Conservative legislators in at least eight states want to require schools to teach students that earning at least a high school diploma, securing a full-time job, and getting married before having children—in that order—will help them avoid poverty as adults.
“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 education committee hearing.
The concept is known as the “success sequence.” Sociologists have debated it—and whether schools should teach it—for the last two decades. But the push has seen renewed interest in recent years as influential conservative groups sound the alarm about declining rates of birth and marriage, viewing the trends as threats to American values and economic prosperity.
Indiana Gov. Mike Braun, a Republican, signed a bill March 5 that will require schools to teach about the success sequence as part of the state’s “good citizenship” curriculum. Tennessee passed a similar law last year, and Utah lawmakers passed a resolution promoting the success sequence in 2024. The Ohio Senate passed a success sequence bill last October, and lawmakers in Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas have introduced similar legislation.
What is the ‘success sequence’? Does research support it?
The success sequence was popularized in an influential 2009 report written by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, two fellows at the Brookings Institution, a think tank that researches economic and policy issues.
Advocates of the success sequence include the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the influential Project 2025 policy recommendations that have influenced much of President Donald Trump’s agenda. In a January policy report called “Saving America by Saving the Family,” the organization called following the success sequence a “near-guarantee of life success.”
Proponents of the concept, including some lawmakers who have introduced these bills, often cite a 2017 analysis of federal data by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank that promotes marriage and parenthood, which found that millennials who followed the prescribed steps in order were significantly less likely to end up in poverty than their peers who did not.
But critics argue that the research is descriptive, not cause-and-effect; it can only show a link between the sequence and economic outcomes, not a proof point. Treating it as a prescription for success overlooks the structural barriers, like growing up in poverty, that make it more difficult for some students to succeed in life.
What do critics say about the success sequence bills?
Critics, including school boards in states weighing success sequence bills, question the research to support the success sequence. They say teaching it in schools would serve to blame individuals for systemic challenges they face, and that reinforcing narrow family norms could stigmatize students from single-parent homes or those who don’t desire marriage or parenthood.
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.”
Teaching about marriage and childbearing in a “good citizenship” curriculum, as Indiana’s new law requires, is “fraught with shame,” Indiana state Sen. Shelli Yoder, a Democrat, said in the January committee hearing.
“It is a state-codified moral judgment about family tradition,” she said.
Some of the states where lawmakers have proposed similar bills also have laws limiting school discussions on subjects like contraception in sex education classes. That has led advocates for comprehensive sex education, like the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, to dub the success sequence “a new version of abstinence-only education.”
(Lawmakers in Indiana voted down an amendment that would have required schools to teach comprehensive sex education alongside the sequence.)
What did an analysis of one cohort of youth reveal about the sequence?
The 2017 analysis frequently cited by lawmakers relies on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort, which includes periodic survey data from 9,000 men and women born from 1980 to 1984.
It generally found that those who appeared to have followed the sequence had higher average incomes.
By the time that cohort reached ages 28 to 34, 14% of respondents who followed the sequence or were “on track” to do so were in the lowest third of income distribution, compared to 41% of respondents missing one or two elements and 71% missing all three, the analysis found. “On track” refers to adults who had at least a high school diploma and a full-time job and were unmarried without children at the time of the survey.
“There are three pillars for the American way for most adults, and those are education, work, and marriage,” said Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at both AEI and the Institute for Family Studies, who co-authored the analysis. “All three of those pillars are likely to increase your odds of avoiding poverty and reaching the middle class or higher.”
The analysis found a correlation between completing the sequence and having a higher income, even after controlling for factors like race and childhood family income levels. But some demographic groups were more likely to complete the steps or be on track to do so.
Fifty percent of all respondents had met all three milestones or were in the “on track” group, but there were wide variations among populations. Fifty-seven percent of white respondents and 63% of Asian respondents had completed the sequence or were on track, compared to 24% of Black and 42% of Hispanic respondents.
Thirty-one percent of respondents who grew up in a lower-income household followed the sequence or were “on track,” compared to 65% of those who were raised in higher-income homes, the analysis found.
Would the sequence be difficult for schools to teach?
One of the points of difference on the success sequence concerns how to interpret studies like the AEI/Institute for Family Analysis analysis.
Critics contend the analysis shows completing high school and securing full-time work have an outsized link to avoiding poverty compared to the family-related steps in the sequence—throwing into question the value of teaching them in a prescriptive order.
“Additional studies are needed to determine whether these correlations reflect causal pathways,” concluded a 2020 literature review on the success sequence published by the U.S. Department of Human Services.
But Wilcox said most people see the steps as logical, and teaching students about their merits gives them “another tool” to make wise choices as adults.
“I don’t look at really anything as a panacea or a magic pill,” he said. “It’s fair to acknowledge that there are lots of things that affect an adult’s success. But we are certainly of the view that following these three steps definitely increases your odds of flourishing.”
Whatever the research shows, some educators argue teaching it could lead to difficult classroom conversations and that requirements to do so are seemingly in defiance of conservative arguments that parents should play a larger role than schools in helping children determine morality.
Requiring schools to teach the success sequence “would be damaging to students who for whatever reason are unable to follow the very narrow set of prescribed steps for ‘success,’” members of the Toledo, Ohio, school board said in an April 2025 resolution opposing the state’s bill, which is pending in the Ohio House. “Moreover, parents’ rights are infringed when the government dictates to parents a formula for a family’s values, rather than allowing the parents to raise their child according to their own values.”
