Teen Birth Rates Drop, But Districts Fight Parent Dropouts
January 20, 2014 RSS Feed Print
Working with teen parents to develop a plan and support can help districts fight dropouts.
Critics slam MTV's "16 and Pregnant" for glamorizing teen pregnancy, but a new study suggests the hit show helped lower pregnancy rates among high schoolgirls.
The report looked at birth rate, Google search and Twitter data, as well as Nielsen ratings, to determine what effect, if any, the show had on teen girls.
"Our estimates from the data suggest that when the show came on, teen birth rates as a result of this show fell by 5.7 percentage points over this 18-month period," Melissa Kearney, the report's co-author, told NPR last week. "To put that in perspective, that is a third of the overall decline in teen birth rates over that time."
Kearney, an associate professor of economics at the University of Maryland, also pointed out large spikes in Google searches for birth