GeekForce

The National Center for Family Patterns Research is a privately funded social science lab that gathers information that is specific to learning factors, patterns, and risk factors relative to the U.S. marriage rate trends, number of children in families by ethnicicity and locale, and a host of others.  It’s not particularily easy to examine, nor is it user friendly.

The Center gathers quite a bit, but not all, of the data directly from the decade-interval U.S. Census. The census, though it’s not, must be regarded as factual demographic quanititive information.

 Of course, the center doesn’t ignore divorce.  Rather, it pours out a full ream of information, mostly gathered from county jurisdictions; imagine the fieldwork’s travel costs; this continuing study goes, literally, coast-to-coast. 

Any and all studies, what pitifully few there are, gather a disgracefully miniscule amount of quantified data nationally (done by state governments, universities, individually examined thesis or dissertaion topics, communities ranging from population of 12 million (NYC) to counties less than 4,000, county court-generated, non-identity revealing information releases, or, most glaringly, school textbooks of grade levels, K thru doctorate-level social science.

 The center’s scattered-but-public research (that reads like a numerical fine-print dictionary),  is as unique as it is immensely valuable.

The bi-annual report (and twice, in 1989 and 1992, tri-annual reporting), like that of  most charitable foundations from D.C., is released in bits and pieces (chapter-by-chapter),  and the titles of the releases can be relative to the subject of this one’s myriad of social issues and phenomenae.   This group (an original sub-section, actually, of the Pugh Charitable Trust’s heavily funded) social research material, is certainly the largest (and, as I mentioned tragically the only), endeavor towards dispelling the maddenly and mysteriously elusive, yet definitively factual diary of the U.S.’s systematically dispensible and disposable building block, the family.

Divorce law and marriage attitude reform CANNOT present a mission without presenting raw empirical and quantitative data (statistics). Of course, as soon as I do that, my audience (of one, max) gets up and leaves or cringes or both. As much as I’m fanatic about devoting the rest of my life to raising awareness to the cataclysmic 57-or-so per cent mortality  rate of ALL marriages here, I realize that almost nobody gives a flying f about any of it.

The primary role of the Hugh Charitable Trust, it’s immense pressence constantly broadcasted on public television in well over 3000 TV markets in the United States, gets a majority of their funding from Congress.  Underwriting from it pays the salaries of the WFPR hundreds of fieldworkers, data compilers/IT, and printer/publishers. The group leans heavily on print, and the print, as I mentioned above, is processed in a way and at a speed that doesn’t lend itself for encapsulation electronically. I suspect this will change, though; dinosaurs all must get up and walk.

The Trust, though, is best known for stoking the bankroll of the U.S.’s mightiest of all labor unions, the NEA (National Education Association).  We applaud the nearly-all-lady union (85%, it was, in the mid-eighties when I got my certificate) for its lone role in funding and supporing the immense continuing cost to bring me (and you)  tireless research and relevant statistical data of America’s marriage dissolution
four-decade-long craze shaking our nation. 

Equally, we shake our heads that American educators and compensation-origin leadership equally have thus far choosen not to speak this unearthed truth to classrooms.  I love teachers dearly, but they supplement family incomes for the most part, and an amazing number of them traverse through their careers never realizing that the NEAs part in raising awareness of the topic herein. I’ve met quite a few educators who somehow didn’t realize (until I informed them) of the NEAs crushing and immense power that has handily secured THE most family-friendly occupation in America…

…which directly relates to the proud, relatively low divorce rate of teachers. We’ll take that as a victory for our educators.