Broken Families and School Performance
By George F. Will
With an energy that, were he a third-grader, would earn him a megadose
of Ritalin, President Bush this week will hopscotch from Ohio to
Massachusetts to New Hampshire to Constitution Hall here for ceremonies
celebrating the No Child Left Behind Act. The movable feast will wildly
exaggerate the act's importance to primary and secondary education.
Its most important provisions are prerequisites for meaningful school
choice, eventually. Information, generated by testing, is necessary for
a market in which parents can, as comparison shoppers, hold schools
accountable. Under the act, all children will be tested in math and
reading every year from third through eighth grades. Students in schools that
fail egregiously and protractedly will be empowered to choose other
schools -- but only other <em>public</em> schools <em>in the same school
district</em>. Because failing schools frequently are in failing
districts, the act's "choice" provisions are derisory.
Federal education legislation is rarely edifying. In 1994 the Senate,
enacting the "Goals 2000" education bill, issued, as is its wont,
imperious commands to the future. Only two goals were quantifiable: By 2000,
America's high-school graduation rate would be "at least 90 percent"
and students "would be first in the world in mathematics and science
achievement." Sen. Pat Moynihan, comparing these goals to Soviet grain
production quotas, said: "That will not happen."
And of course it did not. In 2000 the graduation rate was about 75
percent, a figure inflated by "social promotions." The widely cited 86
percent figure included former high school students who pass "equivalency
examinations," which are not equivalent to graduating from high school.
American students ranked 19th among 38 surveyed nations in mathematics
(right below Latvia) and 18th in science (right below Bulgaria).
In 2000 the top five states in average SAT scores (with their ranking
among the states and the District of Columbia in per-pupil spending)
were:
1. North Dakota (41)
2. Iowa (25)
3. Wisconsin (10)
4. Minnesota (16)
5. South Dakota (48)
The bottom five were:
47. Texas (35)
48. North Carolina (38)
49. District of Columbia (4)
50. Georgia (31)
51. South Carolina (36)
Moynihan, being droll in order to be didactic, concluded that the best
predictor of a school's performance must be its proximity to the
Canadian border. He knew that ever since the baby boom generation began
moving through the school system like a pig through a python, policymakers
have assumed that schools' cognitive outputs would vary directly with
financial inputs to the schools. He also knew that by 1966 an ambitious
government study had reached a conclusion so discomfiting the government
considered not releasing it: "Schools are remarkably similar in the
effect they have on the achievement of their pupils when the socioeconomic
background of the students is taken into account."
Meaning: The crucial predictor of a school's performance is the quality
of the children's families. Granted, many schools are heroic exceptions
to this rule. Nevertheless, it is the rule.
A decade ago Paul Barton, then with the Educational Testing Service,
estimated that about 90 percent of the difference among the average
proficiency of the various states' schools could be explained by five
factors: number of days absent from school, number of hours spent watching
television, number of pages read for homework, quantity and quality of
reading material in the home and the presence of two parents in the home.
That fifth factor is supremely important, not least because it is apt
decisively to influence the other four. When Barton wrote his study,
"America's Smallest School: The Family," North Dakota ranked first in math
scores and second in the percentage of children in two-parent families.
The District of Columbia ranked next to last in math scores and last in
the family composition scale.
Family decomposition should dampen this week's self-congratulatory
focus on the latest education legislation. In 1958 the percentage of
children born to unmarried women was 5; in 1969, 10; in 1980, 18; in 1999,
33. The especially chilling number: In 1999 almost half (48.4 percent) of
all children born to women ages 20 to 24 -- women of all races and
ethnicities -- were born out of wedlock.
The importance of that for American education is in the 9/91 factor:
Between birth and their 19th birthdays, American children spend 9 percent
of their time in school, 91 percent elsewhere. The fate of American
education is being shaped not by legislative acts but by the fact that,
increasingly, "elsewhere" is not in an intact family.
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