Ian Rowe, Brad Wilcox, and Grant Bailey highlight the importance of family structure in determining students’ academic success.
The federal government collects a wealth of data to help us understand what drives child outcomes in student learning, health, and economic security. Yet the government often leaves out a critical factor in its public reporting: family structure. … The National Assessment of Educational Progress from the US Department of Education disaggregates student performance by factors such as race and ethnicity, sex, and poverty. However, it does not report student scores by family structure on the official Nation’s Report Card—even though it has been systematically collecting these data since 2013. This omission deprives policymakers, educators, professionals, and parents of valuable insights into one of the most powerful predictors of academic success.
… [C]hildren raised in “intact” families (in which the biological or adoptive parents are together and married) are far more likely to thrive in school and life than are their peers from other households. We find that children in non-intact households—where children are living with stepfamilies, cohabitating parents, single parents, or foster or kin-based families such as in grandparent-led homes—are 13 percent less likely to receive A’s and B’s than those raised in an intact, married-parent home, 47 percent more likely to have their parents contacted for problems at school, and more than twice as likely to be depressed. We also find, in this instance, that family structure is a more powerful predictor of school problems, academic performance, and depression than are race and poverty.
These are important findings because public policies, research, and discussions related to education, human services, and health policy often focus on race and poverty but neglect family composition. Indeed, despite the federal government’s commitment to reporting outcomes by different demographic groups, family structure is often ignored. …
… To remedy this, key federal reports from the Department of Education and other federal agencies that monitor child well-being should make family structure a standard and consistent data category used to report child outcomes.
