Re: Practical consequences
The often educational Sherman Dorn believes that this recounting betrays an ahistorical mindset because “the early 1970s [were] a time when everyone was complaining about the misbehavior and immorality of youth.” If the topic of discussion were the state of the nation overall, he would be right. Rates of teen pregnancy were far higher in the early 1970s than they are today (although, teen pregnancy rates kept rising throughout the 70s and 80s). But the caller in question referred only to Douglass High School, and his claim that Douglass was a far better school in the early 70s than it is today seems to be corroborated by the HBO documentary. At the very least, it wasn’t then the undisciplined free-for-all that it was in 2004-2005.
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June 25th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
I’ve updated the entry. I’m not sure if the pregnancy rate estimates are as accurate as birth rates (the Guttmacher Institute reports add the birth rates to estimated abortion rates by age and then inflate both to estimate pregnancy). For the <20 estimates of pregnancy rates, it looks like the figure bumps up and down several times until the early 1990s. Teen birth rates decline in the early and mid-70s, and then there’s a sharp spike in the late 80s and early 90s before declining again. There’s a parallel bump for birth rates of women 20-24 in the late 80s and early 90s, but it’s not nearly as sharp as for teens.