A reader sent this article about the schools run by the Department of Defense for children of military personnel.
These schools have a high mobility rate, as military families move; they have a high poverty rate, because military personnel are not paid large salaries; they have a large proportion of black and Hispanic students, reflecting the makeup of the volunteer military (where there is more opportunity and security for minorities than in the civilian workforce today).
Yet these students regularly do very well on the NAEP.
What are the secrets of the DOD schools?
Small classes. Equal resources across all schools. High expectations. A very involved parent body. Well-behaved students. Regular assessments to see if students are keeping up and understanding the lessons.
Happy teachers, who have “high pay, ample instructional supplies, plentiful professional development, and few student behavior problems.” Teachers say “…they are very encouraged and appreciative of the high-level of training they receive and continue to receive” And, “There are many, many opportunities for professional growth, and they have all the [classroom] resources they need. They are treated like professionals by administrators, parents, and the military.”
It all sounds obvious, doesn’t it? No Race to the Top for the military. They have respectful students and engaged parents and all the resources and training they need.
Are there any secrets here? No.
Wouldn’t it be great if all our public schools had equal resources? Wouldn’t it be great if public schools offered all the professional training and support that teachers need? Wouldn’t it be great if all public schools could say they have engaged parents and no behavior problems? Wouldn’t it be great if all public schools had small classes like the DOD?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Military families have a great deal of stress, but at least they have decent housing and medical care as well. The military also has a ethos of merit –it is not perfect but there is a sense that one can be recognized “by the content of your character.”
Might one secret be a highly selective admission? What percentage of students in the DOD system come from poor households? What percentage come from households in which the parent(s) regularly abuse drugs?
Oh boy, DOD school success is everything the educational pundits and charter evangelists tell us not to do or minimize the impact of. OMG- what to do?
The behavior problem may be minimized due to an unspoken ethos of you’re not going to embarrass me or the family. The kids I knew who attended DOD schools always let us in the public schools know how much freedom we had versus what little they had to act up.
teachingeconomist:
To my knowledge DOD students are the children of enlisted men/women and officers. If you live on the base, you go to school there. Re: economics – we’re not paying these soldiers and officers enough. Many qualify for food stamps. As to drug abuse, perhaps no more, maybe even less to the general populace.
Food stamps and the military
http://www.times-herald.com/opinion/Military-and-food-stamps–1843549
Food stamp use at military commissaries up sharply in four years
The agency reports that nearly $88 million worth of food stamps were used at commissaries nationwide in 2011, up from $31 million in 2008.
http://www.stripes.com/news/food-stamp-use-at-military-commissaries-up-sharply-in-four-years-1.160858
See labor lawyer’s reply.
Love and equality. That’s all the world needs more of.
“60 Minutes” did a story on these schools many years ago. And the secret is that parents MUST be actively involved in their children’s education. This is a requirement. And it has nothing to do with the “selection” process.
Can Public schools learn this from DoD schools?
No. We already know all of these things to be true which are exemplified in DoD schools.
The better question is “Can politicians, policy-makers, and voters learn from DoD schools, and act upon the lessons presented there?”
I’m not optimistic.
The DoD school students are, on average, much more like the high-SES suburban school students than the low-SES inner-city school students.
All of the DoD students have at least one parent who is at least 18 years old, has a high school degree, is employed, is literate in English, and works in a large organization where respect for authority is a core value. Most of the DoD students come from relatively-stable two-parent families and, for those families/times when one parent is absent, there is a readily-available network of similarly-situated parents who routinely pitch-in to help each other out. As another commenter noted, all of the DoD students have ready access to decent health care and attend a school that is at least indirectly related to a parent’s job so that a student’s in-school screw-up may reflect badly on a parent’s reputation at work. And, if a student screws up in school, the school/parent-job nexus as well as the parent’s respect-for-authority value make it unlikely that the parent will challenge the school’s responding sanction (either publicly at school or privately at home). Finally, there are few, if any, students in a DoD class whose parents are uneducated, seriously dysfunctional, criminals, and/or drug abusers.
To the extent that the DoD schools offer examples to the low-SES-area inner-city schools, the most likely issues involve student behavior — DoD schools have, on average, better student behavior than inner-city schools and it is at least possible that school-based reforms in the inner-city schools can improve student behavior. Most of the other DoD advantages over inner-city schools are societal rather than school-based and are much more difficult/expensive to duplicate in the inner-city schools.
At the “North Country” meeting of Gov. Cuomo’s education reform commission last month, we learned that the military base in Plattsburgh had for decades been exemplary in addressing learning disabilities. If this is true at most DOD schools, then the four out of ten children who struggle with learning to read (NICHD) are presumably getting the help they need. In the general population, that help is widely variable and usually can only be extracted from school districts after considerable expenditures of time and money.
I really appreciated the information shared on the DOD schools. Some of the reasons given maybe why many teachers apply for a position to teach in them. Another plus….look if they are assigned to teach overseas, think of all the different cultural experiences they would have. What is their pay compared to the average pay in the public schools in the U.S.?
“College and career ready” is not new to DoD schools. Some years back, the schools were reviewed with an eye toward getting their graduates into selective universities (possibly with ROTC scholarships).
Perhaps the Federal Education Association and the Overseas Federation of Teachers missed an opportunity to ensure those lessons learned to reached their peers in U.S. school districts.
Given the DoD success, is Dennis Van Roekel sandbagging the Equity and Excellence Commission? He doesn’t seem to be building upon the success achieved by union affiliates: “I mean, what do we mean by it takes something different to educate poor kids if this report is about fixing the system for poor kids?”