The Educational Testing Service has issued a new report, “The Family: America’s Smallest School.” The ETS e-mail I received transmitting the report made me fear the worst: Yet another liberal study that manages to avoid the elephant in the room, namely that high illegitimacy rates are bad for children, and that these rates—with 7 out of 10 African Americans now born out of wedlock—go a long way in explaining the various racial disparities in educational achievement. But, to my pleasant surprise, the report itself seems on a quick skim not only to acknowledge the problem, but to highlight it.
This is the latest evidence of a positive trend. There is more and more acknowledgment—especially among liberal African Americans like Bill Cosby and Juan Williams, to say nothing of conservative ones like Shelby Steele and John McWhorter—that the fatherless home is the real problem facing black communities today.