“The educational attainment gap for adults who lived in single-parent families in adolescence widened considerably over this period,” states the analysis, which examines completion patterns among students from the 1960s through recent years. It is titled “One-Parent Students Leave School Earlier.”
The analysis appears in the spring edition of the research and opinion journal Education Next. It is part of a series meant to mark the 50-year anniversary of the 1965 release of “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” commonly referred to as “The Moynihan Report,” after its author, sociologist and then-United States Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
While the analysis found that the strength of the relationship between living with a single-parent family and educational attainment was weaker than the relationship for maternal schooling, the negative relationship between living with a single parent and educational attainment has “increased markedly since the time the Moynihan Report was published,” the analysis states.
“In other words, American children raised in single-parent homes appear to be at a greater disadvantage educationally than ever before,” the analysis states.
Specifically, the analysis states found that while those who grew up in single-parent and two-parent homes both saw increases in years of completed schooling over time, the gap between them widened from 0.63 years for those who were age 24 in 1978 to 1.32 years for those who were age 24 in 2009.
“This widening appears to accelerate around the mid- to late 1990s,” the analysis states.
