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. We are reprinting it here in two installments; the first was published in last week’s Education Gadfly Weekly.
Last week, I argued that single parenthood is a major impediment to upward mobility for low-income youth, especially when parenthood starts in one’s teens or early twenties. Furthermore, I concluded that the most important “intervention” is hope: a realistic plan for a life trajectory that is more compelling than early motherhood and fatherhood. This means, among other things, having meaningful opportunities for higher education and interesting, decently paid work. How, then, can schools boost the education and employment prospects of disadvantaged children?
One way is to get many more young people—especially those from challenging backgrounds—“to and through” four-year college degrees. This well-meaning strategy is the primary focus of education reform. There’s little doubt that, when it’s successful, this will encourage many more young people to delay childbearing, which increases their odds of getting married before starting a family.
But it need not be our only strategy for helping adolescents find their way to a rewarding, middle class career and stable family life. High-quality career and technical education (CTE) is another solid pathway to postsecondary education and remunerative and satisfying work—jobs that are worth working toward, and which can thus motivate delayed childbearing.
As scholars such as Harvard’s Robert Schwartz and Georgetown’s Anthony Carnevale have shown, “middle skills” jobs remain plentiful and pay well in the U.S. economy, accounting for roughly 30 percent of the jobs likely to be available over the next decade. These are positions that generally require a postsecondary certificate, but not a four-year degree, in fields such as health care and information technology. Employers regularly struggle to fill these roles, in large part because of America’s underdeveloped—and often ignored—technical training system. European countries such as Germany, Norway, and the Netherlands prepare between 40 and 70 percent of their young people for technical jobs by the age of twenty. Yet in the United States, we remain obsessed with the four-year college degree; fewer students are concentrating in career and technical education at the high school level in America than they were twenty years ago.
That’s a huge lost opportunity, as gold-standard studies of career academy programs have shown. In this model, students in grades 9–12 enroll in “smaller learning communities,” generally within large comprehensive high schools, which combine academic and technical training. The academies are organized around career clusters and partner directly with local employers. A randomized evaluation by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) found significant positive outcomes for academies’ participants, most of whom were low-income, African American, and/or Hispanic. Among the program’s long-term benefits—which were strongest for minority men—were higher earnings, greater hours worked, and stronger attachment to the labor market.
Perhaps most intriguingly, MDRC found that the young men who years earlier had graduated from a career academy were 33 percent more likely to be married and living with their spouse than their peers in a control group. Whether that was because the graduates developed skills that helped them form more stable relationships or became more “marriageable” because of their stronger career prospects, the lesson is clear: Work works, as does high-quality CTE.
Of course, it’s not as simple as creating more career academies. Students entering these programs must possess strong math, reading, and writing skills. They also need to be well-behaved and willing to work hard. That means that our elementary and middle schools need to help many more students get academically and socially ready for rigorous programs in high school. It’s not any easier to prepare students for great CTE programs than it is to prepare them for great college-prep programs. Thus the larger education reform agenda—higher standards, greater accountability, stronger teachers, and solid curricula, especially in grades pre-K–8—remains essential.
Schools can also help their students develop “performance character”—drive and prudence in particular. Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves explains why these attributes are so essential:
People with drive are able to stick with a task, even when it gets boring or difficult; they work hard and don’t leave a job unfinished. Drive includes not just the ability to work hard (industriousness) but also the ability to overcome setbacks and to keep going (resilience).
Prudent people are able to defer gratification and plan for the future; they can make sacrifices today in order to ensure a better tomorrow. The better developed a person’s character strength of prudence, the less they suffer from what economists call “present bias,” the tendency to underweight future utility. They can both plan for the future and exert self-control in the moment to reach their long-term goals.
Reeves and others point to evidence indicating the importance of drive. For example, the fact that students’ high school grade-point averages predict college completion better than SAT scores may be one indication that hard work and resilience pay off even more than talent. The evidence for “prudence” is even stronger, ranging from Walter Mischel’s work on delayed gratification to Angela Duckworth’s findings about the importance of grit and self-control for long-term success.
It stands to reason that young people with the drive to work hard at school and on the job, as well as the prudence to delay childbirth—either by eschewing sex or by making good birth control decisions—are going to be more likely to climb the ladder to upward mobility, and potentially to marry.
So how can schools teach these skills and habits? The old fashioned way is, of course, through religion. Catholic schools in particular have long been singled out by social scientists for their strong results in terms of graduation and college-going rates. These strong long-term outcomes—which tend to be much more significant than any short-term test score gains—likely reflect Catholic schools’ focus on discipline and character as much as their excellent academics. In the early 1980s, James Coleman and his colleagues found that Catholic school students were significantly more likely to report that their schools’ approach to discipline was “excellent or good” than their public school peers. Later research by Anthony Bryk confirmed this view with Catholic school administrators, who were much less likely to report student behavior problems than their public school colleagues.
A 2012 study by David Figlio and Jens Ludwig found that Catholic high school students were less likely to participate in risky behaviors, including teen sexual activity, arrests, and the use of cocaine. They speculated why this might be so. One possibility is the most obvious: Catholic schools put the fear of God into their students. Religious instruction “could affect students’ ‘tastes’ for misbehavior, or increase the perceived costs of misbehavior by defining a number of activities as sins that have eternal consequences.” And of course, positive peer pressure plays a role—by “exposing them to more pro-social peer groups,” particularly by selecting out and/or expelling students more likely to engage in risky behaviors.
The secular, New Age way to teach character is best illustrated by KIPP, which has placed character education at the heart of its “no excuses” ethos. As made famous by Paul Tough’s bestselling book How Children Succeed, many KIPP schools use a “character growth card” to help teachers, students, and parents work together to develop specific character strengths, such as grit, optimism, and curiosity. Some KIPP schools are incorporating mindfulness training and even yoga to help their students build self-control so they can make better choices toward their long-term success.
Don’t Forget the Extracurriculars
There’s one more way schools can help students develop important character strengths while keeping them off the streets: provide an excellent suite of extracurricular offerings. This might be one secret to Catholic schools’ success; Figlio and Ludwig report that students in Catholic schools “spend more time on homework and extracurricular activities than those in public schools….Private schools may thus reduce delinquency if only because of an ‘incapacitation effect’—teens who are doing homework or running track are not out looking for trouble.”
Extracurricular activities, including athletics, appear to be important for public school students, too; as June Kronholz reported in Education Next, studies have long found that disadvantaged students who participate in extracurriculars are less likely to drop out of high school, use tobacco or alcohol, or get pregnant, and are more likely to score well on tests, attend college, and complete college. Granted, it’s hard to tease out the selection bias of these studies; it’s tough to know whether participating in these activities caused teenagers to make better choices or whether teenagers who made good life choices also chose to participate in sports and other extracurriculars.
But as Kronholz explains, some studies attempt to correct for such bias and still find compelling outcomes. For instance, research by Columbia University scientist Margo Gardner examined the issue using “propensity scoring,” finding that the odds of attending college were almost twice as high for students who participated in school-related activities for at least two years; such students were also dramatically more likely to complete college and significantly more likely to vote as adults.
It is therefore counterproductive, if not tragic, that schools serving high concentrations of poor students are less likely to offer extracurricular activities. In an innovative 2009 study, researchers Elizabeth Stearns and Elizabeth J. Glennie at the University of North Carolina scoured yearbooks and state administrative data to determine the number of activities offered, and the percentage of students participating, in each high school in North Carolina. High-poverty schools offered fewer activities and showed lower participation rates than their low-poverty peers. It’s hard to know whether that’s due to lack of funding or an obsession with more academic, college-oriented pursuits, but it’s clearly a lost opportunity that could and should be remedied.
Where There Is Hope
So maybe schools should try to address America’s marriage crisis. At the very least, they can help to instill a sense of hope and optimism in their students—by getting them ready for college and/or a satisfying career, by embracing high-quality technical education, and by developing in them character traits like drive and prudence, both via classroom instruction and through extracurricular activities. All of these actions, done well, are almost certain to help push back the average age of childbearing, which will help the next generation do better academically and economically.
Not all of these actions are easy to implement within our traditional public school system, though, which clearly cannot teach religion but also struggles to enforce high expectations around student behavior. School choice, then, must be an important part of this strategy because it allows parents and their children to opt into schools, including religious schools, that share their values. Importantly, school choice also avoids the specter of “the system” tracking certain students into certain programs (like technical training). A much better approach is to allow students and families to select schools and programs that they themselves find compelling.
But will these steps actually lead to a renaissance in marriage? That’s harder to know, and the honest answer is “maybe at the margins.” We may have a better shot at turning around our marriage trends if young people are waiting longer to have children, picking up important skills and work experiences along the way. And those individuals will, on average, be better parents than if they had children as teenagers or early twenty-somethings, with few skills under their belts or job prospects on their horizons.
Fixing our marriage problem isn’t a job for schools alone, of course. If we’re serious about getting more people to tie the knot, we’ll also tackle prison reform (to help make more men “marriageable”), wage supports (ditto), and tax reform (to remove marriage penalties). But in the meantime, our schools can help give their graduates a reason to wait to become parents—and possibly put them on a path to saying “I do.”
photo credit: World Bank via Flickr
