By Josiah Padley. American Experiment.
There are many factors that contribute to a student’s academic achievement: natural talent, family resources, conditions of poverty, personal willpower, and school structure. Typically, researchers isolate student groups by their race, gender, poverty, special education needs, and English learner status. But should researchers turn their attention to another student characteristic — family structure?
In a new report published by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), former charter school network CEO Ian V. Rowe, alongside professor Brad Wilcox, argued that an analysis of family structure data should be an essential component of academic achievement research. In particular, Rowe examined the National Survey of Children’s Health to determine if family structure was strongly associated with three outcomes: the number of times a school contacts a household regarding their child’s behavioral or learning problems, student GPA, and depression.
(Rowe clarified, “For the purposes of our report, ‘intact families’ are homes headed by children’s married birth or adoptive parents, and ‘non-intact’ families are households where children are raised by stepparents, single parents, cohabitating parents, foster parents, or kin such as grandparents.”)
Rowe found that students living with intact families were far less likely to be contacted by a school for behavioral or learning problems. Family structure was a stronger predictor of problems at school than race, gender, socioeconomic status, or student age.
Students who were in non-intact families were 47 percent more likely to have their household be contacted by school. Interestingly, under this framework, poverty no longer becomes a strong correlative with increased school concern; once the data was controlled for family structure, students in poverty were only a bit more likely (16 percent) to need school outreach.
The benefits of intact families applied to academics as well as classroom behavior. Rowe found that an intact home had an effect on GPA comparable to that of growing up with a college-educated parent.
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The data collected from the National Survey of Children’s Health seems to suggest that students from intact households have higher grades, lower rates of depression, and significantly lower chances of being in need of more support at school.