Public schools in America are becoming testing grounds for a tenuous theory: that poverty can be avoided by making three choices in the right order.
Tennessee lawmakers passed a bill this month requiring schools to teach students this so-called success sequence: that if you graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and wait until marriage to have children, you’ll likely be “successful” in avoiding poverty. Utah lawmakers passed their own success sequence resolution in 2024, and states including Ohio, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Texas considered similar legislation this year.
This wave of education policy largely originates from model legislation provided by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published the influential Project 2025 agenda. It represents a growing effort to codify a particular view of mobility into public school curricula, one that suggests personal choices primarily drive economic prosperity. While the sequence enjoys real popularity across party lines — and to many casual observers sounds fairly innocuous as life advice — policy experts say the actual evidence underpinning its anti-poverty message is thin and vastly overstated…