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.

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

Wallace, J. (2024). The Charter-School Movement Just Keeps on Keepin’ On: Its momentum catalyzed by shifting politics, new strength, better advocacy, and simple staying power. Education Next, 24(1), 8-15.

Rankings and Results

The strongest academic performance from charter-school students is in No. 1-ranked Alaska, at 32 percent of a standard deviation above the average charter score nationwide, followed by Colorado and Massachusetts, then by New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, and New Jersey (see Figure 1). The lowest-ranked charter performance is in Hawaii, at 54 percent of a standard deviation below the national average, followed by Tennessee, Michigan, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.

Alaska’s high ranking for charter-school student achievement may seem surprising given its low ranking for NAEP performance by all public-school students. In a 2019 analysis by the Urban Institute, Alaska ranked at or near the bottom in both reading and math in grades 4 and 8. It is possible that results are skewed in some way by the challenge of controlling for Alaska’s distinctive indigenous population, which makes up about 20 percent of K–12 students. However, Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby found Alaska among the top three states in an analysis conducted on scores in 2003. Further, Alaska’s charter achievement ranks seventh when no adjustments are made for background characteristics. Charter student performance in Alaska seems to deserve its ranking in the top tier.

In looking at the five lowest-ranking states, Hawaii’s very poor performance is skewed downward by NAEP’s incorporation of indigenous Hawaiian population and other Pacific Islanders into the broad “Asian” category, a sizeable share of the charter student population (see “Does Hawaii Make the Case for Religious Charters?,” features, Winter 2024). If the analysis is limited to the years 2011 to 2019, indigenous Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders can be classified separately. When this is done for those years, Hawaii’s performance shifts to –35 percent of a standard deviation, and the state’s score resembles that of Tennessee.

We then estimate differences in test-score performance between students of various racial and ethnic groups in each state, while still adjusting for other background characteristics. States vary in the degree to which the performance of white charter students exceeds that of Black and Hispanic ones (see Figures 2 and 3). The gap between Black and white charter-school students’ test scores is more than a full standard deviation, or roughly equivalent to three-and-one-half years of learning, in D.C. and five states: Missouri, Wisconsin, Delaware, Michigan, and Maryland. By comparison, that gap is equivalent to about two-and-one-half years of learning in Oklahoma, Arizona, New York, Florida, and Illinois.

We find the largest score differences between white and Hispanic students in D.C., Pennsylvania, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, and Massachusetts. States with the least divergence in white-Hispanic scores are Oklahoma, Louisiana, Illinois, Florida, and Ohio, where scores differ by roughly one to one-and-a-third years of learning.

Oklahoma and Florida have among the smallest disparities between white charter students and both Black and Hispanic charter students. By contrast, D.C. and Delaware have exceptionally large differences between those student groups. These differences may be a function of which students opt to enroll in charter schools or some other mechanism not captured by observed student characteristics. Or they may reflect divergent charter practices.

Comparison to Statewide Rankings

How closely do the PEPG state rankings mirror similar efforts to rank states based on student achievement across all public schools? We might expect strong correlations, as charter student performance could be affected by a state’s educational climate, including family and community support for schools and students as well as the talents and training of its teachers.

To explore this possibility, we calculate the relationship between PEPG rankings for charter students with state rankings made by the Urban Institute for student achievement at all public schools. Importantly, the comparison is for performance on the same tests for the same period, and the adjustments for family background characteristics are virtually identical.

The rankings for charters and for all public-school students are only modestly correlated (see Figure 4). Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, and Florida have similarly high rankings on both. At the other end of the distribution, California sits at the 24th position in both standings. But the rankings for other states differ sharply. Texas, Pennsylvania, and Indiana are ranked 2, 10, and 12 on the Urban Institute list but land at 15, 31, and 20, respectively, in the PEPG ranking. Conversely, Oklahoma is ranked 6th and Utah is ranked 9th in the PEPG rankings, but these states rank 21st and 32nd, respectively, on the Urban Institute’s list. In short, charter-school performance is not simply a function of the educational environment of the state as a whole.

A Close Look at CREDO

Another state-level ranking of charter schools warrants detailed discussion. In a June 2023 report, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University ranked 29 states by the academic performance of their charter schools from 2014 to 2019. This ranking is based on state test results and compares charter students’ performance, adjusted for prior-year test scores and student background characteristics, to that of students at nearby district schools. This average difference approach to assessing charter performance diverges significantly from the PEPG yardstick, which ranks states by the average level of charter performance, adjusted for student background.

CREDO rankings would nonetheless resemble the ones reported by PEPG if average student achievement were identical at all district schools throughout a state and the country as a whole. Since that is not the case, CREDO rankings are affected as much by scores at district schools as by scores at charters. This is not a mere hypothetical possibility. CREDO finds that test scores for Black students at charter schools showed they “had 35 days more growth in a school year in reading and 29 days in math” relative to comparable students in nearby district schools, and Hispanic students “grew an extra 30 days in reading and 19 additional days in math.”

Meanwhile, white charter students do no better in reading than white students at district schools, and they perform worse in math by 24 days of learning. CREDO also finds better outcomes for charter schools in cities than suburbs—test scores for students at urban charters showed 29 additional days of growth per year in reading and 28 additional days in math. Suburban charters did not perform significantly better than district schools in math but had “stronger growth in reading” amounting to 14 additional days of learning.

These findings could indicate that Black, Hispanic, and urban students attend higher-quality charter schools than those available to white and suburban students. But an alternative interpretation is more likely: White and suburban students have access to higher-quality district schools than those available to Blacks, Hispanics, and city residents. CREDO’s state ranking is useful in considering how the presence of charters affects the choices available to students in each state, but it does not order states by the performance levels of charter students, as the PEPG rankings do.

Impacts of Innovations

The specifics of each state’s charter law and regulations differ substantially, helping the charter sector live up to the “laboratory” principle. This sets the stage for a variety of comparisons looking at which aspects of charter school governance might contribute to student success.

For example, the type of agency granted the power to authorize charters ranges from the state board of education to local school districts to mayoral offices. Accountability requirements vary from tight, ongoing monitoring to nearly none. The saturation of the charter sector is similarly diverse—in states like Arizona, California, and Florida, 12 percent or more students attend a charter compared to 3 percent or less in Maryland, Mississippi, and New Hampshire. Charter funding differs as well, both among and within states, based on revenues and regulations set by federal, state, and local agencies and authorizers. In 2019, charter-school revenues per pupil ranged from $27,825 in D.C. to $6,890 in Oklahoma.

On some widely debated topics, we find little support for either side of the dialogue. For example, we find no higher levels of achievement in states with a larger percentage of public-school students attending charters. Nor do we find a correlation between charter student achievement and the age of the charter school, whether a state permits collective bargaining, or the level of per-pupil funding charter schools receive within a state.

We do find differences when looking at some of the innovative features of charter schools, including authorizing agencies, management structures, and whether schools have an academic or programmatic specialization.

For example, charter student performance varies with the type of authorizer that granted its charter. Students whose charter schools are authorized by a state education agency earn higher scores on NAEP than students whose schools were authorized by school districts and comparable local agencies. Compared to charter schools authorized by a state education agency, student achievement is 9 percent of a standard deviation lower at charter schools authorized by local education agencies like school districts, 10 percent lower at charter schools authorized by independent statewide agencies, 15 percent lower at schools authorized by non-education entities like a mayor’s office, and 19 percent lower at charter schools authorized by higher education institutions.

These results should not be interpreted as showing a causal connection between type of authorizer and student outcomes. Still, it might be noted that state education agencies have decades of experience at overseeing educational systems, an advantage not matched by any other type of authorizer. Local school districts do not authorize as effective charters as do state offices, but they outperform agencies that have had no prior experience in the field of education. Perhaps Helen Keller was right when she said, “Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened . . . and success achieved.”

We also find notable differences in student achievement between schools based on their management model. These fall into three categories: freestanding or standalone schools; schools run by nonprofit charter management organizations or networks like KIPP Foundation and BASIS Charter Schools; and schools run by for-profit education management organizations, such as Academia and ACCEL Schools.

Some 55 percent of the students in our sample attend freestanding, independent charter schools—the classic charter type, led by a small team, that is one of the thousand flowers expected to bloom. Another 23 percent of students attend charters that are part of nonprofit networks or management organizations, and 22 percent of the sample are at schools run by for-profit entities.

Compared to students at for-profit and freestanding, independent charters, students at charters that are part of a nonprofit network score 11 to 16 percent of a standard deviation higher on NAEP. This may be because networked charters benefit from an association with a larger entity, or perhaps because successful charters expand beyond a single school.

For-profit schools are arguably the most controversial component of the charter sector. Charter critic Diane Ravitch has argued that “our schools will not improve if we expect them to act like private, profit-seeking enterprises,” and in 2020, the Democratic Party platform proposed a ban on charter schools run by for-profit entities (see “Ban For-Profit Charters? Campaign issue collides with Covid-era classroom reality”, feature, Winter 2021).

Why do students at for-profit schools earn relatively lower scores on NAEP than at networked charters? For-profit organizations may launch charters where circumstances are more problematic, or they may find operations more challenging when faced with heavy political criticism and threats of closure and government regulation. Or possibly the profit motive is indeed inconsistent with higher student performance, as critics have alleged.

Our main purpose in ranking states by the performance of their charter students is to focus public and policymaker attention on the provision of high-quality schools, the purpose of charter legislation from its very beginning. Our second purpose is to supplement current state-level rankings of the charter-school environment and focus attention on outcomes, not simply state policies and procedures. Although previous rankings document the variety of environments in which charter schools operate, they do not report student achievement measured by a national test common to public schools across the country.

However, the PEPG rankings are not the last word on charter-school quality. We are not able to track year-by-year trends in charter quality within states, as the number of charter student test scores for any given year are too few for precise estimation. We have no information on student performance at virtual charters, as NAEP only monitors student performance at brick-and-mortar school sites. Also, these rankings are based on assessments of student performances in 4th and 8th grade, which excludes any insights as to charter contributions to early childhood and preschool education or high school or career and technical training programs. Finally, NAEP data are observational, not experimental, so causal inferences are not warranted.

It should also be kept in mind that these data are based upon an 11-year period ending in 2019, the eve of a pandemic that closed many charter and district schools for more than a year. Student performance was dramatically affected by the event, and charter enrollment appears to have increased substantially since then. The data reported here stand as a baseline against which future measurement of charter performance in the aftermath of that event may be compared—an especially important measure given the continued growth of the sector.

Paul E. Peterson is a professor of government at Harvard University, director of its Program on Education Policy and Governance, and senior editor at Education Next. M. Danish Shakeel is professor and the director of the E. G. West Centre for Education Policy at the University of Buckingham, U.K. An unabridged version of this paper has been published by the Journal of School Choice (2023).

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

Peterson, P.E., and Shakeel, M.D. (2024). The Nation’s Charter Report Card: First-ever state ranking of charter student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Education Next, 24(1), 24-33.

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

Wildavsky, B. (2024). The Eight Career Arts: Re-making the case for higher education as the gateway to career success. Education Next, 24(1), 56-61.

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.

It was a Friday afternoon toward the end of the school year, and the 8th-grade English class I taught had finished their required coursework weeks earlier. So, I took them outside. What could go wrong? In this neighborhood, a lot could and did.

My students spread out across the fenced-in playground. Some huddled under the shaded play structures to talk with friends. Despite the heat, a few chased each other around in their school uniforms. A handful of boys ran football routes in the limited space. I was tense.

Three young teens—a boy and two girls—were walking along the sidewalk across the street. One of my own students beckoned them over. Apparently, not everyone got along. I learned later that the young man was in a rival gang and had insulted other students’ deceased relatives on social media. The boys who had been playing football now stood sentinel a few yards back, motionless.

Another of my students encouraged our visitors to move along. The young man shot back, “Who’s going to make me?” One of his female acquaintances spit on my student, and pandemonium broke out. Five administrators ran out to the playground as half of my students started climbing the fence while the rest tried to hold their friends back. They knew, as I did, that a fight would probably lead to injuries and even arrests.

Because of the neighborhood my students lived in, they could not be children for even 10 minutes. They couldn’t have a few moments of blissful, carefree play that so many others take for granted.

In my years teaching the same grade at an affluent private school, we always spent extra time outside the last week of school. It made my English teacher’s heart go pitter-pat to see students rocking on a swing with Animal Farm in hand or whispering the passages together in circles at the top of the slide. Always, with a few minutes left, I let them play tag. Soon-to-be high schoolers, they let loose their remaining childishness on the playground.

There are endless comparisons between rich schools and poor schools. Popular Hollywood movies depict urban schools in disrepair: broken desks, moldering ceilings, tattered textbooks. Students scorn their classwork. Lazy teachers watch YouTube and only intervene if the rowdiness grows to excess.

These portrayals didn’t match my experience. My private school had drafty windows. Many students there did the bare minimum to appease their parents. And while the teachers were well meaning, the hard-working ones knew which of their colleagues were duds. Conversely, my urban school had brand new books, and many of my students had the academic chops to gain admission to an Ivy League school. The teachers in the two schools were similar, the buildings were similar, the students were similar. The context around them made the difference.

One year at the urban school, in the week leading up to Christmas break, I asked one of my students if he was going to skip the last day, as many of his classmates did. He shook his head no. It was out of the question. When I asked why, his response was simple: “My neighborhood is too dangerous. I don’t like being home alone.”

This 8th grader was six foot one. A stranger might have mistaken him for a recent high school graduate. But he was still a kid, one who was scared to be home alone, and not because imaginary monsters lurked in the dark. The troublemakers he feared posed a real threat.

As a polemicist, I might be expected to end this column with a “So what? What kind of policy will solve this problem? What instructional intervention could counter these realities? What effect does a childhood spent in fight-or-flight mode do to the human body and psyche?” But I’m struggling.

We ask schools to do so much already. On top of providing basic academic instruction, they serve as community centers, day care providers, athletic trainers, food suppliers, mental health institutions, basic medical facilities, summer camps, and more. Whenever some new societal problem comes along—from single-parent households to childhood obesity—politicians and the rest of us tend to look toward schools, hoping that they’ll deal with it.

What’s more, we like to blame every societal failure on schools. Why are people rude? Because we don’t teach virtues anymore. Why is there so much debt? No one shows kids how to budget and do their taxes. Who caused the disparities in reading achievement? Know-nothing teachers, of course.

Ultimately, though, schools can only accomplish so much. More than 50 years ago, the sociologist James Coleman, in the groundbreaking Coleman Report, came to a simple conclusion: “Schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context.” Subsequent work reveals that conclusion to be vastly overstated, but it captures an important truth (see “What Matters for Student Achievement,” features, Spring 2016). Family structure, peer influence, classroom disorder, and other such factors can confound the best laid schemes of mice, men, and education technocrats.

Almost every one of my urban students wanted to graduate from high school, get a good job, and raise a stable family, but so much in their life was working against them. That context shut them off from even this simple privilege of affluence: enjoying a few minutes of carefree play on a playground.

Daniel Buck is a former English teacher, policy associate at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and author of the book What Is Wrong with Our Schools?

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

Buck, D. (2024). Privilege on the Playground. Education Next, 24(1), 87-88.

For more than a century, children in the United States have been enrolled in public schools based on where they live, and pressure to improve public education has been mainly channeled through school board elections, inter-district housing decisions, and test-based accountability. Over the past 30 years, however, charter schools, vouchers, and public-school choice programs have challenged this model. Rather than voting at the ballot box, market-based accountability allows families to vote with their feet and select the schools they prefer without moving households. In theory, this alternative also increases competition that promotes educational improvement systemwide.

How choice and competition affect the market for education depends on the characteristics of schools that families prefer. To the extent that families value school effectiveness with respect to academics, there is the potential for schooling choices and competition to lead to improved school quality along this dimension and better learning outcomes. However, if families prefer characteristics that are unrelated (or negatively related) to academic effectiveness, there is a possibility of reduced academic learning. Understanding family preferences is thus crucial in understanding the potential consequences of school-choice policies.

We study family preferences in one of the most competitive school markets ever developed in the United States: New Orleans, where virtually all district students attend a charter school. The vast majority provide transportation from anywhere in the city, and none can charge tuition. Admission is based on parental preferences expressed through a common application system. For many years, an advocacy group also published detailed school guides to inform families’ choices. Not only do parents have more freedom to choose, but they have a ready source of information and a wide variety of options to choose from.

What are the school characteristics that drive family choices, and how do family resources influence these decisions? New Orleans presents a unique opportunity to answer this, with its combination of ranked-ordered preferences within an extensive choice system with detailed data about school characteristics and common enrollment forms. We look at school characteristics such as academic outcomes and extracurricular activities, as well as practical considerations such as the school’s proximity, hours, and availability of after-school care. We report the influence of these factors in miles to illustrate the distance families would be willing to travel to enroll their child in a preferred school.

Our analysis finds that New Orleans families do indeed value academic performance, but they also value many other things at least as much. Improving a school’s performance score by one letter grade is equivalent to reducing its distance by 0.8 miles for elementary schools and 2.1 miles for high-school families. An improvement of one standard deviation in a school’s measure of value-added is equivalent to reducing distance by two miles for elementary schools and 6.4 miles for high schools.

But other factors are at least as important. Families prefer schools with more extracurricular activities, and the availability of a football or band program is especially influential in choosing high schools. Practical considerations also figure prominently. Families generally prefer schools that are close by, and we find some evidence that after-school care is important to elementary-school families. In looking at the preferences of low-income families, after-school care, distance, and extracurriculars seem especially important relative to academic factors, which has important implications for achievement gaps.

These findings confirm that New Orleans families of all income levels place substantial weight on academic quality when choosing schools, including measures of schools’ value-added to student achievement that are not available in published guides. Yet families also value a broader range of school characteristics. And low-income families face constraints on their ability to choose schools based on academic considerations alone.

A District of Choice

Two major factors sparked the growth of charter schools in New Orleans. First, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Louisiana state lawmakers passed a series of laws allowing charter schools and creating the state Recovery School District to turn around low-performing schools. Then, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans, with severe flooding that claimed 1,800 lives, caused more than $160 billion in damage, and displaced 250,000 people.

The state quickly took over almost all public schools. These schools were gradually turned over to charter-school organizations, while attendance zones were abolished. During the period of our study, New Orleans Public Schools comprised about 75 charter elementary, middle, and high schools, which were authorized and operated by a diverse group of charter-management organizations, nonprofits, and state and local agencies. More recently, governing authority has shifted back to the locally elected board under an unusual arrangement that has largely left the reforms in place.

Any student living in Orleans Parish is eligible to attend any of these schools under the district’s all-charter, open-enrollment system. However, families are not guaranteed their first choice. Instead, since 2012, they have been required to fill out a common school-enrollment form and rank their chosen schools in order of preference.

In 2008, local advocates launched the New Orleans Parents’ Guide to Public Schools in order to provide detailed information about this new landscape, as part of a larger effort to organize local parents in the pursuit of excellent public schools. The guide was available online and in print in schools, libraries, post offices, and other public locations throughout the city. It described schools’ locations, offerings, hours, and characteristics based on what parents and community members expressed as most important to them. Over time, it grew to include more than 100 unique attributes for each school.

This detailed information forms the basis of our analysis, which aims to identify the academic and non-academic characteristics that families value when choosing schools. We narrowed the set of characteristics to consider based on discussions with local education stakeholders, survey evidence about New Orleans parent preferences from the Cowen Institute at Tulane University, and prior research about parental preferences. Our main characteristics of focus include school-performance scores, which are calculated by the Louisiana Department of Education based on student achievement and expressed as numbers or letter grades; estimates of each school’s value-added to student achievement, which we calculate using standard methods (and are not published in Parents’ Guide); the distance between each school and the family’s home address; the availability of football, band, and other extracurricular activities; and whether a school offers extended school days, weekend classes, and after-school care.

Our analysis also includes several other characteristics that local parents and advocates indicated would be important to New Orleans families. We use the Parents’ Guide to identify whether a school is “in flux,” meaning that it has recently moved locations or would be moving soon. This is relevant for understanding the role of distance, as well as a general desire for certainty and stability. Relatedly, we also include an indicator for a “legacy” school, which denotes whether a school’s name was in use prior to Katrina. Parents and grandparents may prefer to enroll a child in the school that they themselves attended so their child or grandchild could potentially play on the same sports team. While not part of the Parents’ Guide, we worked with local officials to identify schools that would meet this criterion. We also created a variable to capture the relative quality of a school building. This can vary considerably, due to building ages, storm damage, and whether a building was part of a major school construction and renovation initiative following Katrina.

We include this large number of factors because the characteristics of schools are correlated with each other. Therefore, if an important factor were excluded, it would distort our estimates of parent preferences for the characteristics we included. We did, however, have to exclude two potentially important factors: data on school safety, which were not available; and student demographics, because the city’s publicly funded schools have little variation on these measures. While the precise shares can vary from year to year, at least 80 percent of city students are Black, and a similar share are from low-income households.

Data and Method

We focus on the 2013–14 school year, which was the second year that the common school-enrollment form was in use. The form, then called OneApp, allowed families to rank up to eight schools in order of preference. Our sample includes roughly 31,000 students in 2013, which is about two-thirds of the district’s total enrollment of about 45,000. The OneApp process that year excluded the 19 schools run directly by the Orleans Parish School Board, including the city’s selective-admissions schools, which means that the average academic achievement of students in this analysis is below the city average.

We first look at the characteristics of the schools in our sample, which we separate into two groups: elementary schools, which serve some combination of grades K–8, and high schools, which serve the upper grades. Most of our school characteristics comes from the Parents’ Guide.

The average New Orleans elementary school offers about three different sports and six extracurricular programs and has a school performance score of 78.7, which is below the state average of 93.9. Nearly 70 percent of elementary schools have an extended school day, 24 percent offer free aftercare, and 20 percent offer paid aftercare. The average high school has a school performance score of 80 and offers six sports and seven extracurriculars. Nearly 90 percent of high schools offer band and football, and only one school offers one without the other (band, but not football). Two-thirds of high schools are “legacy” schools, with names the same as or similar to schools that existed before Katrina.

These characteristics show considerable variation in program offerings between schools, which is key to our study. If all the schools had the same offerings, then parent rankings would tell us little about what they prefer. Also critical is that we have data on parents’ rankings of schools. We therefore can combine these data and study the relationship between the rankings and each school characteristic, accounting for the other characteristics at the same time. This includes both the weight families place on academic and nonacademic factors and how practical considerations influence their choices.

We begin by reporting average preferences across all families choosing among elementary schools and among high schools, and then look for any differences in preferences based on family income. To quantify our findings, we take advantage of a consistent finding in research on school choice in New Orleans and elsewhere: all else being equal, families strongly prefer a school that is close to their home. We first measure the extent to which proximity to school influences the choices of families in our sample. We then express our findings for other school characteristics in terms of relative distance from home to school.

Results

New Orleans families have a clear preference for schools with stronger academic performance. For families choosing elementary schools, a one-letter-grade improvement in a school-performance score is equivalent to reducing distance to school by 0.8 miles (see Figure 1). Differences in school-performance scores among highly rated schools appear to matter more for family choices than similar differences among schools with low scores. That is, earning an A grade from the state rather than a B has more influence on how families rank a school than earning an D rather than a F.

Value-added to student achievement is also positively related to elementary-school rankings, even after controlling for the school-performance scores assigned by the state. For elementary schools, increasing school value-added by one standard deviation is equivalent to reducing distance by two miles. Apparently, families have access to and are influenced by information on schools’ academic quality beyond what is published in the Parents’ Guide.

The academic school characteristics also play a large role in shaping family preferences about high schools, with measures of academic performance again playing a leading role. A one-letter-grade improvement in school-performance score is equivalent to reducing distance to school by 2.1 miles, and improving value-added by one standard deviation is equivalent to a school being 6.4 miles closer to home (see Figure 2).

In addition to a general preference for schools that are close by, we find that families are more likely to assign a high ranking to the specific elementary or high school that is nearest to their home. This suggests that some families view the nearest school as the default choice, even when there is a viable option only slightly farther away.

After-school care is another practical consideration that is important to elementary school families. The availability of a free after-school program is equivalent to reducing distance by about 0.8 miles, and a paid program is equivalent to a 0.7-mile reduction. In addition, we find that extended school days and weekend sessions have slightly negative effects on rankings. The seeming conflict between these results may be because after-school care is specifically designed to help parents work; extended school days are not.

The role of extracurriculars has also received relatively little attention in prior research. Football and band, for example, are particularly popular in New Orleans, so it is not surprising that families prefer high schools with these programs. Having either band or football is equivalent to reducing distance by two miles. However, the total number of sports and other extracurricular programs have negligible effects, and the presence of other music programs in addition to band are associated with a school’s being 2.5 miles further away. Families seem to pay little attention to extracurricular programs outside of football and band in high school.

Families also appear to value high schools with a long tradition or “legacy” in the city, dating to the pre-Katrina years, which is equivalent to a reduction in distance of 4.8 miles. This could be because families want to continue traditions, sending children to the schools that parents or other family members attended. Alternatively, this could reflect established reputations; although the schools now have new operators in the post-Katrina period, families may perceive that having the same name means that it has programs and qualities similar to prior years. The fact that legacy status seems especially important in high school might be because adults in New Orleans tend to identify themselves by the high school they attended.

Fewer families choose elementary schools that are “in flux,” although the role of this factor, equivalent to 0.2 additional travel miles, seems small in comparison to other school characteristics. While attending school in a newer building would seem appealing, the estimates of the role of new and refurbished school buildings are erratic for both elementary and high schools, perhaps because many “in flux” schools also are in new buildings.

Differences by Family Income

Prior research has suggested that low-income families often place relatively little emphasis on academic quality in their schooling choices, and several theories take a deficit perspective on the topic. Some studies have focused on a lack of information among low-income groups, while others even suggest that groups with lower test scores might prefer schools where other students’ academic performance is similarly low.

We explore an alternative explanation for why researchers may see lower-income families choosing schools of lower academic quality. Even among families with the same schooling preferences, there are reasons to expect lower-income families to place less emphasis on academics in their choices due to resource constraints. Any financial expenditures involved in schooling choices (e.g., childcare and transportation) yield proportionately greater losses in personal well-being for low-income families. Compounding this effect, some of the family resources that are necessary for education are also important for other household purposes. In particular, lower-income families are less likely to own automobiles that are used for many purposes, and the absence of a car increases the marginal cost to families of sending their children to schools further away.

To better understand how these income-related constraints play out in practice, we divide families into three groups based on the median income in their immediate neighborhood. Our data do not include families’ household incomes, so these are based on Census median block group incomes from the 2007–2011 American Community Survey. The simple average of these median incomes is $16,174 in the lowest group, $28,461 in the middle group, $48,337 in the highest.

In the case of elementary schools, we find that the lowest-income families express somewhat weaker demand than the highest-income families for both school performance scores and value-added. School characteristics related to income constraints also seem to affect their choices more: Low-income families rank schools with free after-school care, extended days, and weekend classes higher than higher-income families. The lowest-income families also have weaker preferences than higher-income groups for paid after-school care, presumably because they cannot afford to pay for it.

The patterns differ somewhat in high school. Compared to the highest-income families, families in the two lower-income groups actually place greater importance on school value-added. Estimates of the influence of school-performance scores are similar across all three groups. Football and band are more important to lower-income families, as is the availability of other sports programs, but at the high school level this preference does not lead them to place less emphasis on academic quality.

In short, our results for elementary schools generally align with those of prior studies that have found weaker preferences for academic quality among lower-income families. However, our analysis points to a different explanation—one that is related to income itself and the way in which schooling choices intersect with household budgets. This role for cost factors reinforces the importance of considering a wide range of school characteristics when studying family preferences.

A Question of Competition

Identifying how families view and rank school characteristics is a difficult task. We rarely have data on how families rank schools in real choice settings, and even when we do, we see little variation about the schools they are choosing among and little information about those options. New Orleans’s school-choice market and efforts to help parents make informed choices enable us to provide unique insights into what school characteristics drive parental choices and how family income influences family preferences. We show that, in addition to academic factors, practical considerations such as the availability of after-school care are also important to families—especially those from low-income neighborhoods. And while academic performance is important to families across grade levels and income groups, extracurriculars and especially football and band programs are highly valued overall and are particularly important considerations for the lowest-income families. This, too, could be related to cost, as wealthier families may be able to afford these experiences through other paid organizations if they are not offered by their school.

Our findings have important implications for school-choice policies, whose ultimate effects on educational quality will depend on what families value in schools. Even when schools do compete, it is not based solely on academics. When parents choose a school, they consider a wide range of characteristics as well as logistical factors related to their household budgets. To attract families—and particularly lower-income families—school leaders may have to reallocate resources away from academics to pay for after-school care and other nonacademic services, for example. This could help explain why studies of school-choice programs to date find only modest effects of competition on student test scores.

The share of U.S. families with access to school-choice programs has expanded rapidly in recent years, with about 7.5 percent of students nationwide attending charter schools and nearly 311,000 using publicly funded vouchers to attend a private school. More than a dozen states introduced legislation to enact or expand school-choice programs in the last year. While the ultimate impact of these efforts on educational quality is not yet clear, our findings indicate that the context of family choices is complex and includes more than just academic quality. Policymakers seeking to harness the power of competition to drive improvements in academic achievement would do well to keep this complexity in mind.

Douglas N. Harris is professor of economics at Tulane University and Matthew F. Larsen is associate professor of economics at Lafayette College.

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

Harris, D.N., and Larsen, M.F. (2024). Going-to-School Shopping: Investigating family preferences in New Orleans. Education Next, 24(1), 62-69.

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.

Questions surrounding the application of Title IX to transgender students have been roiling education politics for nearly 10 years. In 2016, the Obama administration tried to settle one aspect of the issue without public input by declaring in a Dear Colleague Letter that transgender students must be able to use bathrooms matching their gender identity. That effort only generated more conflict and was quickly rescinded under President Trump. The Biden administration not only essentially reinstated the Obama administration’s rule, which is being challenged in court, but also is trying to expand its reach via proposed guidelines on transgender participation in athletics. While its approach on the latter is more cautious and more open to public input, it is unlikely to be any more successful.

In April 2023, the U.S. Department of Education proposed a rule that seems designed to satisfy no one and is sure to generate litigation. Instead of announcing via a Dear Colleague Letter that it would impose its standards by fiat, as the agency has often done, it offered a brief opportunity of 30 days for members of the public to comment. And comment they did, with more than 132,000 statements pouring in. The agency is expected to release a revised rule soon, but the volume of comments and the shifting political landscape are likely slowing the process.

The proposed rule says that “policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity” but “that in some instances, particularly in competitive high school and college athletic environments, some schools may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation.” In short, you cannot exclude transgender athletes except when you can.

So, when can you limit transgender students’ participation? The proposed rule says that “one-size-fits-all policies that categorically ban transgender students” violate Title IX but appears to offer a sliding scale: restrictions in elementary school “would be particularly difficult to justify” but may be permissible in high schools and colleges. Schools, the administration conceded, need “flexibility to develop team eligibility criteria that serve important educational objectives, such as ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” Beyond that it does not offer any real guidance. However, saying that fairness or safety could justify restricting access concedes that biological sex does in fact matter for athletic performance.

That concession has angered transgender advocates who say that excluding transgender athletes for any reason is unacceptable discrimination. Additionally, many have claimed that being biologically male does not confer any demonstrable athletic benefits. In the end, it is not surprising that the Biden administration did not accept that claim, since almost all conflicts about the fairness of transgender sports participation stem from biological males competing in female athletics.

Another often-raised concern is that women and girls playing contact sports face safety risks if they must compete against biological males who have transitioned. And questions about biological females competing in male sports seem to center around their safety rather than the safety of the other athletes.

Beyond safety, of course, there is the question of whether transgender participation deprives females of other opportunities. If transgender athletes consistently outperform other athletes, biological females could be denied the chance to win scholarships or succeed in athletic events. That is, in fact, the claim of four female high school athletes in Connecticut who have challenged their state’s policy of allowing transgender athletes to compete in the category matching their self-identified gender. After being dismissed for lack of standing, that case is now under review by the entire Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Biden administration proposed rule also skirts a whole host of other thorny issues, such as whether religious schools that participate in state athletic leagues could be excluded because they have religious objections to having their students play against transgender athletes. As the regulation is written, they would presumably have to compete against teams with transgender athletes or forfeit the opportunity to play in state-sanctioned leagues. The rule would also seem to compel females in all schools to share locker rooms with athletes with male reproductive anatomy.

The proposed rule drew a range of reactions, including complete disapproval from hardliners on both sides of the issue—those who want states to require students to compete based on their biological sex and those who want no restrictions on the ability of students to compete in the sex category they identify with.

Given the controversy surrounding the proposed rule—and Congressional disinterest in weighing in—it’s not hard to imagine the issue being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. While one might expect the conservative majority to be unsympathetic to mandating transgender participation in female sports, Justice Neil Gorsuch did write the opinion in 2020’s Bostock v. Clayton County, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, finding that the word “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also protected workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Since Title IX was written in 1972, also long before anyone could have imagined its application to transgender students, the Bostock ruling would seem to imply that sex should be interpreted the same under both laws. But the court might also declare that gender identity in athletic competition raises entirely different questions than in employment.

In fact, the proposed rule provides a roadmap for the court to do this. By admitting that biology does in fact matter for safety and fairness, the rule gives school districts extraordinary latitude to create regulations that would exclude transgender athletes. That is why it is so vague about what should guide the schools. And if a school district decides that it wants transgender students to participate in the category matching their identity, parents who oppose such a policy would have a powerful tool to fight back politically and legally. They might point to evidence from studies, such as one published in the journal Sports Medicine, showing that “the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed.” Thus, transgender female athletes would almost inevitably have a competitive advantage in contact and non-contact sports relying on strength and speed, while in contact sports there would also be safety concerns. Those issues largely do not arise under Title VII.

However, the politics surrounding the issue are also changing. The fact that the Biden administration did not offer a categorical rule like Obama’s did and allowed public comments indicates more than a little uneasiness, which could presage a further retreat. A recent Gallup poll found that the percentage of Americans who think that students should play on teams that match their biological sex has risen to 69 percent today from 62 percent in 2021 and that only a minority of Democrats—47 percent—think that transgender students should be able to play on teams that match their gender identity. The looming presidential election could thus also be influencing the administration’s delay. Ultimately, the Supreme Court might decide the matter—that is, unless politics decides it first.

Joshua Dunn is executive director of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Institute of American Civics at the Howard H. Baker

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

Dunn, J. (2024). Splitting the Baby Worked for Solomon, but It Won’t for Biden. Education Next, 24(1), 6-7.

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.