Much has been made in the last few days about a study concluding that abstinence-only sex ed programs don't seem to work.
Students who participated in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex a few years later as those who did not, according to a long-awaited study mandated by Congress. Also, those who attended one of the four abstinence classes reviewed reported having similar numbers of sexual partners as those who did not attend the classes, and they first had sex at about the same age as their control group counterparts — 14.9 years, according to Mathematica Policy Research Inc.
This is hardly surprising. You wouldn't call a program "math education" if students were taught addition and multiplication, but not subtraction and division. And if sexually active kids don't use contraception, addition by multiplication is precisely what ensues.
Then a further explanation:
“I really do think it’s a two-part story. First, there is no evidence that the programs increased the rate of sexual abstinence,” said Chris Trenholm, a senior researcher at Mathematica who oversaw the study. “However, the second part of the story that I think is equally important is that we find no evidence that the programs increased the rate of unprotected sex.”
In other words, the program had no scientifically-measurable effect one way or the other.
If you're spending $176 million tax dollars a year on something, you should expect better results than "It didn't help any, but at least it didn't make things worse."
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