Why The Pentagon run the best schools and the safest nuclear program

48 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by guardianbob
(governance.fyi)

39 Comments

somenameforme

10 hours ago

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.

Waterluvian

9 hours ago

I’m not sure this “thinking” on public education holds up if you look outside the U.S. where countries with emphasis on public education so consistently outperform the Americans.

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.

somenameforme

8 hours ago

It's not really about "emphasis". For instance the US is one of the highest spenders in the world, even PPP adjusted, per student on education. I think it's largely about educational culture and goals. For instance in many/most places in Asia there tends to be far less tolerance for disruptive students. Many places even have varying forms of corporal punishment, even when there are technically regulations or laws against it. There are also generally parallel education systems where people can, from relatively young ages, pursue vocational school instead of normal schooling.

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.

Retric

9 hours ago

An apples to apples comparison adjusted for things like Americans who have English as a second language or other countries removing people from school roles significantly shrinks the differences.

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.

almostgotcaught

3 minutes ago

> An apples to apples comparison adjusted for things like Americans who have English as a second language or other countries removing people from school roles significantly shrinks the differences.

"If I remove all the data that hurts my case, the data clearly supports my case!".

Those people that you want to exclude aren't transients - they're either current or future Americans which are called immigrants. So if you want a well-functioning democracy, economy, society, etc you have to educate them effectively too, not just the people that were born here.

moi2388

8 hours ago

Well, my country has public schools, but children are segregated by educational prowess. The smartest kids go to schools which are completely separate from the less intelligent ones. If you fail, you might get sent to a lower school system.

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.

pyuser583

9 hours ago

I think the election bias is as simple as: at least one of the parents has a job.

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.

roenxi

6 hours ago

There also seems to be a misconception about what failing an audit means. If you have an organisation spending an ungodly amount of money in ways it can't track ... you would expect all the services for its own members to be gold plated.

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.

RetiredRichard

10 hours ago

"This creates a “bit” of challenge. We can observe that the military implements systematically and produces superior results, but we cannot cleanly separate method effects from selection effects without experiments that will never happen."

The article keeps bring up selection effects

godelski

8 hours ago

I agree it is likely selection bias but I don't think it is likely for the same reasons.

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.

lovich

9 hours ago

In what world is the US military suddenly known for having higher IQ than average in the enlisted ranks?

wmf

9 hours ago

It's about the minimum not the average. The minimum in the military is around 90 IQ while public schools could have students with 70-90 IQ who are disruptive but technically not disabled.

austin-cheney

11 hours ago

> 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.

terminalshort

10 hours ago

The military training programs have exactly one goal and that is to train. They have the ability to set their standards and enforce them ruthlessly. Public schools have many goals besides education, have to keep their students (and more importantly the parents of those students) happy, and have no ability to select their students and very little ability to fail them out and remove them, and can be sued for anything at any time. It's pretty clear why military training is superior.

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.

austin-cheney

5 hours ago

The Army software developer is 170D and supposedly they are vastly superior at training developers. There are only two factors to this: better selection of students/candidates and excellent training formulation.

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.

rtpg

10 hours ago

Do military K-12 schools not face similar dynamics? It's not like the kids are who are in the military, right?

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).

user

9 hours ago

[deleted]

hshdhdhehd

10 hours ago

Everyone has budge constraints. I think this is a bit unfair to SWE. Of course sometimes you ship bad performance code quick and pay extra cloud bills to chase extra revenue sooner.

thaumasiotes

10 hours ago

I don't think you're looking at this the right way.

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.

jebarker

19 minutes ago

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

egl2020

10 hours ago

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

whimsicalism

10 hours ago

> 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?

thaumasiotes

10 hours ago

The military imposes strict IQ thresholds on those seeking to join.

That's the point of the Armed Forces Qualifying Test.

nitwit005

6 hours ago

They gave up on the traditional IQ test questions for the most part. The ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) is mostly a knowledge test now. You can find sample questions online.

There is still a section on spatial reasoning, which is trying to get at a general mental ability.

thaumasiotes

4 hours ago

You qualify based on the AFQT, which is a composite of four ASVAB subtests.

Specifically, the Word Knowledge, Paragraph Comprehension, Arithmetic Reasoning, and Mathematics Knowledge subtests.

Sample questions:

    (identify the best synonym for the underlined word)

    His record provides no reason for _apprehension_.
     [ ] anxiety
     [ ] change
     [ ] enjoyment
     [ ] endorsement

    According to the passage, some artists work with titanium because it
     [ ] is transparent.
     [ ] does not corrode.
     [ ] generates its own heat.
     [ ] can assume a variety of colors.

    One in every 9 people in a town votes for party A. All others vote
    for party B. How many people vote for party B in a town of 810?
     [ ] 90
     [ ] 720
     [ ] 801
     [ ] 819

    The ratio 36 : 12 is the same as
     [ ] 2 : 1
     [ ] 3 : 1
     [ ] 4 : 1
     [ ] 5 : 1
You might notice that this is obviously an IQ test. What were you thinking?

(Source of all questions, and the definition of the AFQT: www.officialasvab.com )

duskwuff

10 hours ago

DoDEA teaches the children of military families, not the enlisted themselves.

lmm

9 hours ago

While it's fashionable to pretend otherwise, the best available evidence is that inheritance is highly heritable.

zevon

6 hours ago

Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems don't mean that intelligence is inherited in the genetic sense. If you're seriously arguing this, you're very close to flirting with eugenics and the like.

Dylan16807

6 hours ago

> If you're seriously arguing this, you're very close to flirting with eugenics and the like.

Please don't be so eager to reject eugenics that you end up being anti-science. The idea that some percent of intelligence is genetic is entirely reasonable, not something to refuse to consider.

And there's good evidence too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

zevon

5 hours ago

I did not say nor mean to imply that genetics do not have anything to do with IQ or intelligence. Also, context matters - this is a thread about how to structure educational environments and about certain specifics of the military. Genetics are a factor that is going to be of limited practical use in this domain, at least as far as I can fantasize OTOH.

Dylan16807

5 hours ago

> I did not say nor mean to imply that genetics do not have anything to do with IQ or intelligence.

Please explain what "Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems don't mean that intelligence is inherited in the genetic sense." means because it sure looks like an argument that the genetic component isn't real.

Especially because you posted that in response to someone talking about heritability in very general terms, so your comment can't be interpreted as a nitpick about which evidence goes where. And I can't think of any third interpretation.

> this is a thread about how to structure educational environments and about certain specifics of the military

The idea being presented is that it's easier to run good schools when you have smarter students with smarter parents.

So the inheritability of intelligence over a single generation is critical to the argument.

zevon

5 hours ago

Maybe what I actually meant to express becomes more clear if I re-phrase and expand the the sentence a bit:

Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems does not mean that you can determine genetics as a relevant factor when thinking about how to structure education and if one is interested in the relationship between success (on whatever metric) in education and family trees.

I'm neither a geneticist nor is English my first language but I've always understood "heritability" to be a term that very much has to do with genetics and the Wikipedia link you provided implies the same. If we are talking about other factors/mechanisms that impact success in educational systems and that express themselves over generations and in family structures - sure, that's basically what I'm saying.

---

(Long) edit after a cup of tea and a sandwich spent over the Wikipedia-Link you provided:

I must say, I think that's pretty readable even for me as a non-geneticist. In the context of this thread, there is a lot of interesting info about "Heritability and caveats", "Influences" and "Environmental effects". I've highlighted these quotes for myself while reading:

"Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis."

"Heritability measures the proportion of variation in a trait that can be attributed to genes, and not the proportion of a trait caused by genes."

"Contrary to popular belief, two parents of higher IQ will not necessarily produce offspring of equal or higher intelligence. Polygenic traits often appear less heritable at the extremes."

The whole section on "Implications":

"Some researchers, especially those that work in fields like developmental systems theory, have criticized the concept of heritability as misleading or meaningless. Douglas Wahlsten and Gilbert Gottlieb argue that the prevailing models of behavioral genetics are too simplistic by not accounting for gene-environment interactions. Stephen Ceci also highlights the issues with this assumption, noting that they were raised by Jane Loevinger in 1943. They assert that the idea of partitioning variance makes no sense when environments and genes interact and argue that such interaction is ubiquitous in human development. They highlight their belief that heritability analysis requires a hidden assumption they call the "separation of causes", which isn't borne out by biological reality or experimental research. Such researchers argue that the notion of heritability gives the false impression that "genes have some direct and isolated influence on traits", rather than another developmental resource that a complex system uses over the course of ontogeny."

Since this is a US-centered forum, this also seems relevant:

"In the US, individuals identifying themselves as Asian generally tend to score higher on IQ tests than Caucasians, who tend to score higher than Hispanics, who tend to score higher than African Americans. Yet, although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that between-group differences in average IQ have a genetic basis. In fact, greater variation in IQ scores exists within each ethnic group than between them. The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups. Growing evidence indicates that environmental factors, not genetic ones, explain the racial IQ gap."

gsf_emergency_4

10 hours ago

>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

markerz

6 hours ago

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.

sailfast

10 hours ago

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.

827a

10 hours ago

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.

PoorRustDev

6 hours ago

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.