Brain Trust - Patrick Fagan

Patrick F. Fagan is Senior Fellow and Director of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute with the Family Research Council. He joined The Matt Friedeman Show's Brain Trust segment to discuss the impact of the breakdown of the family. Below are the "CliffsNotes" of his interview.

We've seen the national SAT scores falling. Talk to us about that.

Well, it's a gradual decline. Yes, they're continuing to fall.

We can see that the human capital is falling as well.

It's all related to the family breakdown.

When kids are raised in a family other than their mother and father, the majority of them are weaker adults.

Some would say that it's not nice, lacking compassion, and even bigoted to say that.

Anyone who denies reality is not being very nice, is being bigoted, and lacks compassion.

The work I've been doing seems to some people to be inflammatory.

But it's very dull, basic work. I'm gathering data and showing people what's out there.

By now, the breakdown of the family has been ignored so long that it's having long-term effects.

You can see it in the decline of the SAT scores and the human capital.

Public schools get a lot of blame; is it their fault?

God bless the public school teachers. They're doing very tough work.

They have to play the hand that's dealt them.

What can the teachers do to help?

There's two things we have to look at: long-term and near-term.

Long-term, what teachers have to start pushing for is parents taking responsibility for their children.

Pull that off, and the kids are going to thrive.

Near-term, they do the best they can.