In its 2010 report, "Family Structure and Children's Health in the United States," the National Center for Health Statistics declared, "In view of the changing family structure distribution, new categories of families such as unmarried families or unmarried stepfamilies need to be studied so that the health characteristics of children in non-traditional families can be identified."
We also see that "In view of the changing family structure distribution," health-care leaders and analysts have begun to study causal and correlational links between family structure and a range of child outcomes.
More than half a century ago, the Coleman report, still widely considered the most important education study of the twentieth century, established the primacy of family structure and stability in children's educational outcomes.
What's strange about the silence on family structure is that the education-reform community and the charter school sector have already signaled that they understand the importance of family stability.
Understanding the role of family structure could lead more schools to teach middle school and high school students the success sequence-the series of life decisions that has led 97 percent of individuals who follow it to achieve economic success, and often to break an intergenerational cycle of poverty within their families.
In my own research into the role that family structure plays in educational outcomes, I discovered Chester Finn's simple analysis of the limited leverage of schools: "Formal education occupies a surprisingly slender portion of our children's lives. The youngster who faithfully attends class six hours a day, 180 days a year, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, will, at the age of eighteen, have spent just 9 percent of his hours on earth under the school roof. The other 91 percent is spent elsewhere." The quality of the "Elsewhere" environment is heavily determined by the structure and stability of that child's family.
If we truly want to improve outcomes for children, we must have the moral courage to measure student-achievement outcomes by family structure as routinely as we now do by race, class, and gender.
https://www.city-journal.org/family-structure-educational-outcomes
We also see that "In view of the changing family structure distribution," health-care leaders and analysts have begun to study causal and correlational links between family structure and a range of child outcomes.
More than half a century ago, the Coleman report, still widely considered the most important education study of the twentieth century, established the primacy of family structure and stability in children's educational outcomes.
What's strange about the silence on family structure is that the education-reform community and the charter school sector have already signaled that they understand the importance of family stability.
Understanding the role of family structure could lead more schools to teach middle school and high school students the success sequence-the series of life decisions that has led 97 percent of individuals who follow it to achieve economic success, and often to break an intergenerational cycle of poverty within their families.
In my own research into the role that family structure plays in educational outcomes, I discovered Chester Finn's simple analysis of the limited leverage of schools: "Formal education occupies a surprisingly slender portion of our children's lives. The youngster who faithfully attends class six hours a day, 180 days a year, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, will, at the age of eighteen, have spent just 9 percent of his hours on earth under the school roof. The other 91 percent is spent elsewhere." The quality of the "Elsewhere" environment is heavily determined by the structure and stability of that child's family.
If we truly want to improve outcomes for children, we must have the moral courage to measure student-achievement outcomes by family structure as routinely as we now do by race, class, and gender.
https://www.city-journal.org/family-structure-educational-outcomes
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