Home schooling

President Barack Obama used his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday to promote his $447 billion jobs plan through the prism of education. He recapped the administration's plan to let states opt out of the unpopular No Child Left Behind proficiency standards and asserted that the jobs bill would finance tens of thousands of teachers and modernize 35,000 schools.

But the best way to improve public education should focus less on "modernizing schools" than on supporting families, as a study released last week by the Family Research Council makes clear: children and adolescents who come from intact married families perform better on tests, behave better in school, and are more likely to attend college. "Most parents want their children to succeed in school but are often unaware that family life itself has significant impact on their child's academic capacity," reported the study, titled "Marriage, Family Structure, and Children's Educational Attainment."

Virginia might be doing more to improve the educational performance of its at-risk students than the federal government through its "Strengthening Families Initiative" that is designed to reduce out-of-wedlock births, reconnect unwed fathers with their children and encourage marriage in an effort to reduce dependence on social welfare programs. The rationale is that children of fractured families are more likely to live in poverty and thus require government aid.

Children of fractured families also, according to the FRC's study, have lower scores than their counterparts in intact married families on math, science, history, and reading tests. Additionally, over 57 percent of children from intact biological families enter college, as opposed to significantly lower percentages among children who come from stepfamilies, single-parent families, and families without either parent present. The study also showed that adolescents who attend church regularly tend to complete more years of school.

Dr. Patrick F. Fagan, director of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) at the Family Research Council, and co-author of the paper, believes that the number of stable families in America is declining. "We cannot ignore the fact that the vast majority of American youth grow up today without both their biological mother and father," Fagan said, "This has significant, weakening effects on the educational attainment of our students."

"If we want to turn America's educational system around," Fagan continued, "we must encourage America's parents to remain together in a committed relationship. Policy makers and candidates...should start by advancing policies that encourage, and not hinder, family formation and marriage."

Dr. Henry Potrykus, Senior Fellow at MARRI, said that while the government has to know its place in showing the importance of family, their role is a little more distant than that of another community - the church. According to Potrykus, the Christians in the church are the ones who are able to talk directly about the need for committed relationships on the part of the husband and wife.

"If they [the churches] ever stop preaching the importance of family, they are dropping the ball," Potrykus said.

One of the main reasons family structure matters, he said, is because early cognitive skills are being developed in children at a very young age. Even before age six, children are sensitive to the environment they see at home. First grade students born to married mothers, for example, are less likely to behave disruptively than those born to single or cohabiting mothers. First-graders and kindergartners whose parents attend religious services are less likely to experience anxiety, loneliness, low self-esteem, and sadness.) "America is failing in these earliest investments," Potrykus said.

Potrykus says the current national debate on education is missing a critical point. Americans are spending more and more money on education, but nationwide test scores and performance levels are still dwindling, because the majority of children are coming from broken homes where they have not been cognitively, emotionally, or spiritually prepared for school.

This decline in stable families and educational performance will hurt society as a whole. As the study explains, "Marriage is a major contributor to educational success and therefore to the economy as well."