In fact, there is probably a limit to how well we can understand family structure and its effects on childhood performance from a quantitative standpoint because it's based on observational instead of experimental conditions.

Yea, sociology is a gong show at its best. Experimenting on human children is not something we should do, at all, in my opinion. Going through someone's pass and generating a representative sample to draw conclusions? Sure. But that leads to the next point you made.

For example, to what degree are we conflating marriage with some hidden or common causes? Perhaps the kind of people who make good parents are also likely to get and stay married (i.e., the selection effect), as is evidenced by under performing children in stable step-families.

Stable well adjusted people with the ability to correct and control their emotions will stay together in a marriage. These types of people will also do better at work. They will do better at raising their kids. So, is it the stable marriage that helps? Or is there a deeper core root cause? And I agree with this. And I think we should rework Welfare to help couples when they are down on their luck because working through the tough times is one way people bond. The counter to this is that the divorce rate skyrocketed in the 70's and 80's. Granted there were legal and societal brakes on divorce and annulments back then making the comparison to a kid in the 40's and 50's to a kid now.

Removing no fault divorce seems like a recipe for disaster to me because it requires proving fault. This will return to us to pre-1970 condition of women being trapped in abusive marriages unable to prove their way out of them. Historically, women were successful in proving drunkenness, failure to provide, and to some degree later on, cruelty. Adultery and abuse, especially emotional abuse, were extremely hard to prove.

It's not the 1970's any more and the courts take abuse etc very seriously. Each of the things you list are reasons for an "at Fault" divorce. It used to be legal to rape your spouse, after all. I've seen statistics that as many as half the divorces are a result of the couple not wanting to be married any more and no abuse, adultery etc taking place. I'm not linking anything in this reply because pick a number you want here and some think tank made that number happen. Even the fabled "half of all marriages end in divorce" is tricky; less that a quarter of marriages fail after 10 years and the longer you are together the more likely you are to stay together after marriage. Again, I am not saying the idea is simple, only that what we have now sucks.

If your logic is based on fulfilling a contract for the sake of the children, then a reasonable extension of that logic is that we should have child support (in either direction) in cases were divorce (whether fault or not fault) occurs.

The French pay on average about 3% more in income taxes that we do in the USA. With that they get a national health care system, paid maternity leave and government funded infant and toddler care. This is a problem that is fixable. We also need to stop shaming mothers for staying home with the kids while dad works. (And vice versa. If you want to see vitriol, go to a forum for stay at home dads) the thing about two parents is that back when things made sense, a parent went out and earned a living, the other parent took care of the house and kids and doctor visits and school needs etc. Now with all the appliances, and other modern machinery, the need to be a full time stay at home parent is not as labour intensive as it used to be, but, it may be much more mentally taxing. Just like the US economy has gone from physical work to mental work, so has parenting.

As for the school bussing program, it might be unavoidable for a period of time because it turns out that school desegregation is still a major issue at the heart of many public school problems in the United States. Integration is one of the best ways to improve academic performance, but we never really finished integrating schools (even in states that skipped the whole separate but equal thing) because lots of white/middle class parents (understandably but possibly incorrectly) take a NIMBY approach to integration. This American Life has a great two-part series up on school integration that is worth a listen.

Busing is needed because of the way we fund schools. The schools are bad and failing because of the way we fund schools. Teachers do not get the respect they do in part because they do not earn enough to get better people into the pipeline. There are old crappy buildings that cannot get repaired due to funding issues. Teachers pay for their own supplies because of funding issues. The way we fund schools can and does depress neighborhoods. Changing the way we fund schools is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN in this political climate. Someone in here said it well: Beverly Hills, CA is not going to pay more taxes or surrender its existing real estate tax income to fund better schools in Compton and Watts. How you treat your schools now is what your tax base is going to look like in 20 years. Good schools lead to good citizens and employees, bad schools magnify the bad issues. Another big part of the school problem is that they are being turned into day care and babysitters and that is not right, either.

I freely admit that I have no fucking idea how to even start untangling this shit show.

As for the school bussing program, it might be unavoidable for a period of time because it turns out that school desegregation is still a major issue at the heart of many public school problems in the United States.

Redlining and housing discrimination was a thing when I grew up. Catholics were not allowed to live in certain areas, Mexicans were not allowed to live in certain areas etc and this policy created areas where the schools did not have enough of a tax base to work on providing the core base of knowledge and discipline needed for kids to go out in the workforce and make a better life than their parents. We've lost sight of the core reason for a public education system. Davos, the retard in charge of the US Department of Education, only sees schools as a cash out and a taxpayer funded slush fund to be skimmed off and sent to her buddies. So it is going to be a decade at best before we can talk about fixing the issues.