Brad Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies does some great research, and part of its greatness is that his results force policy makers to confront wisdom that is sometimes hard to hear, but ultimately super helpful in developing action plans.
The latest is a study he did on Florida schools, called Strong Families, Successful Schools, which builds on conclusions reached in a recent MIT study of 1 million Florida school children and found that poor boys are much more negatively impacted than poor girls, even within the same family, when families break up, and more so, that high-school graduation rates see a smaller gender gap when parents are married.
Wilcox and psychologist Nicholas Zill took the MIT study a step further and looked at the relationship between these variables on a macro-level — the county rates of high school graduation versus the number of married households with children in the county, across a five-year period.
Here’s what the researchers started out questioning:
We hypothesize that counties with more married families enjoy higher levels of parental engagement, better parental discipline, and more parental involvement in PTO groups, all factors that would likely redound to the social and educational benefit of children in these counties.”
This is what he found:
Specifically, Strong Families, Successful Schools finds that the share of married parent families in a county is one of the strongest predictors of high school graduation rates in the 67 counties across Florida, as well as recent growth in high school graduation rates in the Sunshine State.
The share of married families also is the strongest predictor of county school suspension rates in Florida in our models. Moreover, the share of families headed by married couples is a more powerful predictor of high school graduation and school suspension rates than are income, race, and ethnicity in Florida—factors that tend to get more attention in media and policy circles.
The report also finds that parental education is the best predictor of county high school graduation rates in Florida, according to our models (emphasis added). In sum, Florida counties that enjoy strong and stable families also tend to enjoy more successful and safer schools. Accordingly, policymakers, educators, and civic leaders should work to strengthen families—as well as schools—across the Sunshine State.
The study looks at several factors that play bear on high school graduation and suspension levels across the counties, including marriage rates, adult education levels, income, race, and the size of the child population in the county.
The researchers acknowledge that the report does not look at the quality, character, and spending of county schools as they relate to graduation and suspension rates, and note that school quality obviously is a factor in performance. At the same time, however, the role of the family, specifically the relationship of parents, is a major variable in outcomes.
