Most attempts to close educational achievement gaps focus on symptoms rather than root causes. While policy debates center on later-stage interventions, such as affirmative action or eliminating standardized testing, they routinely overlook the single most significant driver of student performance and long-term stability: family structure.
In Creating an Opportunity Society, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill popularized the “success sequence,” a three-step pathway to avoiding poverty: graduate high school, secure full-time employment, and marry before having children. Family structure appears last in this order, yet it plays a central role in accomplishing the first two steps. As it turns out, children raised in “intact” families—those in which the biological or adoptive parents are present and married—are far more likely to achieve educational success.
Indeed, research shows that 97 percent of young adults who follow the success sequence avoid poverty, and a majority enter the middle class or beyond. As Bryan Caplan pointed out in 2021, the simplest rebuttal to critics of this idea is that it amounts to basic common sense:
A more agnostic criticism doubts causation. Sure, poverty correlates with failure to follow the success sequence. How, though, do we know that the so-called success sequence actually causes success? It’s not like we run experiments where we randomly assign lifestyles to people. The best answer to this challenge, frankly, is that causation is obvious. “Dropping out, idleness, and single-parenthood make you poor” is on par with “burning money makes you poor.” The demand for further proof of the obvious is a thinly veiled veto of unpalatable truths.
Despite this reality, major institutions remain hesitant to acknowledge the critical role intact families play in student achievement.
A recent report by Ian Rowe and Brad Wilcox for the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies noted that the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—known as the “Nation’s Report Card”— disaggregates student outcomes by race, sex, and income, but omits family structure. This omission appears to be intentional, as the department has collected the data for more than a decade.
It is also deeply irresponsible. As Rowe and Wilcox show using data from the 2022–2024 National Survey of Children’s Health, family structure is among the strongest predictors of student achievement and behavioral or learning problems.
Students raised in intact families vastly outperform those from non-intact homes. In that survey, 74 percent of students aged six to 17 in intact families earned A’s and B’s or straight A’s, compared to just 60 percent of students in the latter group. This academic advantage held even after Rowe and Wilcox controlled for race, income, the residential parents’ highest level of educational attainment, sex, and age. Children from non-intact families were 13 percent less likely to get A’s and B’s or better than students from intact, married-parent families. The same was true of children who did not have a residential parent with a college degree (13 percent less likely to get good grades). Put differently, “growing up in an intact, married-parent home,” Rowe and Wilcox write, “has an effect on GPA comparable to that of growing up with a college-educated parent.”
The gap is even wider when it comes to behavior at school. According to the survey data, nearly one-third (30 percent) of children from non-intact families had their homes contacted for behavioral or learning problems, compared with one in five children from intact, married-parent homes. Even after controlling for race, income, parental education, sex, and age, these discrepancies persisted: students from non-intact families were 47 percent more likely to have their home contacted by school than those from intact, married-parent families.
Personal agency, of course, plays a critical role in whether one decides to follow any element of the success sequence. At the same time, certain government policies work to disincentivize family formation, especially means-tested welfare programs, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Medicaid. These create a “marriage penalty” or “welfare cliff” where economically disadvantaged Americans lose their income and health benefits upon marrying. As FREOPP’s Michael Tanner has explained:
If a low-income woman marries, she can lose some or all of her benefits from food stamps, Medicaid, Section 8 housing, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). These penalties compound and can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, a study by Brad Wilcox and others for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) warns that these penalties can amount to 10-30 percent of household incomes.
Consequently, marriage becomes less desirable, cohabitation becomes more advantageous, and out-of-wedlock births among low-income women increase. This scenario leaves children, as Rowe and Wilcox show, to pay the highest price.
On the success sequence, the data are clear. Family structure remains foundational to student well-being, directly shaping their educational, financial, and life prospects. Demographic trends prove as much: Asian-American children, who have the highest rates of two-parent homes, consistently achieve the highest NAEP proficiency rates, SAT, and ACT scores. Lower rates of two-parent households among black and Hispanic students, by contrast, correspond to lower average performance across these same measures.
Yet, critics regularly attribute racial gaps in academic performance to what they claim to be biased assessments rather than these deeper structural realities. This is why many turn to affirmative action, the elimination of standardized testing, and the dismantling of selective-enrollment public schools whose admissions rely on academic credentials and where Asian-American enrollment is high.
Worse still, universities do not just ignore the role of family structure in student achievement, they incentivize its absence. Following the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-conscious admissions, some institutions have turned to “home environment” as a proxy for race. The embattled University of California system, for instance, evaluates an applicant’s background in ways that can grant advantages to those from non-intact families and other unstable environments.
Instead of undermining or ignoring a student’s home environment, the federal government and educational institutions can support strong families by implementing reforms to promote the success sequence, including:
- Eliminating marriage penalties and benefit cliffs in the safety net that discourage work and hurt families.
- Promoting data transparency by requiring the NAEP and state-level assessments to disaggregate student outcomes by family structure alongside other variables.
- Reforming university admissions to ensure colleges stop using non-intact households as a proxy for race, which penalizes students from intact, two-parent families also working to achieve the American Dream.
- Promoting the success sequence in elementary, middle, and high schools so students understand the importance of education, work, and marriage.
From the federal government to college admissions offices, eschewing—or worse, rewarding—the breakdown of the family benefits no one. To the contrary, withholding data on the relationship between family structure and student well-being, while simultaneously maintaining programs that penalize marriage, harms the very communities these policies were intended to uplift.