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.

The success sequence, explained

The term “success sequence” first appeared in 2006 when historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and sociologist Marline Pearson co-authored a report for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. They wrote that modern teenagers “lack what earlier generations took for granted: a normative sequence for the timing of sex, marriage and parenthood.” Their solution was to promote the “success sequence.”

The concept was later popularized by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-centrist think tank, and championed by researchers at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), particularly Brad Wilcox, who directs the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

Advocates claim the........

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