5/6 Bridging America’s Social Capital Divide - FIVE POLICY SOLUTIONS

America’s marriage divide is driven by a range of cultural, economic, and legal factors; the government can only do so much to mitigate these causes. But it can play a role in strengthening and stabilizing family life. The following five policy solutions, in particular, would be helpful to bridge the divide:

1. REMOVING PERVERSE MARRIAGE PENALTIES FROM GOVERNMENT BENEFIT PROGRAMS

Public policy should not penalize the very institution proven to help house and protect the public good. Several policy solutions have therefore been offered toward eliminating marriage penalties. Many have suggested starting with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a crucial vehicle offering cash support to low-income working families. The challenge with removing marriage penalties from this program is that doing so would require either extending benefits to more working-class married couples or cutting benefits for lower-income single parents.

The best way to address this challenge is to convert the EITC into an hourly-wage subsidy (see more about this in number 5, below). Since a wage subsidy is based on the hourly income of an individual—rather than the person’s family structure or household income (the current bases for EITC calculations)—it would not include marriage penalties. Such a wage subsidy might also reinforce the appeal of work among less- educated men, which in itself would help bridge the marriage divide by addressing the current marriageability crisis.

Many other programs besides the EITC also penalize marriage—including Medicaid, SNAP, and Section 8 housing. The best way to address the penalty in these programs is to double the income threshold for married families seeking to qualify for their benefits. To limit the cost of such an approach, threshold extensions should be limited to married-parent families with children under age 5.

2. PUBLIC CAMPAIGNS PROMOTING THE SUCCESS SEQUENCE

To respond to a culture that is too often indifferent or hostile to marriage (and rather champions young adults having children outside of it), we recommend launching campaigns that empower young adults to make informed decisions—about marriage, childbearing, and other life-defining events. One framework, described as the “success sequence” by Brookings Institution scholars Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, is especially appealing. This framework describes a series of decisions surrounding education, work, marriage, and childrearing that are powerfully linked to a person’s chance of ending up poor.84 In fact, only 3 percent of millennials who earned a high- school diploma, worked full-time, and waited until marriage to have children were in poverty by the time they reached adulthood.

One randomized, controlled study found a 46 percent reduction in teen pregnancy just twelve months after a group of vulnerable students participated in a healthy- relationships course teaching the success sequence. Teens who participated in the course were also less likely to have had sex six months after the course—and they reported fewer sex partners—compared to control-group youth.

Previous nation-wide campaigns against teenage pregnancy have yielded promising results. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has received widespread support from educational, civic, media, pop cultural, and religious institutions, and it appears to have helped drive down the teen pregnancy rate by more than 65 percent since the 1990s. Policymakers can draw valuable lessons from these successful efforts about what an impactful success-sequence campaign might look like.

3. VOCATIONAL EDUCATION TO OFFER MORE WORKING-CLASS MEN PATHWAYS TO STABLE CAREERS AND INCREASED MARRIAGEABILITY

Researchers and policymakers should explore the potential of expanding workforce- education opportunities. Studies should identify the characteristics of careers pursued by graduates of career and technical education (CTE), as well as which factors contribute to an increased likelihood of interpersonal success. Take, for example, Career Academies, high-school programs that offer students who are not on the college track rigorous, career-oriented courses paired with internships. Young men participating in these programs earned more than similar peers who did not. These programs may also prepare young men for more successful relationships: young men who attended a Career Academy were more likely to marry than similar peers who did not.

Research should further explore ways to replicate the marriage-boosting effects of programs like Career Academies in other contexts, including community organizations and nonprofit services. Public funds could be dedicated toward pilot programs that explore the scalability of programs like Career Academies as viable alternatives to the four-year-college pathway.

One could ultimately envision a national workforce-education system that prepares one third of adults for the middle-skills market—offering skill-based certificates and job trainings with real value in the workplace. Such an approach would demand that schools develop integrated networks with local employers and continually update their educational models and resource allocation to match the needs of local labor markets. This approach would also address the marriageability problem among men, since they make up a disproportionate share of the young adults who today do not attend and graduate from college.

4. SCHOOL CHOICE AND EDUCATION SAVINGS ACCOUNTS (ESAs) TO IMPROVE RELATIONSHIP SUCCESS

It is no secret that U.S. public schools often fail to prepare children from poor and working-class backgrounds for academic success in life. What is less well known is that many of these schools are failing to prepare their students to build strong and stable families. Admittedly, the issue of family life is fraught with controversy when it comes to education—and not without good reason. Educators have to be sensitive to the variety of different family environments in which their students are being raised. But many schools respond to the challenges of contemporary family life by avoiding conversations about marriage and family formation entirely.

This is unfortunate, because schools hold tremendous influence over a child’s moral development. In the words of James Hunter and Ryan Olson, 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 many areas of life outside of the classroom.

Our research suggests the moral ecologies of different school types influence the approach students take toward building families later in life. Students who attend private schools are more likely to forge strong and stable marriages, and to have their own children within marriage. For example, one study found that only 11 percent of Protestant-school attendees ever had a child out of wedlock, compared with more than a quarter of those who attended public school. And only 42 percent of public-school attendees said they had gotten married, compared with 53 percent of secular-private- school attendees and 63 percent of Protestant-school attendees.

When it comes to family life, private schools—especially Protestant ones—seem to offer a clear advantage to children. But our educational system places most poor and working-class students into public schools they may or may not prefer to attend, schools less likely to address family formation in their activities and curricula. Thus, one option to address the marriage divide at a younger stage in life is to expand pathways for students with fewer socioeconomic resources to attend schools that will prepare them for success in relationships.

When it comes to expanding school choice, one policy that deserves greater attention is educational savings accounts (ESAs). Arizona was the first state to put ESAs into policy. When parents remove their child from public school, they are given a restricted- use debit card with a percentage (usually 90 percent) of the money a state would otherwise spend on their child’s education at a district-run public school. Parents can then use these funds for any number of private educational ends—such as paying tuition at a local private school, paying for music lessons, or purchasing textbooks to homeschool their child. In Arizona, participation in the ESA program has increased dramatically since it was launched in 2011. Its cash value—averaging more than $6,000 per Arizona child in the 2018–2019 school year—can go a long way in helping families realize a better education for their children they might not otherwise be able to afford.

ESAs, and other popular school-choice policies, deserve greater research and attention, particularly when it comes to their potential effects on the family-formation decisions of lower-income young adults. One could imagine a system where federal policymakers incentivize ESA policies at the state levels by implementing a similar policy nationally, adding the federal government’s per-pupil spending (currently about $1,140 per student) on top of state dollars for families in any state that chooses to implement an ESA policy.

5. MAKE WORK PAY, THROUGH WAGE SUBSIDY PROGRAMS

One obstacle to marriage is the relatively stagnant character of wage growth since the 1970s for less-educated men. To address this, and to help make working-class women and especially men more marriageable, the federal government should implement a federal wage subsidy. Such a subsidy would increase the appeal of work and strengthen the financial foundations of low-income families. One idea, mentioned above, is to convert the Earned Income Tax Credit to an hourly-wage subsidy, which could be paid out monthly through the Social Security Administration. The program would function by setting a target hourly wage—which could be set nationally or regionally adjusted based on local labor-market conditions. This target wage would be anchored to the median wage in the nation or region. The federal government would make up half (or some other percentage) of the difference between a worker’s hourly pay and the target hourly wage. So, if the target wage were set at $16 per hour, a worker earning $10 per hour would receive a $3 boost on their monthly paycheck for every hour they worked that month.

A wage subsidy like this would not phase out as workers increase their hours, since it is calculated from hourly wages and not total income. So, the program could incentivize more work hours for men on the lower end of the wage scale. For these reasons, a wage subsidy is a policy that lawmakers interested in shoring up income and work among lower-income families—especially working-class men—should consider. Such a policy step could go a long way in making these men more attractive as marriage partners.