50 Years after the Moynihan Report, More than One-Quarter of Young Black Males Are Neither Employed nor Enrolled in School or Vocational Training

The incarceration rate for young black men without a high school diploma rose from 10 percent in 1980 to 37 percent by 2008

By External Relations, Education Next

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Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the structural causes of the fragmentation of the black family has been so hotly debated that serious research on the complexity of the problem has been undermined for decades. Now on the 50^th Anniversary of “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” and in new research for Education Next, Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson with Harvard colleagues James Quane and Jackelyn Hwang, find poor black children today are increasingly likely to grow up in family units in the inner city whose dire circumstances affect every aspect of their lives.