Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

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I think this can be misleading in the same way some charter school results are. The easiest way to improve a school&#x27;s results isn&#x27;t to improve the education provided, it&#x27;s to get rid of the worst performing kids.<p>Charter schools do this by various selection effects, and artificial barriers, like ending at noon on a Wednesday. So the only kids who go there have two parents, one who probably is stay at home and can pick the kid up.<p>The same type of thing is in play in military schools. There will be few-to-no kids of poor single moms. All the kids will be well fed and groomed and socialized. Is the education better, or have they just selected better performing kids? The article touches on this. But I don&#x27;t think takes it nearly seriously enough.

This got touched on by a few replies, happy to see there are some others here with actual military experience chiming in.<p>I grew up on military bases, and went to schools both on and off base for 18 years. All continental US bases typically have elementary-level (K-5) school, but you typically go to an off-base school for middle and high school. When you are overseas, this isn&#x27;t the case, you would most likely go to school on base K-12.<p>I think the article gets right a lot of things, but as some other&#x27;s mentioned there are also things it doesn&#x27;t catch. There are still bad kids on base, who do tons of drugs, commit crimes, cheat, steal, whatever. These kids are in every population. One huge difference between on base schools and off, is if you got in trouble at school, your sponsor&#x27;s (Mom&#x2F;Dad whoever is the active duty in the family) CO (commanding officer) gets informed. This can lead to a tongue lashing at the least, and at the most your sponsor can get passed up on the next promotion list or demoted. Kids would get caught selling drugs, they would get suspended and then their Dad or Mom would usually make their life a living hell for a while. It would turn most kids around pretty quickly.<p>The worst one I know about first hand was a group of kids on base in California (a very remote base btw) had a little theft ring of the base exchange (BX, like target&#x2F;walmart on base). The MP&#x27;s found out about it, watched them work for a while, then arrested all of the kids. They were high schoolers, probably 15-17. I think 4 got caught. The result was each of their families were kicked off base, no longer able to live in free base housing. As stated elsewhere, military families aren&#x27;t paid well at all, so now these families had to move off base and rent a house. Once again, this was a super remote base, and it was easily a 35 min drive from main base to the nearest housing off base. I will tell you the rest of our school suddenly got really well behaved for the rest of the year.<p>Once again, I think the NYT touched on most of the reasons schools were generally better, but to me discipline was a huge factor. You typically didn&#x27;t have that one shithead in your class ruining it for everyone else.

It&#x27;s not a high bar to beat, at least here in New Jersey. Nearly all of our school boards are non-professional, non-compensated elected officials, and a large percentage of Superintendents started their career as gym teachers.<p>The net result is schools that hire hoards of consultants to try to meet professional standards, but fail anyway, while spending vast sums of tax payer dollars. Covid funds earmarked towards bridging the learning gap from closed schools during the pandemic are spent on fancy laptops, new athletic facilities, sound systems for auditoriums. Absenteeism is skyrocketing, and teachers are not only not encouraged to enforce discipline, they&#x27;re actively told to let out of control students slide. Social promotion is on the rise, and standardized test scores are tanking.<p>We finally gave up in my local district and ended up paying a fortune to send both our kids to private schools. After an initial many-months-long struggle to catch up with their new private school classmates (because of the public school deficits), they are both doing much better. Money well spent, but I still send taxes to an ineffective district that spends money like water, and where educational value is dead last in their priorities.<p>They even introduced a course in Graphic Novels at the high school this year, while 75% of kids fail standardized science testing, and 60% fail in math.

If your kid is absent at a DoD school your CO will hound you. This makes a difference. There&#x27;s also the slight difference that the military has socialized health care. When your kid is sick you take them to the doctor and that&#x27;s that, while in civilian life small medical and especially dental issues go untreated and snowball into chronic absenteeism. Base life is really civilized in so many various ways. People violating the speed limit (20 MPH in housing areas) will be apprehended by armed MPs, so your kid can walk to school. Housing is often provided, even if it sucks, or subsidized, even if the allowance is below local market prices, so homelessness among active-duty families with children is practically nonexistent.

DoD schools person here, a major point left out of this article is that if you do something bad enough in school your parent&#x27;s CO will be notified and this can have real career results. In a foreign country you can get deported if you do something stupid enough to warrant it.<p>I went to several DoD and civilian schools, NC (dod), NJ (civ), Erie PA (civ), Okinawa (dod), NJ (civ). I would say the standards are higher in DoD, mostly because of standardized curriculum. In civilian world, the variance is very high. In South NJ things were more rigid, in Erie more lax.<p>As for &quot;not having social groups&quot; this can be a plus, looking at my civilian counterparts in high school. It has pluses and minuses, but being an outgroup in high school let me leave that stuff behind much easier on my way to college. It makes me an alien to most of civilian world, but many benefits.<p>Housing is provided in the military.<p>AMA. I am anecdotal, but I have seen both sides at all three levels split down the middle.<p>Edit: I definitely received an education way above my parents earning level, I am first to go to college in my family. I went to a very good engineering school.

I spent Kindergarten to 4th grade on Hanscom A.F.B. near Lexington, MA. I didn&#x27;t appreciate it at the time, but it hindsight it had lots going for it:<p>- No such thing as unemployment<p>- A strong community (Hanscom was also a small, walk-to-school) neighborhood<p>- The schools were indeed good (had several computers in the 2nd grade classroom in 1992).<p>There is a self-selecting element to it though; if you lose your job you&#x27;re out of the community. The line between personal problems and professional problems---I came to find out later---is much blurrier than in the &quot;real world&quot;. Also health care is crazy cheap.<p>I don&#x27;t know if it could, or should, scale society wide. The social benefits are nice, but the authoritarian bent isn&#x27;t.<p>Neat article though, gets you thinking.

The article suggests several causes: 1. Bias in population - these students all have families where at least one parent has a stable job, which isn&#x27;t true elsewhere. There could also be other factors, for instance maybe people who enter the military are more motivated on average and that genetically or through parenting is passed on to their kids. 2. Better funding 3. Frequent feedback to teachers and more methodical planning 4. Excellent racial &amp; socioeconomic integration<p>Is there a way to tease out the contribution in each area through controlling for variables. I suspect #1 is the largest by far, but I think this could be statistically controlled for partially by looking at children of parents who attend non-military schools. Curious for thoughts from HN.

Probably an obsolete datapoint: My parents were both children of US military and educated domestically and internationally between 1955 - 1966. Although my mom became an accountant and dad was a mechanic, they were well-educated compared to the average American. They grew up in a time where college was for about 40% of high school graduates.<p>It&#x27;s also obsolete but worth mentioning my grandfather, child of blue-collar people, still had to take Latin and French in a 1930&#x27;s Stamford, Connecticut public school. Although he was a mechanic, electronics hobbyist, and home-improver, he owned Jeopardy almost to Ken Jennings&#x27;-level. He grew up in a time where not everyone went past 7th grade education (12.5 yrs old on average).<p>I think there are 4 positive traits of military culture that civilian culture doesn&#x27;t appreciate:<p>- Excellence - doing more, striving, mastery, competitiveness<p>- Discipline - self-restraint, following through, doing hard things, completing a task<p>- Collectivism - other people are important, a team can accomplish more than one person<p>- Egalitarianism - treat everyone equally, respect the office not the individual

What&#x27;s unfortunate about the article is that it is so light on data, and heavy on assumptions. So whatever your agenda is, there is something to latch onto, but ultimately nothing to support it.<p>e.g. Prefer more rigour? &quot;Defense officials attribute recent growth in test scores partly to the overhaul, which was meant to raise the level of rigor expected of students.&quot;<p>Prefer more money? &quot;the Defense Department estimates that it spends about $25,000 per student, on par with the highest-spending states&quot;<p>For all we can tell from the article, it is just self selection.

I spent the entirety of my elementary through high school life on a military base and schools on it.<p>1. On our base, school involvement was “easier” for the enlisted parent. They usually worked consistent hours and were available for after school involvement. They weren’t generally working late and night shifts allowing time to be involved with sports and other school activities.<p>2. Healthcare was provided and for regular services it was consistent and available. While we didn’t have to pay for it, we would often spend several hours at urgent care waiting to get seen when one of kids was not feeling well. It was a little strange that when I went to college, I had little understanding about how to go about seeing a doctor.<p>3. We had a small school which allowed everyone to know each other by name, even if we weren’t friends on day to day basis. We knew who was enlisted kids and who were officer kids and who were staff kids. This didn’t generally color attitudes, just part of who we were. It was a good community.<p>4. We had access to technology early and part of what led me to career in tech.<p>5. It was a very diverse environment of kids. It was just the way it was and I never gave any thought to race growing up.<p>6. We had a decent house on base (1950s brick) with each kid having their own room. If there was issues, like ceiling falling in on kitchen, base housing fixed the issues.<p>All of this took burdens off of my parents and us kids. I try to provide my kids with opportunities I had or even more than I had, but it certainly is a much different environment to do so.

The best school system I ever attended was a DOD-funded public school in rural Mississippi --- there were less than a dozen students from the local community, the balance were all from the Air Force Base.<p>Every teacher had at least a Master&#x27;s Degree (pay was very good, and it was a very desirable school system to work at), and they had a system in place which firmly divided classes between academic and social --- for academic classes, one worked at one&#x27;s ability level (up to four grades ahead until 8th grade when that was lifted), while social classes were at one&#x27;s grade level. After 8th grade, one could begin taking college classes (some of the teachers were accredited as as faculty at a nearby college) --- if there wasn&#x27;t a teacher available for a given class, then arrangements were made for a professor to come to the school, or for the student to travel to the college.<p>Many students would graduate high school and simultaneously receive a college degree.<p>The Mississippi State Supreme Court decided that the school was inherently unfair since it provided a notable benefit to students who studied hard and learned well without a corresponding benefit to those who would not do so.

Most very unfortunately, I have to reluctantly agree, but for reasons that are completely hidden: My CS program design teacher, would do three things: He would write the subjects he would cover on the board, and then cover them, and secondly he would check them off. When ever a question would come up from a past lecture, he would ask if someone else had the notes to answer the question, well. Guess who kept the best notes? I also ran the study hall after class. Aced all classes. I finally got up the nerve to ask him directly: &quot;Where did you learn those three things?&quot; &quot;Oh! The Military.&quot; Turns out that those three exact things are used to 1) Write English essays, 2) Critique plays, 3) and organize client therapeutic meetings. etc. etc. etc. 4) organize code walk throughs and 5) multi team debugging sessions.<p>Yes, Jeff Withe. Diablo Valley College.

According to the article, the Dod educates 66k students. That&#x27;s less than half the size of my county. Yet, the comparison is DoD vs states, not the more useful DoD vs counties (or some unit closer in size).<p>I&#x27;d love to see how DoD schools compare against top-notch school systems. And average school systems (in case the quality of country school districts isn&#x27;t a bell curve for some reason).

My feeling is that school performance is denominated by the students and parents.<p>If for example, you took the best performing school district and the worst performing school district and swapped just the parents and students keeping the school staff, administration, and facilities the same, the previously best school district would end up near the bottom and the previously worst school district would end up near the top.

I went to school at Fort Gordon for two years, and the impression I got was that if I got in trouble, my parents got in trouble, and that would have been way worse. In public schools however, it never crossed my mind that my parents could get in trouble for something I did in school.<p>With the military schools, there is a huge element of parental responsibility and that&#x27;s why I think it made them great.

Public school teacher here. Public schools have been in a downward slide for decades. If you want to know what&#x27;s wrong, just brace yourself and ask a teacher. Alas, many people want to believe it&#x27;s the teachers&#x27; fault, and so rarely bother to ask the teachers. Or, failing that, people think it&#x27;s just that teachers aren&#x27;t paid enough and think more money will fix the problems (more money would be nice, but that&#x27;s not the problem).<p>It&#x27;s very straightforward to fix public schools, but, in my view:<p>* few people actually <i>want</i> to know what the problems are,<p>* only a fraction of those people will speak up and say something about addressing the problems, and<p>* only a small fraction of <i>those</i> people would have the wherewithal to actually push for the solutions to be implemented.<p>Fact is, good teachers are constantly being driven out of the profession. It&#x27;s just too arduous and heartbreaking, and every year it gets worse.

&gt; “The military isn’t perfect — there is still racism in the military,” said Leslie Hinkson, a former Georgetown University sociologist who studied integration in Defense Department schools. But what is distinctive, she said, “is this access to resources in a way that isn’t racialized.”<p>Racism in the military is a career ender for officers and enlisted kind of like getting a DUI but worse. What is more in the system is a &quot;good ole buddy system&quot;, where high performers often do favors for each other across racial, preference, and gender lines.<p>My parents both taught in California and I&#x27;ve been friends with many from DoDEA and here is a TLDR;<p>Please hold the downvoting for political reasons<p>-Engaged parents, most are NCOs, officers and civil servants<p>-Well Funded, like, $1M+ housing area school districts<p>-Low ratios of teachers to students<p>-All students are US citizens or foreign nationals from partner nations<p>-Great teachers, some overseas location have insane competition for teacher slots, some professors jump to DoDEA slots<p>-bilingual students that are smart seems the norm<p>-no problems with illegal aliens, or ESL brand new to English swamping 20% of the class particularly at higher grades like what happens in some parts of CA<p>-Some locations have DoDEA are the very choicest in the US military, so they attract the creme de la creme of overachievers competing for very limited slots<p>I&#x27;d describe the DoDEA schools as similar to the very best public schools in the US, but you can find other government schools that run similar programs to DoDEA<p>You can find eligibility for DoDEA at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dodea.widen.net&#x2F;content&#x2F;rlhgfasqfx&#x2F;original&#x2F;ai-1344-01-eligibility-and-enrollment-requirements-final-19jan2023.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dodea.widen.net&#x2F;content&#x2F;rlhgfasqfx&#x2F;original&#x2F;ai-1344-...</a>

How the results are measured? I imagine teachers acting as drill sergeants, perfect discipline in the class and children who forgot their homework doing push ups. The results of standardized tests such as PISA can be pretty high this way. But how many high achieving creatives, scientists, disruptors come out of these schools?

I went to a DoDDDS middle school in Germany. Why was it so great?<p>It’s the military, stupid. Things work as well as they do because discipline.

1) Military has minimum intelligence standards for entry and intelligence is a heritable trait.<p>2) Military members are required to show discipline and are held accountable.<p>Both of these factors make military schools different from public schools.<p>Smart children will learn with bad teachers. Dumb children will not learn no matter how much you spend on them.

An important thing to take from this is that if you pay your teachers well, and also make sure that all the kids in school have a house (since military folk get housing for their families), and at least one parent is paid well, then the kids do well (and don’t write run on sentences like me).

Military recruits typically are of the top 50% of IQ via the AFQT test, so the lower half is truncated, and IQ is largely hereditary, so children&#x27;s scores reflect parent&#x27;s scores. This could explain some of it.

Here, you have kids whose parents are employed (that is, not on welfare, can do their job) and the kids are strongly motivated to do well in school so they don’t have to join the military, like their parents did.

I grew up on military installations and attended some DoD schools. Some things unmentioned&#x2F;underemphasized:<p>Families PCS (move) extremely often -- sometimes every school year, frequently every few years. Some places have DoD schools &quot;on base&quot;, some do not, with students instead attend the local public schools. Some of those public schools are majority military kids, some are not.<p>DoD schools may have a consistent curriculum (not sure), but public schools across states&#x2F;countries certainly do not. Constant moves mean students get a fractured, redundant curriculum. (Comically, I recall learning about the &quot;Explorer&quot; in History class no less than three times.)<p>Some bases are located in well-off areas with great public education, many others are not. Students might find themselves one year learning algebra, the next back to basic multiplication. Schools tend to be stubbornly inflexible and will not make accommodations on their own. Extremely attentive and pushy parents may get weak accommodations (e.g., letting students moving full grade levels up&#x2F;down; something difficult to explain later), but it&#x27;s rare.<p>Added to this is impact of constant social upheaval + stress of parents deployment, lack of lasting friendships, etc.<p>This is all to say -- you would not expect this population of kids to do well academically! The fact that they seem to (as measured in these tests at DoD schools) should be really surprising, and probably has little to do with the DoD schools themselves. They&#x27;re after all only responsible for part (often a small part) of these kids&#x27; education.<p>---<p>My main guesses at the real drivers here are:<p>1. (As mentioned in the article) It&#x27;s a different world on base. Parents have a massive stake in their children&#x27;s behavior -- and the students know this. No one wants their parent to get an earful from their CO, and it does happen. (This is most pronounced at DoD schools, but also extends off base.)<p>Drug and alcohol use is exceedingly rare, due to the above + how serious an offense it is on base.<p>It&#x27;s true also that there&#x27;s a modest baseline of economic + social support. Maybe not as much as the article suggests, but it&#x27;s not nothing.<p>2. Simple reversion to the mean. The DoD schools are full of kids with a really diverse set of educational experience. Maybe some of the good experiences are even a bit &quot;sticky&quot; -- habits and skill learned transferring over to new environments, maybe even bad ones. Maybe it&#x27;s not surprising that that population wins vs. the baseline (where kids only get a homogenous, mostly-good or mostly-bad experience). - If the good skills and habits are &quot;contagious&quot;, maybe DoD schools even help spread them across this population.<p>3. The tests are mostly measuring the lower portion of the distribution. Well-off schools will have most students clipping the top end of the measurement. Many DoD students attend those schools! (At least for a time.)<p>This is going to seriously amplify (2), but also (1) and other things to the extent that they improve (or remove from the sample) the worst-off students.

The DoD is progressive in more than one way: unlike much of the rest of the country they also started desegregating during the 1948-1954 time period...

Get rid of the misbehavers and you get better results for everyone.<p>When the military can discipline parents for misbehaving kids, the kids do not misbehave.

that&#x27;s great, although the article doesn&#x27;t spill much information other than saying they&#x27;re insulated from bureaucratic institutions (a pretty good start)<p>i don&#x27;t see beating public school performance as a high bar, public schools are terrible<p>acton academy is the gold standard imo, i love hearing about other education paradigms though.

Discipline has to be a factor. Big issue in military families.

dupe <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37830605">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37830605</a>

What are smartphone&#x2F;ipad policy in these schools?

clickbait headline, the real answer is in the article:<p>&gt; <i>For starters, families have access to housing and health care through the military, and at least one parent has a job.</i><p>&gt;<i>&quot;Having as many of those basic needs met does help set the scene for learning to occur,” said Jessica Thorne, the principal at E.A. White Elementary, a school of about 350 students</i><p>Providing a stable home environment with access to at least one parent, proper nutrition, and safety - all commonly missing in the worst performing school districts.

Seems like maybe the US Department of Defense is better at socialism than the rest of the country.

If that&#x27;s the case then we really are up the creek as a nation.

The NYT is an apparatus of the intelligence agencies, and coincidentally military recruitment is down ... this is subliminal advertisement for recruitment. Coupled with war in Ukraine and incoming war in the Middle east, in addition to new recruiting tactics (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.military.com&#x2F;daily-news&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;03&#x2F;army-unveils-new-career-track-recruiters-major-overhaul-aimed-bringing-more-soldiers.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.military.com&#x2F;daily-news&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;03&#x2F;army-unveils-...</a>), expect to see alot more praise of the DoD&#x2F;Military in MSM outlets like the NYT.