Headline challenge accepted, boss.
You all know the song. If you’re as old as me you’ve been signing it since you were in high school yourself.
Don’t stop believin’
Hold on to that feelin’
Streetlight people
The chorus was cathartic but the verses were quite sad. They were about lost souls “living just to find emotion.” It was a song about runaways. Kids who hadn’t found a path to success in life:
Just a small-town girl, livin’ in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin’ anywhere
Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit
He took the midnight train goin’ anywhere
What if there were a way to teach these young, wayward kids how to live a better life, a life that would be successful and keep people out of poverty and off the streets. Some argue there is such a path which can be boiled down to three simple steps called the success sequence.
At Vertex Partnership Academies, a New York charter school where most students are Black or Hispanic and from low-income families, children are taught there is a formula they can follow to avoid poverty in the future.
“It’s not something that’s only available to the rich, the famous,” their teacher Ryan Badolato tells the high-schoolers in a promotional video. “It’s something that’s available to all of us.”
Proponents call the “something” the “success sequence.” The steps are simple: Graduate from high school. Find a full-time job. Get married before having kids.
The idea has been kicking around in various think tanks for twenty years now.
The term “success sequence” first appeared in 2006 when historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and sociologist Marline Pearson co-authored a report for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. They wrote that modern teenagers “lack what earlier generations took for granted: a normative sequence for the timing of sex, marriage and parenthood.” Their solution was to promote the “success sequence.”
The concept was later popularized by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-centrist think tank, and championed by researchers at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), particularly Brad Wilcox, who directs the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.
What’s new is that several states are now moving to teach the success sequence in schools.
In recent years, lawmakers in at least seven GOP-led states have introduced bills that would require the “success sequence” to be taught in public schools. Teachers in Utah, Alabama and Tennessee, where bills have already passed, will start teaching the sequence this year. Ohio, Indiana and Iowa are advancing similar legislation, as other red states, including Texas, look to do the same.
Naturally, there are opponents to this. In fact the Washington Post’s comment section is full of progressives who seem to think this is awful. For example:
It’s indoctrination, right wing Republican style.
Forced birth, forced religion, required obeisance to the dear leader.
Everything that they claim to hate, except when it suits them.
It’s amazing to see the same people who think teaching the gender unicorn to 1st graders is a great idea complaining about right wing indoctrination. There’s nothing in the success sequence about forced birth, religion or fealty to Trump. It’s about how to avoid being trapped in poverty. The Post story itself seems to suggest there might be something to it.
…a 2017 report by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies…found that 97 percent of adults between ages 28 and 34 who followed the steps outlined in the sequence were not poor.
The findings held true across racial groups — 76 percent of African American and 81 percent of Hispanic millennials who married before having a baby were in the middle- or upper-income brackets, as were 87 percent of White millennials, the report shows.
However, young adults who grew up in wealthy families had the most financial success. More than 90 percent of adults who grew up in affluent homes and married before having kids were in middle- or high-income brackets, compared with 71 percent of adults who grew up poor.
Granted, the best way to avoid poverty is to grow up wealthy. But kids don’t get a choice whether or not they grow up that way. They do have a choice whether or not to emulate the successful patterns that can help them avoid driving their own lives into a ditch. If this works for 71 percent of the kids who grew up poor, then their kids are no longer going to grow up poor and will be more likely to replicate their success.
There is one criticism of this which seems fair and that is that what the evidence shows is correlation, not causation. In other words, we can’t say if doing these things makes people successful or if successful people do these things.
As Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute pointed out in 2018, “Ownership of a private jet is even more strongly associated with financial success, yet that doesn’t mean jet ownership is what allowed these individuals to escape poverty.”
This is a dumb analogy for several reasons. There are tens of millions of financially successful people in the United States and very, very few of them own private jets. Jet ownership is only correlated with the extreme end of the success scale. The vast bulk of successful people will never own a jet. In fact estimates suggest only about 100,000 people in the US own private planes of any type. So even owning an old Cessna is just not something that more than a small fraction of successful people do.
By contrast, marriage is something that is available to everyone and most people at least contemplate it. Even with the decline in marriage, about half of American adults are married. You don’t have to win life’s lottery to get married in other words.
Something like 28-30% of unwed mothers live in poverty. By contrast about 5% of married mothers live in poverty. If you were advising a child which was the better path in life it seems pretty clear which one that is. Again, few people can choose to own a private jet. but anyone can choose to get married before having kids.
Is it a guarantee of success? No, of course not. The evidence is correlation not causation. And even if that wasn’t the case nothing about marriage is guaranteed. It’s an act of faith. But as the song says “Don’t stop believin’.”
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