Last month, the National Assessment of Educational Progress was released. Commonly referred to as the “nation’s report card,” it is funded by the Department of Education, and in classic bureaucratic style, it crunched its numbers through slick graphics and lots of heady language. 

However, it couldn’t escape the data’s distressing conclusion: American children can’t read, and they can’t do math. (A mere 30% of American eighth graders scored “proficient” or better in reading. Twenty-eight percent were proficient in math.)

The NAEP spills a lot of ink on “trends” — it’ll spin the numbers as “not as bad” by suggesting “at least this community of children over here is ‘doing better’ than those kids over there” or that the children are doing “better than they were in (insert carefully chosen past year).” That information can be helpful when strategizing how to improve, but it also obfuscates the central problem: American children are in trouble, and what we’re doing isn’t working.

So, how do we really help them?

Many of us will hear this distressing news and find ourselves tempted to retreat to our pet explanations: many public schools are failing our children, teachers unions have utterly corrupted the educational process, too many American children are poor, or their families are ravaged by America’s addiction crisis. While some, even all, of these explanations may be part of the truth, they don’t reckon with the deepest root of the problem. 

The root is profound and simple: broken families make broken children and broken children make a broken culture. You don’t have to take our word for it — the numbers are in.

For the last year, the Ohio-based Center for Christian Virtue and the Institute for Family Studies have analyzed data on the health and future prospects of American children, with a specific focus on Ohio as a case study. We’ve called this new study The Hope and a Future Report, and believe what our research uncovered is vital to understanding the challenges our children are facing. When marriages break, children suffer. They suffer educationally, economically, mentally, physically, and socially. The connection between marriage and family breakdown and poor outcomes for children isn’t a mere correlation. It is, undeniably, a direct causation.

Our data found that Ohio children in broken families are nearly seven times more likely to need government food assistance than children living with their married parents. These children are far more likely to repeat grades or fail to graduate than their peers from intact families. Children born in Ohio counties with high intact marriage rates have, on average, a much higher income by the time they turn 27 years old than children born in counties with low marriage rates. Furthermore, children living in broken or disrupted family situations are 10 times more likely than children living with their married parents to witness or fall victim to family violence.

However, maybe the starkest infographic in our report is a line graph tracking childhood poverty across Ohio’s 22 largest cities. The x-axis plots the percentage of each city’s mothers who are married. The y-axis plots the percentage of each city’s children who are living in poverty. The data is almost a perfectly straight line. The more children there are living in single-parent homes, the higher the likelihood those children are experiencing poverty. In Aaron’s hometown of Warren, one of the poorest cities in Ohio, only 34% of mothers are married. By contrast, a staggering 91% of mothers in the richest city (New Albany) are married.

It’s important to point out that while this data is stark, the charge to improve marriage culture is not easy. Most broken families don’t become that way merely by choice or sheer indifference. Statistics are not destiny for individuals, and there are many heroic single parents who raise healthy and successful children. However, it is undeniable that it is harder for them than for their married peers. 

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We at CCV and IFS were so shocked by what we found in Ohio that we extended our report to include the first-ever “Family Structure Index,” a ranking of all 50 U.S. states based on the health of their families. It’s our hope that this ranking will not only demonstrate our conclusion — healthy families make a healthier, more prosperous future — but also motivate those states that are struggling to make a real change. 

That change can’t come from the government. We can’t slash enough welfare programs, hire enough new teachers, or grow our military enough to save our children. These things can help. However, if we want a healthy America, we need healthy children. And if we want healthy children, our assignment is simple: to build and stay in healthy marriages.

Brad Wilcox is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and the author of Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.

Aaron Baer is the president of the Center for Christian Virtue.