The Education Gadfly Weekly

This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family that marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 release of the Moynihan Report.

This may seem like a ridiculous question: How can schools possibly persuade more adults to marry—and not have children out of wedlock? Fifty years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan himself decided it was inadvisable to offer solutions to problems afflicting minority families. Since then, our familial challenges have only grown deeper and wider, with four in ten American babies now born to unwed mothers. That includes a majority of all children born to women in their twenties and almost one-third of white babies. There are no obvious or easy prescriptions for reversing these trends.

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

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

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

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

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

“Drifting” into Parenthood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next week, we’ll explore what schools can do to boost those career prospects for young men and women alike. 

I’ve always liked Fridays as much as the next guy, but this year I especially like them. The reason is that every Friday, my students and I read an obituary together. If that sounds morbid, let me tell you what I tell the kids: An obituary is the story of a life; death is just the detail that gets it printed.

How do I select the weekly life story we read? I don’t. I have other people do it for me. I’ve been asking folks around town—elected officials, businesspeople, civic leaders, colleagues, and friends—this question: If you could pick one person from the past whom you wish kids would learn about in school, who would it be?

With their introductions, we’ve made the acquaintance of Phyllis Jen, a beloved family doctor, Ruth Batson, a civil rights activist who helped desegregate our schools, and Tom White, a businessman who gave away his riches to the poor. In upcoming weeks, we’ll be reading about a firefighter, a judge, and a rowing coach. And I’ve got lots more in my pile, all marvelously interesting—and inspiring. It’s embarrassing to admit that I’d never heard of most of these people before, but I’m glad to have finally met them. And I’m very pleased to introduce them to my students.

For a teacher, obituaries are useful classroom texts. They offer short history lessons, excellent vocabulary (for example, “ephemeral” and “posterity”), and align well with the new Common Core standards. But the greatest value of the obituaries we read is this: They’re fine examples of how to live. We’re not merely reading life stories, we’re learning about lives worthy of emulation. By the end of the year, my students and I will have met dozens of excellent role models.

Susan Cain, author of the book Quiet, observes that instruction in America used to promote a culture of character in which “what was important was the good deeds that you performed when nobody was looking.” Now, she believes, we’ve developed a culture of personality in which… well, I don’t know who the next celebrity will be, but I’ll bet my next paycheck whoever it is won’t have achieved fame by quietly performing good deeds.

Too often, those who deserve our admiration—and our emulation—remain unsung. It doesn’t have to be this way. Obituaries provide character education with real characters. These good men and women were part of our communities, and if you ask to be introduced, you can meet them. Their obituaries present life stories of those who lived well, who did good deeds, and who offer virtuous examples to follow. By making the passed present, we don’t just honor these fine citizens. We do our civic duty.

Peter Sipe is a sixth-grade teacher at Boston Collegiate Charter School. See his previous Flypaper editorials, "At ed schools, a low degree of difficulty" and "How to challenge voracious young readers."

Editor's note: This post originally appeared in a slightly different form in the Boston Herald.

• Though House of Cards returned magnificently to form last weekend, ESEA doesn’t look like it’s headed for a similar renewal any time soon: Friday’s expected House vote on the Student Success Act went up in a puff of smoke and a fit of Mephistophelean laughter from the spirit of Frank Underwood. The Republican bill suffered somewhat from the mad rush to keep the lights on at the Department of Homeland Security, which took most of the air out of the chamber. Ideology played a role, too—after the Heritage Foundation and Club for Growth came out strongly against proposal, conservative votes were hard to find. Let’s just hope members of the leadership can find some common ground and pass a bill soon, without resorting to a string of murders and expository narration.
• When thinking about ways to improve educational outcomes, it’s natural to start from the bottom and move up. We start with the kids themselves, making sure they begin their schooling with the literacy and socialization tools they need to excel; then we focus our attention on teacher quality, the gradual improvement of which demands better ed programs and sensible forms of evaluation; we might even ponder our opaque system of cultivating principals and superintendents. But how often do we discuss the highest level of local education leadership, the school board? That’s what Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim do in their new book, profiled briefly by the Wall Street Journal. The two scholars argue that these ubiquitous small-scale democracies have amassed powers and resources far too grand for their purpose, and the only solution is to scale them back. It’s a topic Fordham’s investigated before, and one that demands greater consideration.
• If you want to know what the Republican presidential contenders have to say about education, they’re happy to tell you—often with the help of a megaphone (and, when the subject turns to Common Core, a wink and a nod). But the Democratic slate is much less transparent, mostly because there is no Democratic slate. The once and future frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, is maintaining a sphinxlike inscrutability on the issue that Education Week’s Alyson Klein has helpfully begun to penetrate in a terrific profile. Going back to her days as the first lady of Arkansas, Klein reveals, Clinton has championed standards, bashed merit pay, proposed universal pre-K, and stated her firm support for Mom and apple pie. The piece is a useful guide to where she may end up as a candidate…if she ever declares.
• The New York Times has a dispiriting look at the New Jersey parents instructing their kids to sit out the new PARCC exams this week. If opposition to the new, more rigorous assessments is as strong there as it is across the river in New York, tens of thousands of children could avoid participating. The cost of that avoidance—though you wouldn’t know it from the frenzied Facebook groups and union-sponsored television advertisements arrayed against PARCC and Common Core—is that the state will be deprived of vital information on how its schools are performing and whether its students are learning. Anyone telling their kids to skip school obligations has actually “opted out” of a responsible way to lodge their complaints.

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).

There is no shortage of theories to explain how learning works and how teachers, as purveyors of knowledge, should disseminate that knowledge to students (though there tends to be a shortage of supporting evidence for any of them). In The Teaching Brain, doctoral candidate and former New York City schoolteacher Vanessa Rodriguez proposes yet another: Forget learning styles and multiple intelligences; teaching is all about “awarenesses”—of learners as individuals, of teaching practices, contexts, and interactions, and of one’s “self as a teacher.” 

She casts off older theories as antiquated, instinctive, and too student-centered, arguing that they’ve hindered educational innovation and stifled educators’ professional development. How students learn ought not be our only concern, she says. Instead, the book introduces “system-centered teaching,” which aims to infuse instruction with awareness of both how students’ brains work when they learn (“the learning brain”) and also how teachers’ brains work when they teach (the so-called “teaching brain”).

Because this is somewhat uncharted territory, a large portion of the book purports to examine the minds of expert educators. Rodriguez concludes that the brains of teachers differ considerably, which means that one-size-fits-all approaches to instruction are bound to fail. What may work for one teacher might not work for another. Instead, every educator has a unique optimal style of instruction, and each must work hard to unveil it.

Rodriguez infuses this section with an awful lot of new-age jargon, like “synergy” and “shared energy.” To find his or her best-fit teaching brain, a teacher needs to be mindful of her instruction methods, how well her students are connecting with the material, and how the former affects the latter; then she ought to experiment with various teaching styles and see what produces the best results.

Despite a concluding chapter entitled “Next Steps for Education Reform,” there are few concrete suggestions for how schools should act on this, aside from designing new frameworks for teacher evaluation and student assessment that would match Rodriguez’s more flexible approach. After so many pages devoted to finding connections between teachers and students, The Teaching Brain left me feeling rather cut off.

SOURCE: Vanessa Rodriguez and Michelle Fitzpatrick, The Teaching Brain: An Evolutionary Trait at the Heart of Education (New York, NY: The New Press, 2015).

Florida—home to Disney World, sunny skies, and bizarre crimes—is probably best known for its sizable elderly population. Yet a new report from the state’s Foundation for Excellence in Education warns that we are all Florida, or will be soon enough. Dr. Matthew Ladner, who pens the report, predicts that by 2030, the demographics in most of the country will mirror those in today’s geriatric Sunshine State. And that doesn’t bode well for our nation’s fiscal health.

Seventy-six million Baby Boomers will soon leave the workforce. Growing along with this cohort—albeit at a lesser rate—is the school-aged population. As a result, the total percentage of young and old Americans dependent on government-financed education, healthcare, and Social Security will jump from 59 percent in 2010 to 76 percent in 2030.

Fortunately, just as readers might consider panicked calls to parents begging them to reconsider retirement, the report offers some hope. The future workers of America are in school at this very moment. Providing them with an excellent education is the best step towards building a large base of wage-earning, tax-paying citizens. According to Ladner, one of the most cost-effective ways to do this is to expand school choice. Charter and private school programs would provide the necessary additional space for the growing school-age population while demanding fewer district dollars and producing higher-achieving students than their traditional public school counterparts.

More importantly, this could also improve achievement. Despite having one of the most expensive public school systems in the world, 64 percent of America’s current high schoolers can’t read proficiently. The autonomy of non-traditional schools allows for greater innovation and efficiency, Ladner insists, which are both necessary to prepare future working Americans for success in a tough, increasingly global job market. Though there are now over six thousand charter schools and thirty-three thousand private schools nationwide, the report warns that this is not enough. The year 2030 will be upon us sooner than we think. In order to rapidly improve the state of education, we must grow schools of choice much more aggressively. And we need to start now.

SOURCE: Dr. Matthew Ladner, “Turn and Face the Strain: Age Demographic Change and the Near Future of American Education,” Foundation for Excellence in Education (January 2015).