This seems like a clear selection bias. One of the reasons, and probably the main one, that public schools are awful is because a very small number of highly disruptive kids can completely ruin the education of an entire class of other kids. Public schools generally have no way to get rid of these children and their parents also generally don't care. These are also of course the kids that are going to score abysmally on any sort of standardized score.

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.

> If DoDEA demonstrates sustained K-12 excellence, the military’s technical training programs showcase something even more striking: the ability to take 18-year-old high school graduates and transform them into operators of extraordinarily complex systems, safely and at scale.

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.

For K-12, it's not complicated: every student and parent knows that a student f-up will have consequences for the service member.

> This same institution operates America’s highest-performing school system. DoDEA students scored 234 in fourth-grade reading on the 2024 NAEP, outperforming the national average of 214. That’s roughly two grade levels ahead. In eighth-grade math, DoDEA scored 291 versus 272 nationally. When 2024 NAEP results showed national reading scores declining, DoDEA was the only jurisdiction where scores increased.

How again do we know this isn’t entirely due to selection effects?

I went to a DoD school from fourth grade until my second semester of 11th grade. After that, we moved to the U.S.

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.

>The Army Corps of Engineers successfully operated small nuclear reactors for remote sites from 1954 through 1979. The Shippingport commercial reactor (America’s first civil nuclear power station) grew directly from the naval nuclear program.

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

The article addresses selection bias, but it doesn't do justice to just how strong that bias is. The military tests all enlistees, and the cutoff is an IQ of around 92 (https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/37491/is-it-truly-il...). If a public school could immediately exclude its dumbest 30%, things would look quite a bit different.

My experience at poorly run public schools is that leadership and admin change out VERY quickly because of burnout. The article talks about how military has long term continuity (8 year terms) but civilian have 2-4 year terms. I’ve seen schools where the principal doesn’t even stay the full year. In the end of the day, the civilian world is full of choices and people come and go at will.

ADM Rickover was no small part of the success of the nuclear program if I recall it right. Rigorous standards and a culture of safety.

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.

One way you can pattern-match this dichotomy between different parts of the Pentagon might be to look at how many private contracts are involved with the project, and how large they are. Certainly seems to be a correlation there.

Maybe they should rename it the Department of Education and expand the program of providing excellent education to all kids.

And why it does not have any PR department, only honest modest truthtellers.

I went to a DOD school for most (around 90%) of my life before High School, I'm happy to answer any questions as a student that actually attended elementary school on base in a foreign country.

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.

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Let me guess... There are no parasitic MBAs in the military, and increasing shareholder value isn't the mission. No wonder they can be mission driven, which is to be the best that a military can be.