Good news for marriage longevity, bad news for WI schools

Hello, all. I took a break from writing last week, as I was not feeling well. Thankfully, I am feeling somewhat better now.

Here is a short news roundup for the week.

For one, the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) recently published an article entitled, “Is Marriage Back? Divorce is Down, Family Stability is Up.” The article had several key findings: 1. The divorce rate is down. By extrapolating current trends, researchers at IFS estimate that 40% of today’s first marriage rates will end in divorce. The “half of all marriages end in divorce” statistic commonly thrown around is not actually accurate.

Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the Institute estimates that just 15% of marriages formed between 2010 and 2012 were divorced after 10 years. This rate is similar to couples wedded in the 1950s, reflecting greater stability in today’s marriages. The divorce rate after 10 years peaked in the midst of the sexual revolution, with 30% of couples first married in the 1970s getting divorced within a decade. Now that percentage has gradually come down.

2. Certain populations have seen a more dramatic change in divorce rates. Over the last decade, the divorce rate has fallen precipitously for less advantaged and black Americans. The percentage of children in lower-income families with married parents rose from 38% in 2012 to 42% in 2024, even as the share of black children in such families rose from 33% to 39% in 2024.

3. The happiest men and women are married moms and dads. Both men and women who get and stay married accumulate much greater wealth than people who don’t marry, and married men and women with families report more meaningful lives, compared with their single and childless peers.

There are several theories as to why a greater percentage of people are staying married. For one, IFS explains, not as many people are getting married to begin with. About one in three of today’s young adults will never marry. Those who do marry are doing so at a later age and tend to be more choosy in selecting a spouse. That is not great news for the birth rate, and that sparks a whole other conversation about why many people are choosing to forego marriage altogether.

However, it’s still good news that those who are getting married are staying together at a higher rate. It’s much better for the children if the parents stay together and leads to better outcomes for them academically, behaviorally, economically, and all sorts of other ways.

More strong, stable marriages has a direct correlation to the well-being of our families, communities, and state, and I hope we see more encouraging trends.

- The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) reported that it submitted a letter Aug. 6 to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) asking for increased accountability and transparency with the state’s school report cards, including adopting more rigorous cut points.

As I reported in this space before, in recent years DPI changed the benchmarks of the school report cards and the categories themselves, making it virtually impossible to compare report cards year-over-year because the cutoff scores were no longer the same. This move obscured the data and made it hard to tell whether a school district was actually increasing its educator effectiveness or not.

Well, WILL took it a step further and conducted an audit of the school report card ratings, which revealed some troubling findings, namely:

• One school with only 4.1% English/ language arts (ELA) proficiency was rated as “Exceeds Expectations.”

• Eighteen schools statewide received an “Exceeds Expectations” rating despite less than 25% ELA proficiency.

• To gain a more objective perspective, WILL compared DPI’s ratings to GreatSchools, an independent school rating system widely used by parents when choosing a school. A review of 309 Wisconsin schools across the state’s six largest districts showed that 50% of schools were rated higher by DPI, while only 3% were rated higher by GreatSchools. “We believe that this demonstrates DPI’s ratings are overly generous and fail to accurately reflect declining student achievement,” Will Flanders, research director for WILL, wrote in a statement.

“Wisconsin is falling behind the rest of the country academically and changing standards only masks this decline. Instead of raising the bar, we are simply putting our heads in the sand. It’s why WILL is encouraging DPI to follow through on its commitment to Wisconsin students and adopt report card standards that give true insight into school performance,” he added.

It is pretty sad when the DPI is taking subpar achievement and calling it exceptional. Ultimately, the losers in this situation are the students and the parents. The parents deserve to know how their students are actually performing, and have the opportunity to make an informed decision on the best school to send their child to. They can’t make that decision without accurate, complete data.

A label of “Exceeds Expectations” sounds good, but it does nothing for the students. The students are the ones who will lose out when they go to their first job someday and can’t read written instructions fluently, or are unable to perform basic math calculations to assist a customer. They deserve better than that. We shouldn’t move the goalposts; we should utilize different learning strategies and resources to enable students to reach those goalposts, and discover that they are capable of more than they ever thought.

But it all starts with being honest about the situation at hand and working to rebuild trust with the public.

Have a good week!