There’s more to a quality education than academics; good schools give students a healthy moral environment that appears to shape their future family life.
There’s more to a quality education than academics; good schools give students a healthy moral environment that appears to shape their future family life.
T here is no doubt that the events of the past seven months have made many parents reconsider the relative value of private and public education. In March, as most schools shut down in-person education because of the COVID-19 pandemic, private schools typically pivoted more quickly than public schools to provide quality online education to their students. This fall, private schools have proved more capable than many public schools of moving quickly to offer flexible, in-person, five-days-a-week education to their students. The upshot is that more parents are removing their children from public schools for the first time and enrolling them instead in private schools so they can continue to get the best possible education.
The relative success of private versus public schools in responding to the challenges of the pandemic adds another data point to the ongoing debate about whether public or private schools are more successful in delivering basic education to our nation’s children. But delivering a basic education is only one function of a good school. Schools don’t just convey academic knowledge to children; they also play a critical role in fashioning a child’s moral life, and the effects of this formation extend well beyond the classroom walls.
As social institutions, in the words of James Hunter and Ryan Olson of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, schools have “distinctive ideals, beliefs, obligations, prohibitions, and commitments — many implicit and some explicit,” which “form a moral ecology.” Different kinds of schools, with different moral ecologies, set our children up for success or failure in areas of life outside of the classroom. Chief among these is family life.
We know that men and women who forge strong and stable marriages are generally happier, healthier, and more prosperous. Any children they have are also more likely to be in better shape emotionally, economically, and educationally. And communities dominated by married men and women are more prosperous, economically mobile, and safer. It is for these reasons that, in a new report published by the Institute for Family Studies and the American Enterprise Institute, we and our colleagues, Albert Cheng and Wendy Wang, examined how enrollment in public, Catholic, Protestant, and secular private schools is associated with family outcomes later in life. What we discovered was evidence that the moral ecologies of these different school types are powerfully linked to the family lives students will ultimately lead as they grow into adulthood.
In general, students who attend private schools are more likely to forge strong and stable marriages, and to have their own children in marriage. We were especially struck by the ways in which students who attended Protestant schools had an advantage when it came to forming and sustaining their own families. Data from the Understanding America Study, a representative sample of U.S. adults, show that only 11 percent of Protestant-school attendees said they’d ever had a child out of wedlock, compared with more than a quarter of those who attended public school. Only 42 percent of public-school attendees said they had gotten married, compared with 49 percent of Catholic-school attendees, 53 percent of secular-private-school attendees, and 63 percent of Protestant-school attendees. Moreover, these distinctive effects of private schools, especially Protestant ones, held in many cases even when we controlled for differences in students’ race/ethnicity, parental education, family background, and family finances.
We were also struck by the ways in which children from financially disadvantaged families seemed to benefit especially from Catholic and Protestant schools when it came to their adult family lives. As the figure above indicates, adults raised in financially disadvantaged families were especially likely to form intact marriages if they’d gone to a Catholic or Protestant school. Our results suggest that these schools may offer children from disadvantaged backgrounds an especially big boost when it comes to forging strong families later in life.
What might explain the clear correlation between private-school attendance and the formation of a strong family as an adult? Social norms within peer groups likely play a large role. The figure above illustrates how much peer environments vary by the type of school a child attends. According to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, three-quarters of teens who attended a Protestant school said almost no kids in their grade had ever had sex. In comparison, only one-sixth of teens attending a public school said the same. Moreover, 83 percent of Protestant-school teens said almost no kids in their grade ever used illegal drugs, compared to just over a quarter of public-school attendees who said the same. These are just two examples of the many ways in which the peer environment our children encounter varies from public to private schools.
Formal messaging from schools and teachers likely plays a role in shaping students’ family life and sexual decisions, too. Whereas public schools have a greater tendency to promote family diversity or avoid difficult conversations about marriage and childbearing altogether, Protestant schools are more likely to teach that marriage is a good in itself and stress the importance of having children within marriage. Some Catholic schools present a similar message to their students, but today many of them steer clear of difficult conversations surrounding marriage and family life, as well. That may help explain why the effect of a Catholic education on children’s future family life looks weaker today than the effect of a Protestant education.
Whatever the core reason for the different family outcomes highlighted above, our report suggests that schools may well impact students’ lives outside of the classroom. When it comes to family life, private schools — especially Protestant ones — seem to offer a clear advantage. We believe the public conversation surrounding the merits of different models of schooling needs to take into account this reality.
Moreover, as parents across the country reconsider their children’s schooling in light of the pandemic, perhaps they should think not only of academics but also of how the moral environment of a school will shape their children’s future family life. Of course, given the costs of private school and the family advantages that private schooling may offer to poor children in particular, it would also help immensely if lawmakers pursued policy options that made this choice affordable for all American families.
W. Bradford Wilcox is the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Patrick J. Wolf is a distinguished professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas. Peyton Roth is a research assistant in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute.