Schools and ‘Family Values': A Reboot of a Familiar Debate

Politicians have long called on schools to promote character and responsible decision-making, often pointing to fears of waning American competitiveness or societal declines if they fail to do so.

Over a span of decades, those conversations have snowballed and evolved, with calls from politicians of both major parties for schools to teach students how to make wise choices about everything from forming healthy sexual relationships and resisting illegal drugs to getting adequate exercise and avoiding “brain rot” through excessive screen time.

Those lessons can be tricky for schools operating in a pluralistic society, where educators aim to position students to thrive in adulthood without prescribing a particular worldview or merely creating a list of do’s and don’ts that students fail to internalize.

Those tensions were front and center in 1992, when a real American vice president criticized a fictional sitcom character for becoming a single parent, a comment that sparked conversations about character and sex education in that year’s election between President George H. W. Bush and then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, Education Week reported at the time.

Echoes of that moment can be heard in statehouses today, where conservative lawmakers have passed or proposed bills that would mandate schools teach the “success sequence,” an idea that suggests that earning at least a high school diploma, securing a full-time job, and getting married before having children—in that order—will help students avoid poverty as adults.

Critics of those proposals say they amount to a state-sanctioned moral judgement that could stigmatize students from single-parent families and overlook systemic contributors to poverty, Education Week reported recently. The research supporting the success sequence does not show a clear cause-and-effect relationship between following the prescribed steps and reaching the middle class, they note.

Supporters of success sequence bills, including conservative think tanks, contend that holding such conversations in class can help students think through the effects of big life choices in the future.

Politicians call on schools to teach ‘values.’ But whose?

“I think from an anti-poverty standpoint, this might be the single most important thing we could be teaching,” Indiana state Sen. Spencer Deery, a Republican, said at a Jan. 21 legislative education committee hearing.

His words closely mirrored those of Republican Vice President Dan Quayle decades ago when he criticized the popular television sitcom “Murphy Brown” after it portrayed its titular character, a successful, unmarried news anchor in her 40s, becoming a single mother.

In a May 1992 speech in San Francisco, Quayle blamed “a breakdown of the family structure” for societal problems and called marriage “the best anti-poverty program of all,” Education Week reported.

“It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown—a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman—mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice,’” Quayle said.

The debate echoed throughout that fall’s presidential campaign. Bush, who was seeking reelection, later encouraged schools to teach character as part of a broader push to promote two-parent families. Clinton, his challenger, pitched a plan that included grants for teen pregnancy prevention and increased funding for Head Start child-care programs. On TV, the fictional Brown responded to Quayle’s comments suggesting powerful politicians had more influence on systemic drivers of poverty than one person’s life choice.

“While I will admit that my inability to balance a checkbook may have had something to do with the collapse of the savings and loan industry, I doubt that my status as a single mother has contributed all that much to the breakdown of Western civilization,” she said.

Conversations later in the 1990s evolved into debates over the effectiveness of sex education programs that emphasized abstinence over the use of contraceptives. In yet another echo today, some states that have weighed success sequence bills limit discussions of contraceptives in schools, leading critics to refer to the measures as rebranded abstinence-only education.

Both in the 1990s and in recent years, some lawmakers and educators have contended that conversations about family formation are too binary, focusing solely on having children before or after marriage while ignoring the various paths to success and happiness in adulthood and the choices adults make along the way.

That’s a broader challenge educators face when they discuss aspects of responsible decisionmaking, often as part of their schools’ social-emotional learning efforts.

If teachers are too prescriptive about topics like sex education, responsible technology use, and personal finance, students may walk away without developing a broader personal ethic they can nurture and apply throughout their lives. On the other hand, conversations lacking specifics may not be practical.

For example, banning cellphones in schools may help remove a distraction during the school day,—but students need strategies to develop better habits after the bell, administrators say. And as technology continues to evolve throughout their lifetimes, they’ll need to develop underlying values that help them decide how to use it in the future.

Encouraging wise decisionmaking, or dictating morality?

In a similar vein, opponents of the success sequence bills argue that the research, based on federal survey data, measures economic success and family status at one point in time, ignoring shifts like divorce or a rising trend of committed, unmarried couples that complicate the narrative. Ignoring those factors may not actually help students make smart decisions down the road, and pinning poverty on personal decisions ignores a whole host of factors outside of students’ control, they argue.

The sequence “oversimplifies poverty, which isn’t tied to a few life choices,” former Louisiana teacher of the year Chris Dier said in a video criticizing Louisiana’s bill. “It’s tied to access to education, housing, healthcare, wages ... Reducing all of that to ‘just follow these three steps’ is misinformed and harmful.”

But those critics may be having very different conversations with their own families, said Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, two conservative think tanks.

Wilcox, who co-authored an often-cited paper in support of the success sequence, said he often asks his young, unmarried students how their families would react if they went home at Thanksgiving and said either they or their romantic partner was pregnant.

“Like 97, 98, 99% of them say that their parents would freak out,” he said. “I think the success sequence is one of those issues where many elites kind of talk left and walk right. They are opposed to it in their public rhetoric and advocacy, but when you look at their own lives, they follow it quite diligently.”