At Commentary's blog, Contentions, Peter Wehner directs readers to a new study (from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values) that is, according to Wehner, ?both somewhat encouraging and quite alarming.? Encouraging mainly because for the 30 percent of American adults who have a bachelor's degree, ?marriage is stable and appears to be getting stronger?; alarming because marriage remains ?in trouble? among the poor and also in ?Middle America,? a group defined as the 58 percent of Americans who have obtained a high school diploma but not graduated from a four-year college. Here's Wehner:
Among this cohort, rates of nonmarital childbearing and divorce are rising, and marital happiness is falling. If this retreat from marriage among moderately educated citizens continues, the report argues, ?then it is likely that we will witness the emergence of a new society? ? one in which ?for a substantial share of the United States, economic mobility will be out of reach, their children's life chances will diminish, and large numbers of young men will live apart from the civilizing power of married life.?
If the study is right and if marriage?and, thus, more-stable, two-parent families?are deteriorating in such a large portion of the American middle class, no doubt schools will soon feel the ramifications.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow