Fix the Family, Fix Education

March 28, 2025

Doug Leyendecker

Welcome to This Week’s Leyendecker View

My first guess is sometimes right. My second never is.
– JP Morgan

FAVORITE READ OF THE WEEK

Given today’s tumultuous world,
how about Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”

FAVORITE WATCH OF THE WEEK

Learn the Trump team’s strategy.
All-In interviews Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent
All-In interviews Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick

THINKING OUT LOUD

Fix the Family, Fix Education

One of my good friends recently asked, “Are schools these days teaching kids what to think rather than how to think?”

As we’ve been reading and hearing about in the news, President Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. Trump seeks to push the management of education down to the states. The theory is that the closer you get to the students and parents, the more productive a school system will be. Eliminating federally-managed education will allow states and municipalities to better organize and manage their regional and local schools.

Here are a few of education’s many problems…

The biggest problem with the education system itself is likely the gargantuan growth of school administrators. From 2000 to 2019, we had student growth of 7.6%, teacher growth of 8.7% and school administrator growth of a staggering 87.6%. How much did expanding regulations out of the DOE drive that administrative growth?

The more regulations you have, the more administrators you need to comply with said regulation. And the more regulations you have, the more impacted teachers are, too, and the less time teachers have for students. Or the more overtime work they must do, which makes the teacher’s job even more burdensome, and the more likely they are to burn out.

On the basis of administrative bloat, the idea of pushing education management down to the states and even further down to the actual school districts makes sense. Wouldn’t parents and teachers know what’s best for children over a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington DC?

One of the other education management problems seems to be the teachers unions. A decade or so ago, I was friends with a former high school principal. He had started as a teacher and worked his way up. Once he became principal, he discovered that teacher unions prevent principals from culling the poor performers. If you can’t cull the poor performing teachers, aren’t you dumbing down a school? Isn’t the chain only as strong as the weakest link?

I’m not sure if dismantling the Department of Education will fix the teacher union problem, but odds seem it may help. One would think the Department of Education is “tight” with the teacher unions, since both tend to have the same goal: We need more money! That seems pretty typical of bureaucrats. If only they had more money, they could fix the problems they’ve been trying to fix for decades, all the while getting more money but never enough money.

Maybe the biggest—and most overlooked—education problem is with our children, seeing as 34% of them are raised in a single-parent household. As President Obama once said, “Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.”

Another example of this problem: “In 1960, the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families—95%. By 2005, after a decades-long elite cultural repudiation of marriage, that figure remained high among affluent families (85%) but had plummeted to just 30 percent among working-class families.”

So how do we encourage the creation and sustainability of the nuclear family? How do we give children a better start that would improve their education outcomes and put them on a better path to adulthood?

This is obviously not a simple problem to fix. It’s a problem the Trump administration has yet to consider, much less provide policy ideas. So what can we do?

I’ve thought for years the solution is to reward people for creating and sustaining nuclear families. How can we do this?

A financial incentive that could help create and sustain nuclear families could be lowering a couple’s income tax rate the longer they stay married. After five years of marriage, they get a lower tax rate. After ten years, lower again. And then after a certain period of time maybe they don’t even pay taxes. The number of children involved in the marriage could also influence the tax benefits.

Of course there will always be people who game the system. You can’t eliminate all the cheaters, but smart policy that’s embraced by a large enough number of people could change overall behavior.

This is a simple idea on how to help fix the nuclear family, which would help fix our education system. Certainly better informed people could improve upon this idea.

Dismantling our burdensome education bureaucracy and pushing decision-making closer to the student, parent and teacher seems a good way to improve our educational system and outcomes.

But creating more and longer-lasting nuclear families would also naturally improve education outcomes, which would improve worker productivity, which would improve wages. And then imagine how much money we would save by spending less on treating the diseases of mental health, physical health, crime, drug and alcohol addiction and more if we had more and longer lasting nuclear families.

THE RANDOMS

Former president John F. Kennedy’s quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” should be something EVERY American knows by heart. You shouldn’t be able to pass a social studies class without showing you have memorized it. What other quotes from great historical leaders should every one of us know by heart?

How are our big tech companies going to compete globally with AI when China’s AI is so much cheaper?

We can now learn pretty much anything online. So why do people need to go to college? Why can’t people just pass a test created to prove someone knows what they need to know? Maybe we should ask AI to create the tests.

We all know education is broken, health care is broken, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are running out of money, the budget deficit is too high, our debt is growing too fast and regulation is stifling economic growth. So it’s interesting to see that the majority of pundits are greatly critical of the Trump administration’s effort to MAGA. It’s easy to be a critic. How about more people present ideas on how to fix things?

AI can read for you. AI can write for you. AI can do math for you. AI can program computers for you. So now what do we need to teach our children if AI is able to do their reading, writing and arithmetic?

China’s Xi is beginning to tighten his authoritarian management over the private sector even more. Are Trump’s MAGA strategies influencing Chinese economic and social reforms?

If you wish to understand how the human condition translates into the power of film, then watch Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’ animated film, Flow. Do we not all possess the same sense of emotions?

What culture might we consider the role models for civility? The Brits? The Japanese? Who?

ECONOMIC NEWS

Economy
Are we growing? Are we stalling out?

The Lululemon economic indicator
GDP growth revised up a bit
Trade deficit is a drag on economic growth
Consumer confidence at 4-year low
The stock market-consumption connection

Labor
Thoughts on leadership.

7 leadership blindspots
How to be the least wrong
Inner stillness makes you a better leader

BUSINESS

Finance
What’s a bear market look like?

What do you think of burrito bonds?
PE lobbies for a better tax deal
KKR’s canary in the coal mine
Guy Spier on what he learned from Warren Buffett

Real Estate
Is housing at a turning point?

February home sales rebound
New home prices are falling
But overall home prices keep rising

Tech
How will AI change big tech?