A big report from the federal government and the nation’s top reproductive-health think tank shows damning evidence about the impacts of the last decade of sex ed in our country: the pregnancy rate for 15-to-19-year-olds increased 3 percent between 2005 and 2006, the first jump since 1990. The abortion rate increased one percent.
As the Washington Post notes, the uptick in teen birth rates and abortion rates come as the Senate is considering restoring $50 million in federal funds to groups that teach abstinence education (Obama cut $150 million from these groups). Those groups are exactly who progressives are blaming for the backslide on sexual health: how can teens learn how to make realistic life choices when school districts ban dictionaries that define ‘oral sex’ and an estimated 30 percent of American schools taught abstinence-only sex ed? Better sex education will lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies, meaning less abortions and less teen parents. Isn’t that what we all want?
So how does Oregon’s sex education shape up? The state passed a bill last year that requires all public schools to teach age-appropriate, medically accurate sex-education courses. Until now, the state’s patchy funding has lead to abstinence-only education groups like The Students Today Aren’t Ready for Sex (STARS) filling in the gaps by jumping at the chance to flesh out schools’ absent or bare-bones health programs. But abstinence only education is not considered “medically accurate” under the new law. Providing good health education to all Oregon school kids, though, will certainly require hiring new teachers and writing a state-wide curriculum. That takes money.
More about Oregon’s sex ed: conversations with Portland sex ed teachers.
Corollation is not causation
I can’t imagine this surprises anyone.
Abstinence only “education” is like teaching drivers ed. students the only way to avoid a collision is to never learn to drive.
When you say something like “Corollation is not causation” D, you are implying that writer is trying to link to potentially unrelated phenomena that simply have simply have similar statistical values. This is not that.
Not only is there an inherent relationship between a behavior and how someone is taught about that behavior (driving and drivers ed, as mentioned above), all the studies I’ve read on the subject produced numbers that are completely unambiguous. For instance: http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publication…
Unambiguous is still highly subjective. I’ll get right to my point – public education fails again.
I think that should be “policy fails again.” There has been (in the ’90s, in Nevada, for instance) more successful sex education programs facilitated in public schools.
D: You’re really really reaching on this one. And by reaching, I mean you’re wrong.
Spending 150 million dollars on a program that cannot produce more than a percentage point of variation from an otherwise identical control group cannot be judged on a subjective basis, D.
It’s just a shitty way to spend a 150 million dollars.