When it comes to the role that teachers’ unions play in the problems of public education, Mr. Duncan doesn’t pull his punches. Upon taking charge of the public schools in Chicago in 2001, he discovered (with the help of the Chicago-based economist Steven Levitt ) that at least 5% of the city’s teachers were helping their students cheat on standardized tests. He was appalled but felt stymied: “If I’d asked Mayor [Richard] Daley to fire 5 percent of all Chicago teachers, then there would have been hell to pay.” The episode is emblematic beyond its particular circumstances: In what other profession is it acceptable to retain people who you know are falsifying results?
She is reviewing the memoir of President Obama’s first education secretary, Arne Duncan.
You will not find me arguing that charter schools do a better job than government schools when it comes to creating better long-term outcomes for students. The Null Hypothesis would say that neither does a better job.
My concern is with the distribution of power.
I live in an area where the collective “bargaining” table has the teachers’ union on both sides. The union controls the election of the officials with whom it “bargains.” The consequences are an enormous cost to taxpayers relative to the number of actual classroom teachers. The big winners are retired school personnel, non-classroom staff, and teachers who would otherwise be recognize as not fit for the classroom and fired, rather than given administrative jobs.
As a matter of principle, I believe that parents should have the power of choice when it comes to their children’s education. For any product, I want sovereignty for consumers, not for the supplier. Consumers will make mistakes, but I prefer the mistakes of consumers to the mistakes of government.
If we stopped sending taxpayer money directly to schools, then I don’t think we need to give vouchers to every parent. I would prefer to see voucher money concentrated on the neediest families, where need relates to income and the specific problems of some children.
Kudos for bravely taking an unpopular but principled position. You are exactly right.
You can expect to have your position dismissed precisely because the media is awash in reports about studies that purport to demonstrate that voucher programs don’t work. As you state “You will not find me arguing that charter schools do a better job than government schools when it comes to creating better long-term outcomes for students.”
And indeed there are too many different voucher programs around the country with little in common to make broad assertions.
Nevertheless, at the international level it is clear that there are many countries with strong voucher programs that consistently outperform the US.
The important thing is to focus on the characteristics of voucher programs that lead to success. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has done this: https://www.oecd.org/education/School-choice-and-school-vouchers-an-OECD-perspective.pdf
The OECD recognizes that “School choice will only generate the anticipated benefits when the choice is real, relevant and meaningful, i.e. when parents can choose an important aspect of their child’s education, such as the pedagogical approaches used to teach them. If schools are not allowed to respond to diverse student populations, and to distinguish themselves from each other, choice is meaningless.”
Unfortunately, data on the role of voucher funding in providing that real choice is limited: “Vouchers are commonly used to finance private education, but there is little data on this. As of 2009, 9 out of 22 OECD countries with available data reported that they use vouchers to facilitate enrolment in government-dependent private primary schools. In five of these countries, the voucher programme was restricted to disadvantaged students. At the lower secondary level, 11 out of 24 countries reported using voucher schemes, 7 of which targeted disadvantaged students. At the upper secondary level, 5 of 11 voucher programmes were means-tested. Of the surveyed OECD countries, seven reported that they provide vouchers from primary through
upper secondary education (OECD, 2011).”
Instead OECD member nations tend to provide direct funding support: “Data for the financial year 2013 indicate that private primary schools in OECD countries received
USD 4 212 (equivalent USD converted using PPPs for GDP) per student from government sources, on average, compared with USD 8 316 per student in public primary schools. Private lower secondary schools received USD 6 011 compared with USD 9 707 USD per student in public schools; and private upper secondary schools received USD 5 722 compared with USD 9 194 per student in public schools (OECD, 2016). These amounts vary considerably from country to country.”
The range in amount of government funding provided private schools does indeed vary widely: ” In Finland, the Netherlands, the Slovak Republic, Sweden and the partner economy Hong Kong (China), principals of privately managed schools reported that over 90% of school funding comes from the government; in Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg and Slovenia, between 80% and 90% of funding for privately managed school does. In contrast, in Greece, Mexico,
the United Kingdom and the United States, 1% or less of funding for privately managed schools comes from the government; in New Zealand, between 1% and 10% does (OECD, 2012b).”
And although the OECD does not find any correlations between percentage of students in private school and PISA scores, it does identify characteristics of high-performing school systems that incorporate school choice.
In considering the examples below please keep in mind US 2015 PISA scores: Science 496; Math 470; Reading 497. Among the 35 OECD members, the U.S. ranked 17th in reading, 30th in math and 19th in science.
BELGIUM:
The Flemish Community of Belgium, which scored 515 points on the PISA 2015 science test (511 points in reading and 521 points in mathematics), and where 12% of students are top performers in science, is clearly a high-performing education system. While some 75% of secondary school students and 62% of primary school students are not enrolled in public schools, most private schools can be considered as “government-dependent”: they aim to meet regional attainment targets and are subject to quality-assurance inspections organised by the state. Rare are the private schools that position themselves completely outside the public system, and for-profit private schools are almost non-existent. Education in the Flemish Community is characterised by the constitutional principle of “freedom of education”, which gives any person the right to set up a school and determine its educational principles, as long as it fulfils the regulations set by the Flemish government. Schools are not allowed to select students based on the results of admissions tests, performance, religious background or gender. Parents are allowed to choose the school for their child and are guaranteed access to a school within a reasonable distance from their home, with funding allocated to schools on a per-student basis. However, because of insufficient capacity, parents’ choice is not always guaranteed and actually can be limited.
While schools managed by public authorities are required to be ideologically neutral, and the authorities must provide a choice of religious and non-denominational lessons, this does not apply to subsidised private schools. The largest share of these schools is run by denominational foundations, predominantly Catholic, but they also include schools that use specific pedagogic methods (e.g. Steiner schools).
and
“In Belgium, government-dependent private schools, which constitute a majority of the market, receive (almost) the same amount as public schools, and they are forbidden from charging tuition fees or selecting students.”
THE NETHERLANDS
But this comment is already way too long, so I will apologize, and close by suggesting the Null Hypothesis can be rejected in terms of the advantages of freedom of education.
Not sure how this can be used to reject the Null hypothesis. Differences in test scores across countries could simply reflect cultural differences w.r.t education.
Well then we might as well dismiss all comparative analytics. All differences between nations could be cultural. There is no way to control for culture. There is no way to falsify the “cultural” confounding factor. We would lose a lot though by simply ignoring the rest of the world and the progress it is making.
I saw a chart recently dividing the world into quintiles based on some index of freedom and of course there was a strong correlation between freedom and prosperity. Yes, that could be cultural, but one wonders why giving families autonomy and freedom in the education sphere would not produce better results than authoritarian schooling systems.
Trying to find that article online I happened to come across a hit on Russ Robert’s twitter feed in which he argues strongly in favor of vouchers: https://twitter.com/EconTalker?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Dr. Kling has good company.
Comparative analytics are fine. The trouble is in the conclusions drawn from them.
If variation in test score averages results mostly from some cultures valuing school more or less than others, why ignore that?
That being said, I love the idea of more choice in education. Choice has worked wonders for shoes and beverages, among other things.
I just don’t think you need to sell the idea on test scores. It’s simple enough to sell it on the idea that giving the people who use it more choice is good, whether it improves test scores or not. Check out my responses to Russ’ tweets.
“Kudos for bravely taking an unpopular but principled position. ”
Oh, please. Unpopular? Get out much?
If you want a really unpopular expression of cultural differences, check out the colorful chart at the end of this post.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/new-pisa-test-results/?highlight=PISA
This has always seemed to me to be an “I want my cake and eat it too” argument. Using choice and markets only works when you accept the consequences. Education was brought under the umbrella of government for certain reasons. Those reasons are incompatible with markets.
Markets do not solve failure. They let the winners proceed and strand the failure with the losers. We need to let that happen for the most part, but we also need some institutions where we accept common risks and don’t give up on people.
We recognized a long time ago that it wasn’t acceptable to have a broken permanent underclass, and that we needed educational institutions that the community could provide as a platform to give people a chance. Vouchers do not serve that purpose.
I’m gob-smacked that anybody can make the argument that we have to keep government-run schools to protect the underclasses. Big-city public schools, across the country, have done a truly terrible job with at risk populations (and typically at very high costs). The main beneficiaries of such school systems have been the employees, not the students. Illinois is a particularly egregious example — it spends the most money per student of any state in the region by a significant margin, while outside Chicago nearly half of the education budget now goes to pensions instead of current operations!
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-spends-the-most-per-student-of-any-state-in-the-midwest/
This is the kind of system we need to preserve ‘for the poor children’!?
Local institutions, and even entire municipalities can fail. I assume you agree whether we should go forward with them at all depends on whether public education works broadly work or not.
Arguing from the perspective of the handful of worst situations in the country is not helpful. Make a solid case nationwide that the poor won’t be significantly worse off without public education, and I’ll look forward to hearing your argument.
Tom, charter schools with vouchers is not a dismantling of public education. If you assume poor parent are not stupid, and want their children to have a good education, then the choice they get with vouchers is likely to have a positive impact.
For a number of reasons public schools that serve the poor are the worst, and so the poor would have the most to gain by charter schools.
Vouchers are utterly independent of charters, and charters are not public education. Both vouchers and charters are private schools funded with public money, but exempt from all the laws that public schools are mandated to follow.
And they will only be exempt so long as public schools are there to catch the rejects.
Micheal – you are correct that some poor people will be helped by charters. But you are missing the core point, which is that the underlying reason for vouchers working is that they create market conditions, with all that entails. Markets only work when you allow winners and losers, which is exactly what we are trying to mitigate against.
Tom, aren’t the schools the winners/losers, rather than the kids (which is what we’re trying to avoid)? IE, they have to compete for students, and some will be more successful than others?
“Tom, aren’t the schools the winners/losers, rather than the kids (which is what we’re trying to avoid)? IE, they have to compete for students, and some will be more successful than others?”
The losers aren’t the schools. They’re the kids that are difficult to educate.
“Arguing from the perspective of the handful of worst situations in the country is not helpful. ”
Are there any best case scenario for big city public school systems with a long-term record of success? Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, DC — where is the shining example?
Slocum – If you refuse to engage in the spirit of this conversation, that’s your prerogative. Did you think you were making a point by including Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and DC? Didn’t you forget Baltimore?
Just what do you mean by a long-term record of success? The question is whether public education is worth having at all. Even in a city like Chicago, which you cited as an example of failure, it is difficult to argue that their is no substantial net public gain overall. Relative to a wealthy suburb, yes, these schools are failures. But should society stop providing public schools?
And I live in the Boston area. Perhaps we don’t qualify as a “shining example”, but our schools are clearly making progress and are worth having.
“If you refuse to engage in the spirit of this conversation, that’s your prerogative.”
I’m not sure what you’re talking about. You’re claiming we need public schools as a way of ‘giving the underclass a chance’. But the underclasses (especially minority underclasses) are concentrated in urban areas where public school outcome are generally terrible and have been generally terrible for generations. That seems right on point and ‘in the spirit of the conversation’ to me.
“Even in a city like Chicago, which you cited as an example of failure, it is difficult to argue that their is no substantial net public gain overall. ”
Is it? Compared to vouchers provided to families to use at independently run charter, private and parochial schools? What is your basis for assuming that Chicago Public schools are better than those alternatives would be?
We recognized a long time ago that it wasn’t acceptable to have a broken permanent underclass, and that we needed educational institutions that the community could provide as a platform to give people a chance.
That is one of the great American narratives and it still is true for various motivated immigrants. But for most poor Americans, it is simply not true. Most poor Americans will do poorly in school–due to some combination of genetics, culture, and life experience. They will lag the children of the more affluent, find school unpleasant (at least the non-social parts), and because of those things, will complete less school than the children of the more affluent. We will then say, “Of course, you can’t have many of the good jobs. You didn’t stick out school like me and my kids did.” Now, we don’t say that; we say, “It is a shame that you aren’t qualified.”
Conventional wisdom on both the right and the left is that dedicated teachers and/or professional pedagogy and/or spending more money will fix this. It will not. Most poor children will continue to do poorly in school. Then since it is legal and encouraged to use schooling as a hiring filter, they will continue to have less opportunity. I would not be surprised if, in general, the American system of schooling and employment actually does more to keep poor people down than to help them to rise.
Roger is correct. Both the left and the right use school as a means of showing their dedication to helping the poor. But our education system is very efficient at finding the bright kids who are poor. The rest of them are poor and also not terribly intelligent. What they need are jobs and education that helps them find interests or have the skill to build on as they move forward in life.
But we’re not allowed to say so.
I had a voucher discussion with some workmates a few years ago who had similar perspectives as you.
We live in KC, where charters have been around for awhile. They weren’t aware. I pulled up Google Maps. I believe there were about 15 in the district then. Looks like there are 20 now.
It changed their mind some to realize it’s happening right under their noses and it didn’t seem to be bringing on an education apocalypse. i.e. We don’t have constant news stories about kids who can’t get an education.
It seems the public schools and charters, here, coexist about as normally as Coke and Pepsi on grocery store shelves.
@Tom D – “Vouchers do not serve that purpose.”
Vouchers for less than all do not serve that purpose.
Vouchers for all solves this. This is why I support vouchers for all, and believe Arnold is politically wrong to support the more ideal Libertarian “selective vouchers”.
It “solves it” as well or better than current tax funded support for gov’t / teacher union controlled schools. With the huge advantage of having the funding mechanism, vouchers, all prepared to help the parents of kids in the worst schools to try something different.
The reality is that for any cohort of poor/ disadvantaged/ underperforming kids, or even adults, there is a real, if only implicit, order of who can move up. Vouchers, much like the market, will help those at the bottom who are most willing to try something else in order to move up.
The episode is emblematic beyond its particular circumstances: In what other profession is it acceptable to retain people who you know are falsifying results?
Devil’s Advocate: if the null hypothesis is correct, it really doesn’t matter whether you fire those people or not, does it?
Michigan has partly solved the power imbalance problem with a couple of reforms. First of all, education operating funding is centralized and equalized. So the state collects the property taxes and redistributes them to districts based on head count. So unions still negotiate with local school boards that are usually very friendly but it hardly matters, since the local board only has so much money to spend on operations (and therefore, on salaries) and cannot ask the local taxpayers for more. Also, because funding is based on head-count and because Michigan has vouchers and cross-district enrollment, school-districts have to be customer focused, because when the lose a student, they lose the funding.
And this is why Detroit schools are the envy of the world.
It was just a matter of equity in funding per seat.
Paradise achieved!
That’s a terrible cheap shot. School districts with lots of students from poor, underclass, broken families are not going to be competitive with the best school districts. That’s not indicative that specific policies are good or bad.
Competitive markets don’t assure that all firms succeed. Some don’t. But competitive markets provide choices, so that consumers aren’t stuck with a badly run monopoly provider. In the case of DPS (which has long been very badly run), the big success of school choice for students and families is that more than half are now enrolled in charters or public schools in neighboring suburban districts.
I cannot wait to see, in ten years or so, what are the results of the fact “that more than half are now enrolled in charters or public schools in neighboring suburban [to Detroit] districts.” Of course, researchers will have to control for the characteristics of the students going in. Otherwise, it’s like running a regression, finding that students on the high school basketball team are significantly taller, and concluding that the way to make people taller is to make them join basketball teams.
My hypothesis is that the (controlled) difference will be small.
Sweeny’s Law: To a first approximation, good schools do not make good students; good students make good schools.
(Actually, there is a “range restriction” problem to the Law. This applies only within America. 99% plus of American schools have teachers showing up most every day, reasonably adequate supplies, and teachers who, though perhaps burned out or “going along to get along”, are trying and want their students to succeed. There are lots of truly terrible schools around the world. Lant Pritchett has some of the story in his 2013 The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain’t Learning. Interestingly, he has a number of recommendations that would keep the public school system but make it more market-like in some ways, decentralization, incentives for success and disincentives for failure, etc.)
Yes to all this.
I am, as always, befuddled by otherwise intelligent people who are profoundly ignorant on public schools and mouth utter absurdities.
Even Arnold, whose Null Hypothesis is a brilliant formulation, thinks that vouchers to needy student is some sort of solution.
Who the heck is going to take those vouchers? Certainly not any private school with any sort of reputation. What will happen is that private schools will be created purely to collect those vouchers, and all these folks who think public schools do a horrible job will learn just how far the bottom of “horrible” goes, and how money could be genuinely wasted, instead of not used efficiently. It’s already what happened in Wisconsin.
Where is link to data about Wisconsin? As compared to Michigan, or Illinois (ha!)?
The worst of private school scams might well be worse, for a few years (5? 10? 20?), than the worst gov’t school, until parents choose other schools.
In many cases, what people want is the reasonable quality-price combination that the market will converge towards, but they want it sooner, and support gov’t “forcing” their preferred convergence point.
This probably isn’t the best time to suggest the Church is a good option as an institution to serve in loco parentis, but I would think that religious organizations that have a commitment to serving the poor would be good candidates for educating poor children with vouchers.
I live in an area where the collective “bargaining” table has the teachers’ union on both sides.
Have you seen who is winning a lot of Democratic House Primaries? Unfortunately that is not changing any time soon.
The biggest thing I wish voucher supporters would do is show what the system would look like. Just saying the free market would mostly work sounds great but I am not convinced. Because I would see voucher system end up being like our college system in which:
1) The best local schools would compete for reputation and smart students which send tuition up to $15K – 20K/year.
2) And lots Trump Elementary Schools that just take people money and crappy schools.
Also private school attendance is dropping the last generation so how private schools are succeeding? (although this is probably decline in religious schools.) Anyway, I would like to see voucher systems for High Schools to see how it would work. (Being a parent with 3 teens the biggest issue I would have with private schools are it would a pain for transportation and going to regular school is less making my kids snowflakes.)
The main reason why I thought conservatives should be against DeVos was she was not a strong enough competence to bring about this change.
Well the way it works currently is that you borrow 1 million plus from a bank to buy a school district for your kids. You also get a house at the end.
That is what I did, except for the million dollar loan and buying a school district for my kids.
I spent half my life educating my children in a home school.
Yes, it took a lot of time and there was no money to own a home for many of those years. I developed an educational philosophy along the way–things that worked. No I do not have a college degree of any kind.
The result, as they headed off to college, SAT scores of 1600, 1550, and an ACT score of 35. Each of them got 2 4-year degrees in 4 years and one of them got 3 4-year degrees in 5 years.
They have masters degrees now too.
When I hear professional educators with their ideas of what to do to improve educating children I am puzzled that being professionals, earning their living doing this, they can not even identify the problems, or find the solutions. Yet, I was able to educate my children and solve most of the problems on the small scale of our home school. Without the benefit of money in the form of vouchers to buy supplies–I would have loved to have even one year of voucher money to buy things for our school. I’m not sure all my solutions would be applicable to a public school where the teacher and the parent are different people who seldom meet. But surely some would be useful, I would think.
But we will never know as I am out of the child educating business now–all mine are grown and gone. Still, I wonder how it is that professionals in the field cannot find solutions for the problems that exist in public schools and implement them.
When the problem is “how to educate up to college standards young people who are below average in intelligence and conscientiousness and who have little inherent interest is what you want to teach them,” THERE IS NO SOLUTION.
That’s why professionals in the field can’t find it. The fact that they keep saying there is a solution and that they will find it someday is actually a much greater failure. As education realist says above, “our education system is very efficient at finding the bright kids who are poor. The rest of them are poor and also not terribly intelligent. What they need are jobs and education that helps them find interests or have the skill to build on as they move forward in life. But we’re not allowed to say so.”
Aren’t there organizations that are allowed to say so, that aren’t formally part of the US public education system? I am thinking of religious institutions and the military, primarily.
Are there any knowledgable write ups on what DeVos’s Department of Education has accomplished or failed to accomplish?
Are there any knowledgable write ups of why DeVos is qualified or not qualified to lead education reforms?
All the articles on National Review have been very positive on DeVos. I haven’t heard any school choice advocates arguing that DeVos was a bad pick. But I’m disappointed to see zero changes. My wife works in a big public school district, and from what she tells me, DeVos’s administration has had zero noticeable impact or change.
There are two purposes to vouchers.
1) to allow middle class urbanites to send their kid to a school where he won’t get beat up by Jamal.
2) to allow non-mainstream curriculum or teaching methods.
#1 is RACIST. Only upper class people who can afford 40k per year tuition should be allowed to live in urban areas while sending their kids to schools without the underclass.
#2 can go both ways in the current system. Voucher money can be tied to “standards” set by the government so while it makes schools affordable it can als change them.
The poor can’t use education because of bad genes. Public education was founded at a time where lots of smart kids where born to poor parents. That is less the case today and we have standardized tests to find the diamonds in the rough. At best the poor need discipline and vocational training. Such honesty would probably be condemned as racist.
Unfunded public pensions are common outside education. I think the cause is more then teachers unions. More like public choice failure on this kind of liability.
Oh, please. There are no middle class urbanites. That’s why people move to the suburbs. Rich urbanites send their kids to private schools without vouchers. The primary use of vouchers in middle class is Southern private evangelical schools.
There’s no such thing as “non-mainstream” curriculum and charters aren’t doing a damn thing different, except a few champagne charters with extremely short lives pretending to teach Latin and the like. There are charters that do academically advanced work, but they do it by creaming the kids. The teaching is utterly ordinary.
There is a ton of pressure for the middle class to leave the city, but some stay. The main dysfunctional issue for the middle class is city schools. Charters help fix that as much as they can. Why do you hate the middle class and want them to move an hour away from the city to get a proper education? That’s asinine.
My charter had a very different curriculum. It also creamed. This is a good thomg! The weak shouldn’t hold the strong back so we can perpetuate a useless lie that does nobody any good. The non rich deserve and education! The talented deserve to develop their talents!
This is the truly fascinating part.
“I live in an area where the collective “bargaining” table has the teachers’ union on both sides. The union controls the election of the officials with whom it “bargains.” ”
Do you live in a teacher’s retirement community? The number I find is that there are about 3.2 million teachers nationwide, or about 1% of the population. Be generous and make that 2% of voters. How do 2% of the voters control the vote?
Steve
2% of the voters give money to candidates who advance their agenda, as well as campaigning, going to rallies, etc. for those candidates. By actively seeking out potential candidates and encouraging them to run.
That is how any small group has an influence greater than their numbers.
Then, collective bargaining takes place between the teachers unions, and the people that they helped to get elected to office. That means that people who largely agree are on both sides of the bargaining table.
For reference, although this is by no means a statistically valid sample, both my parents, most of my uncles, my younger brother, and one of my grandparents were private school teachers. Most eventually taught in schools that accepted vouchers and all saw the curriculum dumbed down to allow incoming voucher students to get passing grades, since the private schools’s curriculum was usually about a year ahead of the local public schools.
There were no exceptions to this effect. The choice was always to fail most of the incoming voucher students, hold them all back a year, or dumb down the curriculum. One tried to stop accepting vouchers, but found that more difficult than expected, but for reasons I can only quote “Because once the federal government gets their hooks into your budget, they don’t let go”.
It stops being fun when your tax money goes to a madrassa.
There is no longer anything approaching a consensus in this country about how primary and secondary schools are to be run, what belongs on the curriculum, whether students are to be segregated by ability, what the schools are supposed to be for, what they are supposed to achieve, how ideologically sensitive matters are to be handled, etc.
Collectivization without consensus is a recipe for constant political conflict. As it is, I have to worry about who wins election for POTUS (!) if I want common sense disciplinary rules in my local public school and a Supreme Court that will approve them. The stakes of elections for remote and distant office holders is huge and pits me against my neighbor for the sake of my kids’ welfare.
Look, that’s crazy. Truly, deeply insane.
From the perspective of trying to solve this particular political issue peacefully via choice, there’s not much point to charters if they are required to be mere “independent licensed franchisees” of the state’s cookie cutter mandates.
I sympathize with good public school teachers doing their best but trapped in this insane system and who find the whole charter / voucher movement a very unfair threat to their interests. Which it is. But we also need escape hatches from the insanity.
Vouchers are utterly independent of charters, and charters are not public education. Both vouchers and charters are private schools funded with public money, but exempt from all the laws that public schools are mandated to follow.
And they will only be exempt so long as public schools are there to catch the rejects.
“At best the poor need discipline and vocational training.”
Not poor, but the below avg IQ folk, especially men. 90-100 points in IQ is fine for normal living, but won’t cut it in most academic circles — yet such folk are often eager for craft work, making furniture, or beer, or cars.
Yes to discipline and vocational training. And responsibility. The truth is that the promiscuity culture promotes undisciplined sexual irresponsibility. Kids, especially boys, who grow up without a father and have avg/below avg IQs, such kids need extra help.
I now advocate for a Job Guarantee — where the gov’t offers everybody a low-paid job requiring some discipline. This is for adults, over 18. Before that, there should be vocational tracks for guys who want to build stuff.