As go the families, so goes education.

• Author: Barrett, Michael J.
• Position: Decreasing number of households with school-age children

Declining numbers of households with school-age children bode ill for school finance, says this Massachusetts legislator.

The federal census for 1990 confirms something that some of us had suspected: Families with school-age children make up a surprisingly small percentage of the U.S. population.

In 1950, five years after the end of World War II, 46.3 percent of American households had children under 18. Ten years later the historic Baby Boom was at full crest, and families with children were a remarkable 48.4 percent of all American households, just short of a majority.

But then by 1970 the proportion of households with children was down to 44 percent, and in 1980 it dropped to 37.5 percent. In 1990, after a full decade in which Baby Boomers had had babies themselves and were joined in the endeavor by record numbers of new immigrants of child-bearing age, the proportion was down again to 34.6 percent. Elementary school enrollments have begun picking up during the past few years, but in most parts of the country they will not achieve the peak numbers of the past.

It's in the old industrial states of the Northeast and the Midwest that the new demographics are most apparent. In New York, households with children were 44.5 percent of the total in 1960, 41.2 percent in 1970, 35.2 percent in 1980 and 31.1 percent in 1990. The figures for Massachusetts were 46.4 percent, 42.4 percent, 35.1 percent and 32.3 percent; for Illinois 46.3 percent, 43.4 percent, 37.4 percent and 33.4 percent; and for Michigan 51.4 percent, 47.6 percent, 37.7 percent and 34.9 percent.

Surprisingly, the Sun Belt states do not rack up the countervailing numbers that the popular impression might suggest. These places are seeing the migration of young people from other parts of the country and immigration from Asia and Latin America--but they also attract senior citizens. The net result: large overall declines in the proportion of young families from 1960 to 1970 and from 1970 to 1980 with only minor rebounds from 1980 to 1990.

Numbers like these are not rigidly predictive, but they provide a way of thinking about the downturn in the fortunes of public education in many communities. Heads of households with children under 18 are, after all, the core constituency for education in the country--not because they are more enlightened or civic-minded than anybody else but precisely because they are like everybody else: They think first about their own welfare and that of their...