By Patrick Price, Government Practice Section Executive Committee
Addressing the structural barriers to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) includes recognizing the vitally important role that families play in society. Research shows is that there is an increasing divide between working and upper-class America in terms of critical components of social society that are entrenching the separation of the two groups.
As Ron Haskins, Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Brookings Institute, has explained:
Policy aimed at promoting economic opportunity for poor children must be framed within three stark realities. First, many poor children come from families that do not give them the kind of support that middle-class children get from their families. Second, as a result, these children enter kindergarten far behind their more advantaged peers and, on average, never catch up and even fall further behind. Third, in addition to the education deficit, poor children are more likely to make bad decisions that lead them to drop out of school, become teen parents, join gangs and break the law.
To remedy this problem, Haskins provides:
Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules [at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children], only about two percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class.
The initial research behind these straightforward guidelines, dubbed the “success sequence,” was developed during the administration of Bill Clinton and championed by William Galston, his Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy and its findings have held up over successive generations.
For example, In a June 14, 2017 working paper for the American Enterprise Institute entitled “The millennial success sequence: Marriage, kids, and the ‘success sequence’ among young adults,” W. Bradford Wilcox notes that “97 percent of Millennials who follow what has been called the “success sequence”—that is, who get at least a high school degree, work, and then marry before having any children, in that order—are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years (ages 28-34).” “In contrast, 53 percent of young adults who did not follow this sequence at all are in poverty.” As importantly, Wilcox finds that “The association between following the success sequence and avoiding poverty remains robust after controlling for various factors such as education, childhood family income, race/ ethnicity, sex, and the [Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT), which measures intelligence and knowledge of a range of subjects].” https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/millennials-and-the-success-sequence-how-do-education-work-and-marriage-affect-poverty-and-financial-success-among-millennials/
In a May 19, 2001, article for the National Journal, Jonathan Rauch proclaimed that “marriage is displacing both income and race as the great class divide of the new century,” noting:
Research by the ton finds that children raised in single-parent homes are at greater risk of poverty, school dropout, delinquency, teen pregnancy, and adult joblessness. All those problems disproportionately affect blacks, but before you decide that race, rather than marriage, is the active ingredient in the witch's brew, consider a few other points. First, poverty correlates more strongly with a family's marital status than with its race. According to Census Bureau data, a two-parent black household is more likely to be poor than is a two-parent white household, but both are far less likely to be poor than is a mother-only household of either race. In other words, if you are a baby about to be born, your best odds are to choose married black parents over unmarried white ones.
Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard have done extensive research on social mobility and opportunity in American. Their research indicates the strongest predictor of upward mobility by children was the number of intact families locally in neighborhood.
Tim Carney’s Alienated America takes this research further to understand at a personal level why some communities thrive and others collapse. In his journey across America, Carney uncovered that “places collapse if they are not planted with institutions of civil society that connect people together and provide a sense of purpose,” as he explained in an interview to the American Communities Project.
There is no quick fix to this problem, but Carney offers several suggestions: “If you want people to get married, you can’t preach to them about the importance of marriage. You have to build the culture, a society, where there’s support and modeling for that. … We have to get rid of, weaken, or reform those policies that kill institutions or try to back them into corners.”
If you would like to submit content or write an article for the Government Practice Section, please email Kara Sikorski at ksikorski@indybar.org.
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