It’s an argument that has gone on almost as long as we have had public schools: What makes children succeed in school—and what makes them fail?

In a recent New York Times column, David Brooks offers a big part of the answer: If kids have a chaotic home life, he writes, it is much harder for them to succeed in school.

Brooks mentions programs in which mature women visit mothers under stress to offer “the sort of cajoling and practical wisdom that in other times would have been delivered by grandmothers or elders.” If we want better students, Brooks concludes, the government ought to fund more of these programs. The next president, he suggested, could win on such a platform.

I admire David Brooks, but he is dead wrong on this. He is addressing symptoms, not the sickness: The sickness is broken and unformed families.

Instead of relying on a government program to fix families after they break, wouldn’t it be better to keep families from breaking in the first place?

Wouldn’t it be better to find ways to encourage parents to marry before having children, instead of telling them—as our cultural elites often do—that marriage does not matter?

Second, when it comes to families, government itself is often the problem, promoting policies destructive to families. For example, courts that force states to accept same-sex “marriage” are redefining true marriage out of existence. That’s not good for kids.

And many studies have shown that kids do best in married, two-parent families. Yet some states now force adoption agencies to send kids into the homes of homosexual couples. Continued...