By contrast at these schools for military kids, behavioral or academic problems can have direct and serious consequences on the parents and end up having the bump into issues with their command. There's going to be an overall greater degree of focus on discipline in the school, as well as the households, and so on. In many ways the most surprising thing is that the overall difference is only about 10%.
EDIT: As mentioned elsewhere, you also know that the parent(s) in these households are going to have minimum of IQ that's higher than the normal minimum since that's a prerequisite for enlistment. So you're getting a rather overt selection bias there.
I guess at best it might be that there’s problems unique to American culture that makes public education not work. But that feels unlikely to hold up. I think the premise is simply wrong.
Basically the US education system is more focused on a sort of one-size-fits-all education with the only real differentiation being a 'normal' or 'accelerated' track (with some places like California even gradually moving against that remaining differentiation). This is in spite of having a far more diverse population in every possible way than other countries which focus on more of having educational systems which work to the strengths of each student.
So this would explain why these disruptions would not appear in my country (or to a far lower degree)but would in the US school system.
A surprising number of the absolute best schools in the world by those same criteria are US public schools due to the population and resources going to those schools. So the issues are not quite so simple as they might first appear. The US education system isn’t efficient, but it’s also not as bad as generally perceived.
The public schools run by the military are fairly normal public schools. They aren’t “military schools.” They aren’t more discipline-focused.
They do have the advantage of offering federal salary and benefits to teachers. That means they can be pretty picky about who they accept, resulting in higher quality teachers.
* Almost every parent had college education.
* Classrooms generally were small, with around 20ish kids per class.
* Facilities were very well maintained and funded. Nothing was ever really broken, or stayed broken for long. Nothing looked worn, equipment was generally kept up to date. We had our own bowling alley, swimming pool, theater, lecture halls, music building, indoor basketball courts and two soccer fields, one baseball diamond.
* There weren't really any kids with parents struggling financially. Parents were involved with the school on open days.
* There were some problem kids, but everyone moved so often, it didn't matter.
* If a kid ever did something bad enough the parent would get in trouble. One family I knew had to move back the US after the kid said a racial slur.
* You didn't make any lasting friends, because again, everyone moves frequently.
Basically, short answer, you went to the same school as the officer's kids, so the schools were nice for everyone. Moral of the story, send your kids to schools in affluent neighborhoods.
The article keeps bring up selection effects
Organisations with bad budget discipline aren't usually short on benefits. What disadvantages are there for them to provide the best conceivable services? Nobody expects them to be able to justify the spend.
Is it? I know they’re a lot more selective than historically, but I was under the impression that a low 30-something asvab score qualifies you for at least infantryman. Is that really above average IQ?
Simply excluding the mentally handicapped or dysfunctional drug addict parents would have an effect
These kinds of results often correlate strongly with parental income levels, which put another way "zip code". Yeah, the military isn't known for great salaries and you'd be right to point at plenty of rich counties, but how many rich counties are there to poor ones? We don't have the distributions and that's what makes this hard to read.
Despite that, we do have some distributional information. Lucky for us, they included the demographics! Taking what we know above, we can actually back investigate to at least provide a "sniff test". Looking at the DoDEA scales, they are pretty low variance in comparison. Unless you think Asians are genetically smarter than whites, blacks, or hispanics then it needs to come down to other factors, which includes culture. The culture will probably be suppressed a bit in the military data, as military naturally creates a more homogeneous setting, but some variance will still exist for this part as well as some likely imbalances in incomes and other things.
An important part of this rich correlation is that it ties very much into stable household. Certainly having active deployment will disrupt the household a bit, but some of that normalizes and well... let's be honest, there is a stable income and stable food situation at home. That's a major factor in a lot of households.
So the real question would be "How do DoDEA schools compare to national schools when you exclude national schools that have a significant number of families that do not have a stable income?" I believe that would be a more fair comparison, though that would really just bring us to "apples and oranges" instead of "oranges and tomatoes". The claim is that the difference is due to some organizational influence, i.e. one that is actionable (like the way teachers teach or students are disciplined, etc), but frankly we just have so little data we can't rule out a million other things.
What I found most striking is that last word: scale. Most people employed to write software cannot write original applications of any size. They certainly cannot thus scale solutions forward if they cannot author solutions in the first place. This is supremely costly for these profit oriented companies. The military on the other hand must scale because while they do not have profits or revenue margins to chase they do have budget constraints. The result is an organization that can do more with less.
As for software, I have never heard the military or government accused of being good at building it, so I don't really see your point there.
Obviously there are still different dynamics between an arbitrary public school and a school on a military base in Kanagawa for many reasons, but I have to imagine that there are similar diversity of goals and lack of "throwing out" the kids in these schools.
Just seems like the flavor of challenges that public schools face and k-12 mil schools face are a bit similar, except for a huge one: the kids in the mil schools are much more likely to have three square meals a day(etc etc).
My experience in corporate software is the opposite where it’s all about hiring/firing for the lowest common denominator. It’s not about being good. It’s about speed and not training.
I would say that the training programs illustrate that the military generally treats its workforce as the result of external factors. Someone else decides who will be in the military, and the military has to figure out what to do with them.
Companies usually see things very differently. They feel free to say that they won't train because they want to hire someone who's already trained. If that approach doesn't work well, they can put even more effort into searching for The Ideal Employee and taking advantage of the fact that, if you ignore the time you spent searching for him, his time-to-become-productive is so low.
How again do we know this isn’t entirely due to selection effects?
That's the point of the Armed Forces Qualifying Test.
There is still a section on spatial reasoning, which is trying to get at a general mental ability.
We moved to a good school district in the U.S, so the quality of the education remained the same. The most startling difference in a U.S public school was in how we were viewed by admin.
Compared to DoD schools, administrators in U.S public school system weren't too different from middle management at $corp. We were numbers on a spreadsheet.
A good analogy - U.S school admin acted like the kind of "manager" who judges you by the lines of code you produce and the number of commits you make. DOD school admin were the kind of people who judge you by the impact you made.
DoD schools respected our autonomy - we were treated like humans. Non-DoD schools treated us like cattle.
Hope author goes further into analyzing the diff between army and navy engineering culture, because it is clear that naval engineers built the foundations here :)
Post is titled Pentagon but how does the cross-service learning work exactly in the Schools
I also wonder if culturally DODEA is cut from a similar cloth and had a similarly strong founding impetus / strategy. The pentagon / DoD contains multitudes, and the culture of each branch, agency, etc are all different in different ways. Some for the better… some worse.
In general I would disagree with the posts that say they are not more discipline focused. It was a normal school, however if you were consistently a problem in class the squadron commander would be notified of a subordinates unruly child, and that would immediately solve the issues in class. I remember getting into a fight with a bully, and my military parent drilling into my head that this had career consequences if it kept happening. I believe the bully also had a similar talk because the next day at school we were no longer speaking or in contact in any way, which is a perfectly acceptable outcome in my opinion.
One difficult part that many people do not seem to understand is that as a kid you become very good at forming surface level friendships, but not many deeper friendships. This is a result of your class changing every month as parents are sent to different bases during a permanent change of station (PCS). One moment you might be best friends with someone who sits next to you in class, the next week their seat is empty, and the week after that it could be filled with someone from around the world who grew up in completely different circumstances than yourself.
One aspect that was completely different was that the DOD school was more egalitarian. No one cared who your parents were, as everyone's family was from the military. In the public schools and private schools I attended in the United States, other students focused a lot on what their parents did or what (economic) class they belonged to.
When I returned to the United States and was enrolled into the local public school, it was a nightmare. I was years ahead of the other students in all subjects. As a young child, I didn't understand why everyone was so undisciplined, and when there were problems in class the teacher seemed more than happy to do literally nothing. Students could be bullying classmates during a lecture, and the teacher would just continue the lecture as if nothing is going on. Where bullying was completely stomped out in the DOD school by the faculty, it was actively aided and grown by the public school faculty. Students who were more of the "political activist" type also actively harassed me for my parent's chosen career, and more than one public school faculty member made distasteful comments about my intelligence due to my families military background.
The faculty of the school also didn't like me (I think?), I was held back from joining the gifted program because my Spanish language grades were terrible. There was no consideration that I had never had Spanish as a class before moving back to the states, and was joining a class in the 7th grade that had studied Spanish for years at that point. Because my reading scores were so much higher than the rest of the class, I was blocked from checking out specific books I wanted to read in the library. The teachers deemed them "below my reading level" and so I was limited to a selection of about a dozen books I found extremely boring, with no option to read what interested me. I simply didn't read at school, luckily my parents took me to the county library instead. Being ahead of the other students was also disastrous to my study habits, I unfortunately turned into one of those students who could get A's without any studying, so the change to a much more difficult high school curriculum required a lot of adjustment.
As an aside, the field trips were also significantly better. In the DOD school once a year we got to go somewhere very interesting, like a real medieval castle, the white cliffs of dover to see old WW2 equipment, and even Normandy beach. In the US I had a single field trip the whole time I was in the US, and we just walked around the state capitol for an hour.
In general I found that any learning that happened at a public school to simply be a happy accident. While at the DOD schools it seemed to be the focus every day. In my opinion, public school faculty are actively the worst elements of the school system, with the student body being a close second. I don't think you can solve this issue with more funding, smaller classes, or any of the other often repeated "one simple solutions" you see posted around online. It seems to me that Americans actively despise education, and place no value on it, and that the people we let teach at public schools are the complete opposite of who you would want teaching in the first place.
Genuinely curious.
