The performance of U.S. students in the basic subjects of mathematics and English has been declining, or at best stagnating, over the past decade, and even before that. The worldwide, high school, rankings for these subjects has been established for decades now by tests conducted by the PISA organization in Germany. Several years ago, when the U.S. ranking dropped to 43rd in the world, and the U.S. powers-that-be, in a fit of pique, withdrew their participation in the program. It was interesting to note, at the time, that several states, actually ranked in the top five worldwide, if they had been considered as countries.
The U.S. has since rejoined PISA, and now ranks 22nd in the world overall (2023), but 33rd in mathematics skills. A pretty pathetic state of affairs.
However, while the achievement of U.S. students overall is poor, and has stagnated in the last decade, the country’s military schools have made gains on the U.S. national test since 2013. Even as the country’s lowest-performing students — in the bottom 25th percentile — have slipped further behind in general, the Defense Department’s lowest-performing students have improved in fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading.
“If the Department of Defense schools were a state, we would all be traveling there to figure out what’s going on,” said Martin West, an education professor at Harvard who serves on the National exam’s governing board.
So, what is going on?
The Defense Department’s school system includes about 50 U.S. schools and more than 100 schools internationally. With about 66,000 students — more than the public school enrolment in Boston or Seattle — the Pentagon’s schools for children of military members, and civilian employees, have quietly achieved results most U.S. educators can only dream of.
On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal exam that is considered the gold standard for comparing states and large districts, the Defense Department’s schools outscored every other jurisdiction in math and reading. Their schools have 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.
How does the military do it?
In large part they do it by operating a school system that is insulated from many of the problems plaguing American education. Defense Department schools are well-funded, socioeconomically and racially integrated, and have a centralized structure that is not subject to the whims of school boards, mayors, or, more recently, governors.
I would add here that that last point is very significant. Local control of curriculum and standards is probably the most significant contributor to the wide range of student performance throughout the country. I remember hearing from the Chief State School Officer for Illinois, many years ago, that rural school boards in his state organized the curriculum so that all topics related to farm work. The purpose was to keep the kids on the farms. Hardly a strategy for a country’s economic development.
Unregulated local control is also the reason that the U.S. has never had a national curriculum. Since the curriculum in most schools is subject to local, often political, control, this translates into unequal opportunity. Your opportunity, as a U.S. citizen, depends almost entirely on where you live, and not on your ability. I think that totally contradicts the Constitution and the Bill of Rights!!
I submit that local School Board control of curriculum may play well in local, and even national, politics, but it is totally detrimental to a nation’s economic development and its citizens’ rights to equal opportunity.
Military schools are inherently less political — big decisions come from headquarters.Case in point: An academic overhaul that began in 2015, and has stuck ever since.Defense officials attribute recent growth in test scores partly to the overhaul, which was meant to raise the level of rigor expected of students. The changes shared similarities with the Common Core, a politically fraught reform movement that sought to align standards across states, with students reading more nonfiction and delving deeper into mathematical concepts. But unlike the Common Core, which was carried out haphazardly across the country (it was subject to school board approval), the Defense Department’s plan was orchestrated with, well, military precision.
Officials described a methodical rollout, one subject area at a time, teacher training, and global coordination, so a fifth grader at Fort Moore learns similar material as a fifth grader in Kaiserslautern, Germany. It took six years to finish carrying out the changes, longer than the average public school superintendent’s tenure.
Another interesting fact of military schools. Today, Defense Department schools are 42 percent white, 24 percent Hispanic, 10 percent Black, 6 percent Asian, and 15 percent multiracial. Those numbers are roughly equivalent to the nation’s projected demographics for 2050. Is the military ahead of the curve?
Overall, the consistency of standards across the military is a lesson for the nation. School board control of schools should be abolished if the United States wants to fully realize its potential, offer equal opportunity to its citizens, and compete successfully in the economy of the world of the future.
