that was rooted in bad assumptions.” But more than a decade after her paper was published, a comprehensive review of welfare reform studies (including Kearney’s) reported mixed evidence on the question, with two of six papers finding that family caps did reduce nonmarital fertility, two finding they did not, and two yielding ambiguous results.

Moreover, three trends suggest that welfare reform may have increased family stability. First, among the most disadvantaged children, the share of children living with married parents stopped declining 30 years ago. From the late 1960s to the early 1990s, living with married parents became rarer among children with the least-educated and poorest mothers. But then it bottomed out. Around the same time, the nonmarital birth rate, which had been rising since at least 1940, leveled off. It eventually began to drop and in 2021 was lower than at any time since 1987. Finally, the teen birth rate (and nonmarital teen birth rate) also began steady declines at around the same time.

As it happens, the early 1990s was a period of state experimentation with welfare reforms, political pressures to reform the system (“end welfare as we know it”), and federal activity to pass legislation that would do so. It culminated in the landmark Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which overhauled the nation’s welfare system. Notably, employment of single mothers, especially the least skilled, rose sharply beginning in the early 1990s and remained elevated thereafter. Meanwhile, child poverty fell to an all-time low—a result that is not exclusively the result of welfare reform but for which the reform appears central given how much of the drop was due to pre-tax and transfer income. This evidence is far from rock-solid in demonstrating the causal impact of safety-net policies on family stability, but it adds up to a much stronger case than Kearney admits.

Since Kearney rejects the notion that transferring money to people does harm, she advocates a much bigger safety net for all families with children, including a universal child allowance and universal pre-K. These kinds of policies are not really a solution to the problem of rising single parenthood. They effectively amount to a concession to Kearney’s critics, who argue that single parenthood itself isn’t the problem. Rather, it’s the economic cost of single parenthood, and policymakers could choose to support these families enough that it wouldn’t matter. Furthermore, somewhat undermining her case, Kearney notes that research by Nobel laureate James Heckman has found that Denmark’s more expansive welfare state does not appear to translate into higher intergenerational mobility.

More Than Money

At the end of the day, Kearney attaches too much importance to having enough money. As noted, she emphasizes wage stagnation and income inequality as causes of family breakdown. She also focuses on insufficient family income as a mediator of single parenthood’s harms. For example, noting that single motherhood appears to have a stronger negative impact on boys, Kearney might have probed the importance of same-sex role modeling. Instead, she sticks to her framework in which money affects what families can afford, how stressed they are, and the spare time they have to give children, positing that boys may be extra sensitive to these diminished inputs. Finally, Kearney’s solutions focus heavily on providing more money to families or helping men earn more money so that they will be more marriageable.

If only money mattered, addressing single parenthood would be much easier, since we have policy levers for transferring money and increasing the ability of men to earn more. Unfortunately, transferring money may itself be a big part of the problem. And the cultural factors at play resist policy intervention.

Kearney’s proposals for education are not especially well aimed at reducing single parenthood. She wants “improvements” to primary and secondary education, a “massive” increase in federal spending on postsecondary schools, and more apprenticeships and career and technical education programs. But marriage has eroded even more for moderately educated parents than for the least-educated parents, and today, the rates of the two groups are nearly indistinguishable. It is unclear that raising educational attainment will have much of an impact. The higher marriage rate for college-educated parents surely reflects factors other than their having earned a paper certificate.

However, there may be one way for schools to support the sort of cultural change that could make a meaningful difference. They could adopt curriculums that emphasize the “success sequence,” as does the Vertex Partnership Academies network of charter schools founded by my American Enterprise Institute colleague, Ian Rowe. The success sequence involves putting high school graduation, work, and marriage before childbearing; poverty rates among adults who took such a path are vanishingly low. We could use more causal research to establish the impact of following the sequence, but experiments to encourage kids to forge a successful path seem warranted. Such curricular experimentation seems hard to imagine within public schools for the time being, which points toward expanding the number of charter schools and providing more vehicles for school choice, such as education savings accounts.

Despite my not sharing Kearney’s perspective on the causes of the rise in single parenthood and preferring different policy measures to reverse it, I wholeheartedly agree with her as to its fundamental importance. Advocates for children and for greater social mobility should be grateful for her informative, nuanced, and humane case that single parenthood is one of the greatest barriers we face to expanding opportunity. Policymakers and analysts across the ideological spectrum should consider it one of the defining challenges of our time.

Scott Winship is a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Winship, S. (2024). It Takes Two: Does The Two-Parent Privilege get it right? Education Next, 24(1), 70-75.