The controversial anti-poverty solution coming to public schools

Public schools in America are becoming testing grounds for a tenuous theory: that poverty can be avoided by making three choices in the right order.

Tennessee lawmakers passed a bill this month requiring schools to teach students this so-called success sequence: that if you graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and wait until marriage to have children, you’ll likely be “successful” in avoiding poverty. Utah lawmakers passed their own success sequence resolution in 2024, and states including Ohio, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Texas considered similar legislation this year.

This wave of education policy largely originates from model legislation provided by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published the influential Project 2025 agenda. It represents a growing effort to codify a particular view of mobility into public school curricula, one that suggests personal choices primarily drive economic prosperity. While the sequence enjoys real popularity across party lines — and to many casual observers sounds fairly innocuous as life advice — policy experts say the actual evidence underpinning its anti-poverty message is thin and vastly overstated.

The term “success sequence” first appeared in 2006 when historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and sociologist Marline Pearson co-authored a report for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. They wrote that modern teenagers “lack what earlier generations took for granted: a normative sequence for the timing of sex, marriage and parenthood.” Their solution was to promote the “success sequence.”

The concept was later popularized by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-centrist think tank, and championed by researchers at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), particularly Brad Wilcox, who directs the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

Advocates claim the results are impressive: According to research from IFS, 97 percent of millennials who follow all three steps avoid poverty as adults. Even among those who grew up in poverty, the majority who complete the sequence reach middle-class status or higher.

“We do have, in certain parts of our state, problems with fatherlessness, and we do have pockets in our state like in metro Nashville with poverty and lots of kids not having the type of economic opportunity that we all want them to have,” Tennessee Rep. Gino Bulso, the House sponsor of the bill, told Vox. “When I saw [the success sequence] cut across all demographics, that even Black adults were 96 percent likely to avoid poverty, I thought it was something we should go ahead and introduce.”

But the idea has been largely debunked, as the evidence confuses correlation with causation. As Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute pointed out in 2018, “Ownership of a private jet is even more strongly associated with financial success, yet that doesn’t mean jet ownership is what allowed these individuals to escape poverty.”

There’s little to back up the claim that the exact sequence matters. A 2021 study funded by the federal Department of Health and Human Services found that young adults who finish high school, work full time, and get married are less likely to experience poverty, but the specific order doesn’t seem to matter much. These steps — except for marriage — don’t strongly predict family stability either, and researchers say more data is needed to understand what really helps young people thrive.

”Even with delaying parenthood, the importance of that for poverty is swamped by the importance of having and keeping a job, so it’s worth asking whether policymakers are also making it easier for people to access contraception and abortion services and to have an income when they have kids,” said Paul Bruno, an education policy professor. “If not, I’m not sure that having classes about those things amounts to much more than scolding students about things a long time in the future that they either already know or have limited control over.”

Despite the success sequence’s weak intellectual basis, it remains very popular across political and demographic lines. According to a 2021 American Enterprise Institute survey, 77 percent of Americans support teaching the concept, including 85 percent of Republicans, 72 percent of Democrats, and 78 percent of independents. Support spans racial groups as well, with 68 percent of Black respondents, 80 percent of white respondents, and 74 percent of Hispanic respondents favoring its inclusion in school curricula.

“Teaching the success sequence has overwhelming support on the left and right, with higher, and more intense support among conservatives, so it’s not surprising that red states are leading on these bills,” Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy at AEI, told Vox. “The broad support among liberals is there, but the minority of liberal opponents would be more vocal in their opposition, so the same bills could be more trouble than blue state legislators are willing to bear.”

Bruno cautioned that polling support for educational concepts often proves fragile upon implementation, pointing to the Common Core standards as an example. “It’s very easy to find political support for proposals for schools to teach kids stuff that sounds nice,” he said. “Because the proposals sound nice and are pretty vague about the details and don’t ask anybody to make any hard choices, this often means the real support is not that strong.”

Matt Bruenig of the left-wing People’s Policy Project think tank has been pointing out methodological problems with the sequence for the last decade. At its heart, he argues, the formulation is about deflecting attention from how policy choices produce poverty. “It’s always been a way to undermine efforts to improve the welfare state,” he told Vox. “That’s why the right likes it and why they want to teach it to students.”

For most people, the success sequence sounds like harmless and practical life advice. But its deeper appeal, Bruenig argued, is that it offers lawmakers a palatable way to frame poverty as a matter of personal failure rather than systemic design.

When Tennessee’s success sequence bill was being debated, Democratic Rep. Aftyn Behn of Nashville attempted to add language to teach that economic barriers can prevent students from completing the sequence. Her amendment — which framed delayed marriage and childbearing among millennials as the result of challenges like wage stagnation, student debt, and unaffordable child care and housing — ultimately failed.

In an interview with Vox, Behn pointed to her own experience: “I make $26,000 a year as a Tennessee legislator. I have student debt from graduate school, I rent, and I represent a large swath of millennials who have decided to forego children because of the negative economic impact. My amendment would have made the curriculum address the reality facing many young people. Without it, we risk teaching young people a narrative that blames them for systemic failures.”

She continued: “We have foster kids sleeping on the floors of our [child services] offices. We have gay kids sleeping in their cars because of the policies forcing schools to out them to their parents. No young person working three jobs can afford the down payment on a house in Nashville, where I represent. The Tennessee legislature has done nothing to address the affordability of living, and yet expect us to buy into a false narrative that if you follow one individualized path, you can claw your way out of systemic poverty. Give me a break.”

Rep. Bulso, who sponsored the bill in Tennessee, said it’s “very rare” for the legislature to amend any bills on the floor of the House, adding that “it didn’t seem to me that the substance of the amendment added anything to what we were doing.” He said, “the last thing we want to do” is present facts to students that could “cause emotional distress,” but he believes the success sequence ultimately presents a “very compelling and uplifting message.”

Education researchers have long questioned whether school-based instruction on life choices really influences students’ future decisions. Teen pregnancy has declined dramatically over recent decades, for example, not primarily because of abstinence education, but due to increased access to high-quality birth control.

How these broad success sequence concepts will translate into actual classroom instruction remains an open question. “Thoughtful implementation is key to ensure the success sequence is used to inform, rather than browbeat students,” said Malkus, of AEI. “But I am confident educators can manage this, particularly given the far more charged topics ‘family life’ teachers have to routinely cover.”

Malkus believes teachers should have flexibility in presentation. “The requirement to teach the success sequence does not mean it cannot be taught in context,” he added. “I trust most teachers have the common sense to do this well, and I think when it comes to their local schools, most Americans do too.”

But Bruno, the professor, worries about opportunity costs. “Teaching the success sequence probably won’t have much impact for anybody, but will take up time and energy that could be used to teach kids skills that will actually help them get jobs or to set up social safety nets that make sure they don’t fall into poverty if they get hit with bad luck,” he said. “Those costs are going to be especially important for kids from lower-income families.”

Some critics offer alternative frameworks for addressing poverty in educational settings. Bruenig suggests students could “learn about countries that have low levels of poverty and inequality” and study “notable successes in poverty reduction in America, such as the massive drop in elderly poverty following Social Security expansion and the halving of child poverty that occurred in 2021 following an increase in child benefits.”

Bulso, meanwhile, is optimistic. “I would hope that 100 percent of students in middle and high school will be exposed to facts that actually show them that if they follow the sequence where they finish high school and go to college and get a job and have full-time employment and then get married and then have children, their chances are better than in some other circumstances,” he said. “The most important milestone is finishing high school.”