First of all: thank you for posting what may be the only unpopular opinion on this thread. Someone said something interesting! I think it hasty to draw policy conclusions based on descriptive statistics, there are so many nuances to quantitative sociology that would require further investigation to tease out. 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. 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 underperforming children in stable step-families. Perhaps the quality of parents matters more than the marriage itself. Also, there is certainly an interaction effect between poverty and single parenthood that researchers are still disentangling. I would be inclined to think the quality of a marriage overrides it's presence, but the data I've seen just doesn't make it clear either way. Even after admitting there is a lot we don't know about family structure and childhood outcomes, trying to determine the best course of action for an individual family from aggregate data commits the ecological fallacy. We cannot restrict divorce options based on statistical averages -- not only is that bad for the individuals involved but it's not necessarily better for society. 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. To your point about women's earning and job prospects, in fact to this date parental resources drop significantly after a divorce and job prospects for mothers are significantly worse for fathers after a divorce (on average, see my point above about ecological fallacies). One of the major contributing factors to childhood performance gaps in single parent households is the rapid descent into poverty brought on by single motherhood post divorce. 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 (wether fault or not fault) occurs. 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.
I think that there is an excellent point here that "Incentives matter". Welfare is currently designed such that married couples or even co-habitating couples are punished and given less resources to succeed. Its unclear if that was an intentional attack on the black family unit or just an unfortunate consequence but the destruction of the poor black family is one of the main consequences of that policy. This could be easily fixed by removing the marriage penalty from all government programs and actually proving a small incentive for two people to stay toughener and raise a child. Just like incentives matter in welfare the do so in schools as well. There is no Incentive for good teachers to teach at poor schools, and no incentive for good students to go to said poor schools so anyone that can just gets out and goes somewhere better. Because of this, schools naturally segregate. If no effort is taken to integrate them over time schools will segregate into rich schools and poor schools which also tends to mean white/asian schools vs black/Hispanic schools due to how wealth is distributed demographicaly in the US. Its a self reinforcing loop where if a school is on an upward or downward trend it will continue on that trend until it either levels off at the top or sinks to the bottom.
Your point makes sense in regard to welfare, although to be honest I don't really know anything about it so take my agreement for what it's worth. I agree school segregation is a self reinforcing loop, because school segregation is both a cause and an effect of income inequality (via geographic segregation). But we could short that circuit if there were the political will to put resources into creating incentives for local governments (it's very expensive), teachers and parents. In the FY2017 Obama budget proposal, there was originally a $120 million grant program for integration, which was eventually reduced by 90% to $12 million. Now Devos might cut that in the name of "school choice" -- a dog whistle for de facto segregation. On the other hand, if we choose to follow political decisions (in this case, politically motivated legal decisions) like Miliken v Bradley and allow de facto segregation in schools, then we will never be able to have the equality of opportunity that would narrow the income and achievement gaps across races and prevent auto-segregation. Another thing to consider is why we can't appreciate the inherit incentives of school integration: It appears to do a whole lot of good for a lot of kids. Integration leads to higher achievement in several subjects, especially for black students. Based on the research I've seen, there is little to no effect on white students' performance. I don't know of any other pro-equality public policies that minimizes loses as much as integration does. As for the big picture, the potential knock-on effects of reducing systemic inequality should provide a lot of long-term incentive for white communities to embrace integration. It's not a panacea, but there are a lot of reasons to be (cautiously) optimistic about school integration. I think one, maybe not the only but at least one, reason we don't think about the inherit incentives of integration is that racism makes supporting integration politically toxic. Both white and black communities were widely opposed to integration in the 70s, and white families fought particularly hard to keep black students out of white schools. After that, white flight kicked in to avoid having to send white kids to predominately black schools.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.