The US military's school system has long been a high performer among US school systems, but according to data published by the NY Times, pandemic declines in the test scores at all of the high performing state systems have left the military's schools the best in the country. This is despite having some unusual problems, such as students who move from school to school more frequently than those in any state and parents who are often away from home for long periods.
Their schools had the highest outcomes in the country for Black and Hispanic students, whose eighth-grade reading scores outpaced national averages for white students.
Eighth graders whose parents only graduated from high school — suggesting lower family incomes, on average — performed as well in reading as students nationally whose parents were college graduates.
Etc.; lots more numbers at the Times.
How do they do it? The Times offers these suggestions:
- The schools are well-funded. The costs are hard to compare, because the military spends a lot supporting schools in places like Okinawa and Germany, but it looks like military funding is on par with the top spending districts in big cities and rich suburbs. I know two teachers who switched from DC suburban schools to military schools because the pay was better, and the difference is even bigger in the rural areas where many military schools are located. A place like Fort Moore in Alabama has their pick of local teachers.
- All of the parents are employed. Not that military families don't have their share of dysfunction, including a high divorce rate, but by definition at least one of the parents has a career.
- Everyone has a home and medical care.
- Mixing of social classes; in military schools the children of privates sit side-by-side with the children of major generals.
- Mixing of races with less racism than in the rest of America.
I would add another factor that I think is important:
- A bedrock belief that with the right kind of disciplined environment even very troubled young people can achieve stability and success.
Liberals often find it baffling or irritating when conservatives hold up the military as the model for solving our social problems. But there are ways in which the military does better than the rest of the country in dealing with issues, especially poverty and racism. But, and this is a big qualifier, the military brings a lot of very trouble young people in line by 1) offering tangible rewards in terms of pay, job security, and opprotunities for advancement, and 2) being able to throw out those who won't toe the line. Hard for a country to throw people out.
9 comments:
"Liberals often find it baffling or irritating when conservatives hold up the military as the model for solving our social problems."
This might have been a pattern before about 2010, but the current Trump-inflected party is not that fond of the military as an institution, just like they no longer respect the FBI or CIA or district attorneys (and those hostilities date to the first months of Trump's admin and reflect his basic fear of law enforcement). Trump himself is deeply hostile to a lot of the military's values, as explained by John Kelly. See also Tuberville, Tommy; etc. The Trump-inflected party does like to talk about violent solutions to problems. But that old basic military identification was part of Reagan's and Cheney's party. No longer, not any more.
I guess that's true about Trump's people, but I see the older kind of thinking all the time from military types I follow on X.
Wheelus AFB school in 1957 was horrible for me, a student in the 4/5th grade, and for my older brother who was sent to the states due to bullying teachers who physically attacked him. 1999 schools on military bases hired anyone with a teaching degree, including my nasty Ex-Brother-in-Law. If these are the best schools it shows how awful our other schools are.
@ John
To be sure, that kind of thinking still exists. But your comment was directed as a kind of reprimand to liberals, no? And I don't think liberals are really debating those old-fashioned military types anymore. I'm sure there are relict, Vietnam-scarred "the USG is always evil" lefty types out there--we saw them in the runup to the Ukraine war. But history has moved on from them, as it has moved on from the old Reagan-Cheney GOP.
@David - I am mainly curious about what the military does with people and how, and whether the model has any wider application. Some military guys see the military as a sort of island of traditional and good order in a chaotic world. Tom Ricks wrote an essay about finding a squad in Somalia commanded by a 19-year-old corporal who seemed competent and professional like no 19-year-old he had ever met before.
So I think there must be something to it, and maybe I am a little snippy about liberals (including a friend of mine) who just dismiss the whole business as lies. But I am not at all sure that anything about the military can be made to work with people who refuse to buy in.
@John, let's face it, you're usually snippy about liberals.
So the main takeaway from this is that when you actually fund schools well; when students and their families have stable finances, housing, and healthcare; and when discrimination based on race or class is diminished; returns on education improve?
Gee, who would have thunk it?
/eyeroll
Once again, demonstrating that the answers people have been shouting from the rooftops for decades, and which many other wealthy countries implement as standard with resounding success, actually work...
...and hence why America as it stands will never adopt them in any other context EXCEPT military schools, because voters will scream and shout and stamp their feet over the idea of spending tax money on improving society - the only reason military schools get away with it is because the money they get from the government is "defense spending", which John Q. Public will always sign off on.
@Verloren
Well said. Imo, the unwillingness of the public to contribute to higher taxes is our major national problem. Even our political divisions have, so far, been less fundamentally important.
@David
It's fine, we can just raise the debt ceiling and borrow yet another few trillion dollars every few years for the rest of eternity, right?
As a bonus, every time renewal comes around, one of the parties gets to hold the country's governance hostage by threatening to allow a shutdown unless they get their chosen pet legislation pushed through! It's like a Free Space in bingo! Except it also imperils the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans by turning them into political bargaining chips!
Truly, I can think of no nobler or more civilized a form of governance than putting a gun to the heads of your own citizenry in order to get your way!
Remember - when an individual or an organization does it, it's Terrorism; but when a Senator or a Representative does it, that's just Politics!
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