Rewriting the Success Sequence?

You've probably heard about the "success sequence," the idea that if young people do the right stuff in the right order-- finish school, get a job, get married, have a kid-- they are less likely to end up poor.

Conservatives had pushed this concept for a while, including some fairly overblown sales jobs, like the Brookings article "Follow these three rules and you will join the middle class!." The data for the success sequence are pretty spotty, and one has to wonder if maybe its fans have things backwards; maybe being middle or upper class increases the likelihood that you'll follow the sequence.

Nevertheless, conservatives believed in the success sequence enough that Rick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute wondered if maybe schools shouldn't be teaching students to follow it, the better to improve their future prospects. I disagreed at the time, But now it seems that many folks on the right want to... revisit the terms of the success sequence.

The argument has been bubbling up for a while in MAGA-land. Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke at the Heritage Society argued the country needs more babies, and the problem is that too many women are going to college and postponing baby-making. Joy Pullman at The Federalist argues that to get healthier Americans, we should get women to quit their jobs (so they can stay home and cook healthy stuff for their children). In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis wants to install Scott Yenor as a board member at the University of West Florida. This is a guy who has labeled “independent women” as “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome” and decried colleges and universities as "the citadels of our gynecocracy”

“If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers,” Yenor said, "not finding every reason for young women to delay motherhood until they are established in a career or sufficiently independent.”

So you see, the problem is that women are actually trying to follow the success sequence by getting an education, then a job, before they get married and baby up.

Turns out that the success sequence is a Bad Thing when practiced by certain people, specifically certain people who ought to busy birthing, rearing, and feeding babies.

One good way to make this possible would be to make it possible for a working man to support his family with his wages, but somehow none of these "a woman's work is to make babies and sammiches" folks is advocating for, say, a hike in minimum wage. Just advocating for women to be regressively focused on making babies and sammiches.

But there's something else to note here. These are the same folks who want to privatize education, to make it every person's responsibility to get the education that best fits their station in life, without any support from the government. And when you put together "Get the education that fits what your kid needs" and "You don't need any education except maybe learning some cooking, Missy," you get a system that aims only to educate young men. You ladies just need how to cook a nice meal while you bat your eyes and try to land yourself a successful man who can get you properly impregnated.

I think it's pretty clear that for one part of the ed reform crowd, reforming education means making sure that women get less of it. It's not unlike the focus in some states on making sure that teenagers are "free" to ditch school and get out into the work force, unobstructed by any of those darn child labor laws.

The underlying assumption is that for some people to take their proper place in society, education is unnecessary, even counter-productive. Success, it turns out, is only a worthy aspiration for Certain People.