This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Moynihan Report. The great tootling racket now bursting your eardrums is the trumpet blast of memorials, think-pieces, and reflections commemorating the occasion.
The report, which kicked up a generations-long debate on race and culture far afield from its technocratic origins, primarily concerned itself with the vanishing of two-parent families in the black community. That phenomenon is also the subject of this counterintuitive Education Next study. Its authors, however, have no need to limit their focus on a particular racial category, since single parenthood is now commonplace across multiple demographics. The proportion of white children raised by a single parent today (22 percent) is precisely the same as for black children in 1965. Meanwhile, the proportion of black children living in the same circumstances has continued to rise astonishingly, to 55 percent.
Contriving to measure the educational influence of these developments, the study analyzes data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a broad-ranging sample of roughly 6,000 children who came of age between the late-1970s and the late-2000s. Their conclusion is both surprising and noteworthy: Measured against a number of other factors, including the age of the mother at the time of birth, number of siblings, and the mother’s educational attainment, the effects of having only one parent are by no means the most consequential.
Over the course of three decades, children who spent 1.2 years with a single parent between the ages of fourteen and sixteen received about a quarter of a year less schooling than their peers and were 5 percent less likely to graduate college by age twenty-four. That’s certainly less than ideal, but not exactly a blight of pathology. By comparison, increasing the mother’s level of education by one standard deviation could increase the child’s likelihood of college graduation by 14 percent—nearly triple the impact. What’s more, nearly the entire correlation between family structure and educational achievement is negated when adjusted for family income.
In other words, living in a one-parent family isn’t so much the problem as the economic hardship that often suffuses that experience. (It’s hard to earn a middle class living when you have to play both breadwinner and caretaker all by yourself.) While that sounds like good news, the authors warn that things may be changing; since the time of the Moynihan Report, the educational gap between kids in one- and two-parent families has grown somewhat. That’s a shift that bears careful observation. In the meantime, the rest of us can find a government study of newer vintage to obsess over.
SOURCE: Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest, Greg J. Duncan, and Ariel Kalil, “One-Parent Students Leave School Earlier,” Education Next Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring 2015).
