Family structure, school choice, and a mother’s regrets | Episode 1035 of The Education Gadfly Show

Well, I guess I'm trying to embark upon an effort to make it impossible to ignore the importance of family structure.

So as you said, I've been running public charter schools since 2010 in the South Bronx, right? Elementary and middle schools for a decade and now running high schools.

And, you know, being a school leader, Look, you get a bird's eye view of what's working and what's not working in schools.

You know, the importance of strong leadership, great principals, a school with an actual ethos that it has fidelity towards rigorous curriculum, content rich curriculum.

These things really matter.

But if one doesn't acknowledge, particularly in the communities we serve, the role that a kid coming from a stable family household, and that can be a single parent household for sure, but oftentimes a kid coming from a married two parent household, just based on my quote unquote lived experience as a phrase that people love to use, It's obvious that that makes a huge difference in kids outcomes.

And when I first started talking about this issue, probably back in 2016, folks said, Ian, don't go down there.

Don't don't talk about this, because if you start talking about family structure and the relationship with kids outcomes, A, You are gonna be embarrassing kids because a lot of their parents didn't, you know, they weren't raised and married to parent households.

And more importantly, you're gonna take the attention away from what really matters.

And that's the structural racism and discrimination in the system, right? And I said, but okay.

But then as I looked at the National Assessment for Educational Progress and almost every report that came out, you almost always saw disparity information reported by race, reported by economic class, reported by gender.

And those things are important to track.

So this is not an argument for eliminating other prisms through which we look at student performance.

But family structure doesn't appear anywhere.

And that's when it became clear to me that we are deliberately ignoring a very important dimension.

In fact, a dimension that might be what I call transcendent, meaning that they're black kids being raised in stable married to parent households.

that are doing great.

They're heading to college.

They're reading on grade level.

They're well adjusted.

And there are a lot of white kids being raised in unstable family structures that their education is suffering.

And of course, you have to say the caveat just because a kid is raised in a married two parent household is not a guarantee that they will be successful in the same way a kid raised in a single parent household is their life is a disaster.

There are many, many exceptions.

But the data, when it becomes available, disaggregated by family structure, really makes a difference.

So my colleague and I, Brad Wilcox, embarked upon an effort to do a report to say, does it make a difference? And we learned that the National Assessment for Educational Progress, and actually it was Checker Finn who was the first person to alert me to this fact, actually collects data on the student questionnaire every two years on NAEP, the National Assessment for Educational Progress, the nation's report card.