The Protestant Family Ethic

Introduction

The public debate surrounding the efficacy of private versus public schools tends to revolve around their relative success in boosting test scores, graduation rates, and college admissions.¹ For instance, are private or public schools more successful in giving children a head start when it comes to getting the human capital they need to thrive in today’s economy? This is the kind of question that drives contemporary debates about the value of private versus public education.² But there is more to life than excelling at school and work.

For instance, there is the opportunity to be formed into a woman or man of good character, a good citizen, or a good partner and parent. The effects of schooling extend to these other important domains of life. Civic and character formation are key educational priorities, not only for parents who send their children to religious private schools but also for the majority of Americans.³ According to the 2019 PDK Poll of the American public’s views on schools, nearly three-quarters of adults asserted that civics courses should be required for all students. The 2015 Education Next Poll found that an overwhelming majority of the American public agreed that character education should be emphasized “a lot” in schools.⁴ We suspect that parents are also concerned about how well schools form their sons and daughters for a future family life. That is, parents hope that schools maximize their children’s chances of forming a strong family later in life and minimize their chances of forming their own family before they are married or ready to be a parent.

All schools do their part to put kids on one kind of civic and family path or another, insofar as they constitute moral communities, whether they intend to do so or not. They inculcate students to abide by specific values, norms, practices, and habits as well as situate them within specific peer influences and social networks.⁵ In the end, schools form each of their students into a particular kind of person—with one kind of character or another. Different types of schooling influence a variety of character-related outcomes, including the odds that students become enmeshed in the criminal justice system, their level of civic engagement, and the moral obligations they feel towards their neighbors.⁶

Family is no different, with different types of schools putting young people on distinctive paths towards family formation and marital stability. Until now, however, we have known little about how different types of schools are linked to students’ family life as adults. The limited research that exists in this area indicates that religious schooling is associated with higher rates of marriage among young adults, but we know less about how different forms of schooling are related to the risk of divorce in adulthood or to non-marital childbearing throughout one’s life.⁷

In this report, we examine how enrollment in American Catholic, Protestant, secular private, and public schools is associated with different family outcomes later in life.⁸ We analyze nationally representative data from the Understanding America Study (UAS) and the National Longitudinal Survey 1997 (NLSY97) to explore the links between adults’ prior schooling and their odds of marrying, divorcing, and having a child outside of marriage.

Men and women who have been educated in a private school tend to be more likely to be married, less likely to have ever divorced, and less likely to have had a child outside of wedlock. Figure 1 displays the proportion of US adults from each school sector who are in intact marriages, have ever divorced, and have ever had a non-marital birth. All other figures in this report, like Figure 1, do not adjust for background demographic characteristics like race, ethnicity, parental education, age, and gender. Nonetheless, these patterns remain unchanged even when results are adjusted using a regression framework for demographic characteristics. Specifically,

• Adults who attended Protestant schools are more than twice as likely to be in an intact marriage as those who attended public schools. They are also about 50% less likely than public-school attendees to have a child out of wedlock.
• Among those who have ever married, Protestant-school attendees are about 60% less likely than public-school attendees to have ever divorced.
• Compared with public-school attendees, ever-married adults who attended a secular private school are about 60% less likely to have ever divorced.
• Catholic-school attendees are about 30% less likely to have had a child out of wedlock than those who attended public schools.

The results detailed in this report suggest that boys and girls who attend private schools are more likely to avoid a nonmarital birth and to get and stay married. This pattern is especially pronounced among Protestant-school attendees, which suggests that these schools are more likely to foster a kind of “Protestant Family Ethic” among their students. This is an ethic that seems especially conducive to strong and stable families.

Download the full report here.

Notes

1. Patrick J. Wolf et al., “School Vouchers and Student Outcomes: Experimental Evidence from Washington, DC,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 32, no. 2 (2013); John F. Witte, et al., “High Stakes Choice: Achievement and Accountability in the Nation’s Oldest Urban Voucher Program,” Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis 36, no. 4 (December 2014); Matthew M. Chingos et al., “The Effects of Means-Tested Private School Choice Programs on College Enrollment and Graduation” Urban Institute, July, 2019; and Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah T. Lubienski, The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
2. Vishal Kamat and Samuel Norris, “Estimating the Welfare Effects of School Vouchers,” Working Paper, Cornell University, January 31, 2020.
3. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916); and Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
4. Phi Delta Kappan, “Frustration in the schools: Teachers speak out on pay, funding, and feeling valued,” Phi Delta Kappan 101, no. 1 (2017): NP1–NP24; and Michael B. Henderson, Paul E. Peterson, and Martin R. West, “The 2015 EdNext Poll on School Reform,” Education Next 16, no. 1 (2016): 8–20.
5. Anthony S. Bryk, Valerie E. Lee, and Peter B. Holland, Catholic Schools and the Common Good (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); and James D. Hunter and Ryan S. Olsen, “Introduction,” In The Content of Their Character: Inquiries into the Varieties of Moral Formation, Ed. James D. Hunter and Ryan S. Olsen, (New York: Finstock & Tew, 2019), 1–20.
6. Marisa Casagrande, Ray Pennings, and David Sikkink, “2018 US Cardus Education Survey: Spiritual strength, faithful formation,” Cardus, 2019; Albert Cheng and David Sikkink, “A Longitudinal Analysis of Volunteerism Activities for Individuals Educated in Public and Private Schools,” Youth & Society 52, no. 7 (2020): 1193– 1219; and Corey A. DeAngelis and Patrick J. Wolf, “Private school choice and crime: Evidence from Milwaukee,” Social Science Quarterly 100, no. 6 (2019): 2302–2315.
7. Jeremy E. Uecker and Jonathan P. Hill, “Religious schools, home schools, and the timing of first marriage and first birth,” Review of Religious Research 56, no. 2 (June 2014): 189–218; Corey DeAngelis and Patrick J. Wolf, “Private School Choice and Character: More Evidence from Milwaukee,” EDRE working paper, no. 2019-03, February 26, 2019.
8. Protestant schools compose about 90% of enrollments at non-Catholic but religious private schools (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019). Indeed, only 6 respondents in our sample primarily spent their primary and secondary education in a religious private school that was neither Catholic nor Protestant. We leave those 6 observations in our analysis in order to maintain the representativeness of the sample, meaning that the category technically is “non-Catholic religious,” even as we assign it the more elegant and largely accurate descriptive title of “Protestant.”