What The Success Sequence Teaches

Ohio has decided that all students should be taught the Success Sequence; the notion that students should graduate high school, get a job, get married, and make babies--in that order! And you know this is a swell idea because the Heritage Foundation provides model legislation for this very thing. There’s an important lesson in the Success Sequence, but it’s not the one supporters talk about.

The sequence has occasionally been oversold (”Follow these three rules and you will join the middle class!“) and the “data” used to bolster it is a little suspicious (like claiming that only2% of people who follow these rules end up poor anyway--2%?! Really?)

There’s also a causation vs. correlation problem. Do people end up in the middle class because they follow the sequence, or is the sequence easier to follow if you are already in the middle class? Do people who mess up the sequence end up more likely to be poor, or does poverty make it really hard to follow the sequence?

Philip Cohen makes a case for why the sequence is bad public policy, noting that costly initiatives to sell the redemptive power of marriage have utterly failed. Of the advice to wait, he says

Success sequencers believe it’s hypocritical to hoard this advice and only dispense it to the children of privilege. But you can’t wish away education, career, and marriage uncertainty or impose order on instability by force of will. If we’re not prepared to guarantee all women the same opportunities as those in my classes have, it’s not reasonable to demand the same attachment to the success sequence that those opportunities make feasible. In the absence of that guarantee, you’re simply asking, or requiring, poor people to delay (until “they’re ready,” in Sawhill’s terms, meaning not poor) or forego having children, one of the great joys of life, and something we should consider a human right.

And he points out the connections between the sequence and race and class

Not coincidentally, the history of welfare politics in the United States is intricately bound up with the history of racism against black women, who have been labeled pathological and congenitally dependent. The idea that delaying parenthood until marriage is a choice one makes is highly salient and prized by the white middle class, and the fact that black women often don’t have that choice makes them the objects of scorn for their perceived lax morals. The framing of the success sequence plays into this dynamic. For example, Ron Haskins has argued that welfare reform was needed to “[change] the values and the approach to life of people on welfare that they have to do their part.” The image of the poor welfare “taker” has a race and a gender in America.

To further muddy the water, there’s a 2021 study funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services which found those who finish high school, work full time, and get married are less likely to experience poverty, but it doesn’t really matter what order they do them.

There are also several conservative problems with the conservative argument--or, at least the one they openly admit to. For one, the very clear implication of the sequence is that young women should have birth control freely available to them, thereby making it easier to postpone the Making babies step until all others have been completed. But that’s not what these folks want at all. 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.

Which takes us to the other issue for conservatives-- do they really want young women to get a job before they start procreating? Because if the goal is for them to be staying home to make and raise babies, then the job step seems extra.

So why make teaching the Success Sequence a law? Listen to bill supporter Senator Jerry Cirino:

We have been throwing money at the war on poverty, and where has it gotten us? Not very far. We need better life decisions to be made.

Teaching the Success Sequence is about driving home one idea that is central to right-wing policy:

If you are poor, it’s your own fault.

This is central to so many MAGA policies. If you are poor, it’s your own fault-- so we shouldn’t have a taxpayer-funded safety net. If you are sick, it’s your own fault-- so we shouldn’t have taxpayer-funded health care insurance. And if you don’t have the resources to educate your own children, that’s your fault, too-- so we shouldn’t have taxpayer-funded public education.

For many, that is the only real lesson of the Success Sequence-- poverty is the result of making bad choices (and why should I pay taxes to make up for your bad choices). Accident, illness, unexpected disaster, job loss, jobs that don’t pay a living wage, a lack of resources necessary to make those Really Good Choices-- those are all just excuses made by folks who lack the fortitude to grab their bootstraps and heft away. But hey- it’s never too early to start telling the Poors that their problems are their own fault, or their parents’ fault, and therefor taxpayers shouldn’t have to help you out. Good job, Ohio.