WSJ op-ed calls family structure the ‘hidden factor’ in student success

Family structure plays a pivotal but often unacknowledged role in student success and may help explain some racial disparities in educational outcomes that are often attributed to discrimination, according to an opinion piece the Wall Street Journal published July 24.

The piece argues that children living with their married biological or adoptive parents are more likely to succeed academically than children in other household arrangements. Yet because family structure is largely absent from federal education reporting, the authors contend, debates over achievement and admission rates at elite public schools can offer an incomplete picture of the disparities among racial groups.

“Leaving family structure out of federal reporting,” authors Ian Rowe and Brad Wilcox wrote, “creates a vacuum that gets filled by theories that treat any gap between demographic groups as proof of discrimination.”

Rowe is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute whose work focuses on education and family formation. Wilcox, a sociology professor and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, studies marriage, fatherhood, and the effects of family stability.

They described the assumption that every racial disparity demonstrates racism as “a causal fallacy dressed up as moral clarity.” Focusing exclusively on race, ethnicity or income, they argued, risks overlooking family dynamics that may shape a child’s trajectory just as much — or more.

Rowe and Wilcox pointed to New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, where only three of the 777 students in this year’s incoming class are black. The figure prompted Queens Borough President Donovan Richards to say black students were “being locked out” and call the admissions results evidence of segregation, according to the piece.

The authors argued that such criticism overlooks a consequential statistic: Nationwide, 80% of Asian children live with their married birth parents, compared with 30% of black children, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Whether a child has two married parents at home, they wrote, predicts academic success — and admission to a school such as Stuyvesant — nearly as well as, or better than, race.

The authors also acknowledged that family structure does not excuse the failures of school systems serving black, Hispanic, and low-income families or diminish the need for wider access to test preparation and higher-quality schools. They argued, however, that a family’s structure and stability can shape a student’s success more significantly than race or household income.

Citing their forthcoming report for the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, Rowe and Wilcox said federal education reporting has largely overlooked the relationship between family structure and student success. Although the Nation’s Report Card has collected information on family structure since 2013, it does not report results by household type.

Analyzing federal children’s health data, the authors found that children living with their married biological or adoptive parents were more likely to thrive academically. Children in other household arrangements were 13% less likely to earn mostly A’s and B’s, about twice as likely to experience depression and 47% more likely to have a parent contacted about a problem at school.

Rowe and Wilcox urged the Department of Education and other federal agencies to examine how children’s outcomes vary across family structures, including intact married, single-parent, blended, cohabiting, and extended families. 

The piece concluded that family structure should be reported alongside race, poverty, and disability rather than treated as an “afterthought.” Doing so, the authors argued, would provide a fuller picture of what shapes children’s lives and academic success.