Who Runs the Best US Schools? It May Be the Defense Department - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  by androk1 ( 8059434 ) on Thursday October 12, 2023 @04:42PM (#63921249)

  Well funded schools and the parents can be held responsible for their kids = great school systems

  • That's the third reason. It's not enough to hold the parents responsible, you have to be able to hold the kids accountable.

    You'll never see a DoD school tolerate the sort of garbage behavior that is normal from students in the inner cities. Even the minority kids whose parents left those places will be held to a real standard.

    Try that in an inner city and you'll have no shortage of people crying "dat racissss" at you, including a bunch of well off people who want to virtue signal.

    • Re:

      It isn't just the inner cities. Those fine upstanding Americans in the Heartland think Johnny can do no wrong and doesn't need science or math.

      • Re:

        I can tell you don't have kids. Go to a PTA conference, have the teacher lie to your face and then tell me that. Then look on the administrator's face in that meeting, you won't see surprise or disappointment, what you will see is the, "oh no, not again" look. Because its the same 2 or 3 teachers that always have this happen to them again and again. That happens because that person is a terrible teacher and shouldn't be working in this job. But they are in the union and the administration can't fire th

        • Re:

          Go as a teacher and listen to parents lie about their kids. Every parent of a spoiled moron thinks their kid is beyond reproach.

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          Unqualified teachers working on an emergency teaching license aren't eligible to join the union because they're not actually teachers. That's who's teaching in Oklahoma, where emergency teachers make barely more than minimum wage and an actually qualified teacher with a masters degree and a teaching license is better off quitting to manage a QuikTrip. Or move to Brooklyn to help run the New York Public Library. We've seen both in recent history.

        • Re:

          DoD just assigns them to Fallujah Elementary.

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          You get what you pay for. You pay low wages and you get low quality work. Maybe ask the administrators how many new applicants they have received. The answer is going to be zero.

      • Re:

        Many folks in the US Heartland only think Johnny needs football [that's American Football to the rest of the world]

    • Inner city nothing. Try someplace where mom's a lawyer and dad's a surgeon. Those little shits get away with anybdamn thing because the districts are tired of fighting them.

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        Oh, they're not going to public school. They're going to a private catholic school because they'll take anybody, expel nobody, and frequently don't charge tuition.

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        Best one I ever saw was the very bright kid who was the son of two lawyers. Half-way through sophomore year he goes from straight As to Cs. Parents lose their shit, want the teachers investigated, want the school to fix the problem, threaten administrators, etc. "What are you doing to our child!!!"

        The band teacher opens his instrument locker and a bag of weed falls out. Mandatory 1 week suspension, drug counseling, and a possible expulsion for that. So his responsible parents threaten to sue the school out

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      Where I'm sitting in a rich white suburb, the cry isn't "dat racisss" we're all white, it's parents running in to defend their kids idiotic behavior and blaming teachers, or explaining why subject x,y,z is unnecessary, being taught wrong, ungodly, pornographic, not interesting, wahtever, and thus their kids are "bored" and (real example) breaking toilets in half.

      Holding parents responsible is important, but difficult to do in the wild, particularly in the south where "parents rights" seems to be in vogue. S

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      DoD schools tolerate all sorts of 'garbage', they are very big on knowing your place and who is allowed to do what to who. They have serious histories of abuse and silence.

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      I mean, way to show how little you respect children and the whole 'inner city' thing is obviously a racist dogwhistle. It's way more straightforward and depressing than that: Parent is a trained killer, and if you act up and get them fired, it's anybody's guess what happens next.
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  • Re:

    Oh you sweet summer child. These schools are not better funded. There are several reasons they perform better. First is that more money gets to the classroom. Many school districts in the US use 50% of their funding for administration and maintenance. This is an astronomic figure compared to other organizations who often spend more like 10-15% on administration even in inefficient organizations. Second is the lack of unionized teachers in this system. The ability of administration to get rid of bad t

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    • by tsqr ( 808554 ) on Thursday October 12, 2023 @06:16PM (#63921411)

      Oh you sweet summer child. These schools are not better funded.

      He didn't say "better funded"; he said "well funded". And they are. I can understand why you may not have read the paywalled NYT article, but if you'd did a few seconds of seaching you'd have found this one [axios.com] and you'd have seen this:

      They are well-funded, with well-stocked classrooms, including books and art supplies. Many public school teachers have to pay out-of-pocket for supplies.

      Their teachers are well paid. The Pentagon's budget allows schools to spend more money per student and pay teachers more, which helps retain teachers.

      Many school districts in the US use 50% of their funding for administration and maintenance.

      Really? Can you supply a citiation for that number? The US national average for school district admin overhead is 4.8%; California is an outlier with some districts spending as much as 20%. This is according to "Argument in Favor of Proposition 223" in this ballot proposal. [uclawsf.edu]

      Maybe the schools can afford more supplies and higher teacher salaries because of lower administrative overhead, but that's more of an assumption than an established fact, especially since the administrative overhead in the DoD schools isn't cited.

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      • Re:

        Here is a summary. [educationnext.org] And this is a rollup of the raw data. [ed.gov] Also I said many school districts, smaller districts in rural areas ironically often have less overhead. It is the big districts in the urban cores that often have the highest overhead. The national average is 40% overhead.

  • Re:

    It should be pointed out that it's not automatic that government funded services are the best. They are however the least constrained by "for profit" schools, because many private schools are straight up grifts or "Diploma mills".

    - The Art Institute (Heavily marketed in North America as the only way to get into Film or Games)
    - Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) (Heavily marketed to art students as THE ONLY way to get an animation job)
    - ITT Technical Institute (Heavily marketed in north America)
    - The

    • Re:

      >- ITT Technical Institute (Heavily marketed in north America)

      They have been gone since 2016

      >- PragerU (probably the worst example of a fake University)

      They have *never* claimed to be an actual university

• weird (Score:3, Insightful)

  It's almost as if a widespread cultural commitment to rigor, discipline, results, and accountability that is shared by parents, teachers, and administrators translates into more effective outcomes for students.
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  • Re:

    My first thought on reading the summary was: how much of the superior achievement is due to the schools, and how much is due to parenting? You could hypothesize that parents in the active military might be more likely to emphasize values like discipline, routine, "grit" (perseverance in the face of difficulty), respecting one's elders, etc. (Granted, not all the parents are active military-- some are civilian contractors-- but the percentage of military would be much higher than at other schools).

    One way

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  • Re:

    Conversely, it's almost like inadequate access to quality public schools, healthcare and food while parents work slave wage jobs 16 hours a day tends to have negative outcomes. Maybe we should be looking at modernizing our welfare system and getting rid of means testing for the basic safety net.

  • Re: Unity

    "It's almost as if a widespread cultural commitment to rigor, discipline, results, and accountability that is shared by parents, teachers, and administrators translates into more effective outcomes for students."

    Exactly this. Unity. It's probably more important than any of the other advantages. The military is quite good at taking an input stream of highly diverse enlistees and molding them to a strong shared culture of hierarchy, discipline, and dedication to mission. It doesn't completely grind down all d

• People always credit parental involvement for kids' school performance.

  While it's important, it's also true that at the high end of the income scale parents are just as absent as parents at the low end.

  The fact is that their school performance is better because they actually measure performance...unlike most union-driven public schools, where measuring performance leads to the slippery slope of judging teachers by student performance.

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    In public schools, it is about the parents. If you want your kid to succeed then don't expect a school to babysit for you.

  • Re:

    measuring [student] performance leads to...judging teachers by student performance.

    Also known as value-added modeling, [wikipedia.org] where teachers are judged not by how high their students score but by how much their test scores improve.

  • Re:

    And this is another example of that, I expect.

    Especially telling is the minority students' performance. To understand why this is meaningful, you have to look at what kind of Black and Hispanic people join the military. Although backgrounds obviously vary, the large majority of them are from very low-income, difficult backgrounds. They're the kids who fought their way through school to get a diploma or a GED (it's pretty tough to join the military without one of those) and joined the military to get out o

• by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Thursday October 12, 2023 @05:03PM (#63921301)

  The stereotype for military is a bunch of dumb jarheads. Nothing could be further from the truth. Maybe that was the case back in the 1950s when the military needed tons of people to just charge the hill and die taking a bullet. Nowadays the US military spends close to a million bucks training up each grunt. They’re not gonna waste resources on an idiot, they dont want an asshole to drag an entire team down, they don’t want to station a moron on a 1.5 billion dollar nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, and they dont need cannon fodder or warm bodies to clean tables anymore (contractors do that). If your IQ is in the bottom quintile, they wont even let you in - there’s literally nothing the military can have you do that’s useful.

  
  
  The military does make mistakes and let in unsuitable people, but it’s rarer than you think.
  
  So, on average, the people in the US military are WWWAAAYY healthier, more energetic, more motivated, and more intelligent than the average citizen. Is it any surprise that the kids from this group are well above average?

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  • I don't think any of that is relevant to a discussion about the K-12 schools. The vast majority of people with children in grade school are older than 22. That means the parents with children in the schools aren't grunts that serve for 4 years and then take their discharge, they're almost all career military, which are officers (people with college degrees) and high-ranking enlisted.

    • Re:

      That makes my comments even more relevant. The officers are the upper tier of a group that’s already well above the population average.

    • Re:

      As hdyoung said, that the parents are going to be all career military only raises the point that we're looking at a very different group of parents than those of children going to public school systems in general even more.

      So, it's been said many times that "parental involvement" is the single biggest indicator of student success. This encompasses everything from rich people hiring tutors to guide their kids through any troubles, to middle class parents helping their kids with their homework, to the poor f

      • Re:

        Then everything from your performance evaluations, the two tests, your physical fitness scores, time in service, time in grade, etc... All are weighted, tallied up, and you find out whether you were promoted or not.

        You brought up a good point that acted to help maintain a suitable learning environment when I was in school - if your kid was an ongoing discipline problem at school, your CO was going to hear about it at some point, and he'd "strongly encourage" you to get the kid whatever help he needed, and

• I served at two locales with DoD school systems..... the kids were kids like everywhere. The teachers were teachers like everywhere. The parents, though, had expectations of their children's effort and performance. Not for teachers to give out easy A's, but for their children to work for their grades.

  • Re:

    What do you know... some structure, some discipline, and some expectations, and the children do better. I wonder if the US should share these findings with the rest of the world.

• so that helps. Here in the states property taxes are used to fund schools so that wealthy districts don't pay for the poor kids to go to school.
  
  I remember moving to a middle class neighborhood and noticing my kid's school was much better. Buddy of mine moved to the rich kid's district and he said it saved him a bunch of money because the school just had things like pencils and paper & crayons that in his old (dirt poor) district he had to buy out of pocket.
  
  As usual it's expensive to be poor.

  • Re:

    You might have a point if we had t learned first hand decades ago that pouring more money into school systems does little to improve the outcome [cato.org]. You're probably getting the cause and effect better. In poor neighborhoods you're more likely to have people that don't give a shit about their children's education and so the institutions reflect that. The good teachers get driven to quit or go teach at better schools even if the pay is less.
    
    Baltimore spends over 10% more per student than the national average,

    • Re:

      I suspect that the Cato report is drawing some "lying with statistics" type of arguments.

      One of the issues was that the district got a lot of money and hired a bunch of administrators (some needed, some not) but there is nothing in the report to suggest that the amount of money that went into the classrooms actually increased.

      If you just blindly raise money and give it to the schools, a bunch of opportunists will come to provide services to the school for a fee and most of those will not be things that impr

    • Excuse me did you just link to the Cato institute?

      I mean, why not just link directly to the Republican Party's website. Save yourself a click.
      
      Charter schools do *not* outperform public schools [texastribune.org].
      
      And that's with cheating. The dirty little secret of charter schools I learned when my neighbor sent their kids to one is that if you don't keep your grades up they kick you out. Meaning the only kids allowed in them are the ones that learn on their own and need minimal attention. Meanwhile the public schools have to actually *teach*.
      
      Yes, unlimited money i

  • Re:

    Nothing wrong with property taxes funding schools but I don't know of any state that does it correctly. The state should take ALL the money into a single pool and equally distribute it to the schools based on attendance. No more rich or poor districts. Each student gets exactly the same amount of money allocated to them. It's pretty fucking simple but like a lot of our "problems" we don't actually want to fix any of them.

    This won't happen though because rich people won't allow it to. Not even a party issue,

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    • All equal funding

      You'd probably still want to make COLA (Cost Of Living Allowance) changes because running a school in the inner city or out in the boonies can be more expensive.

      For example, what happens if you make all funding equal, but an inner city school has 100 times the security expenses than the rich school? If the low class school needs more tutoring? Etc...

      This is because, surprisingly enough, the Democrats are pretty much just as infested with racists, classist, NIMBY type people as the Republicans, especially

      • Let's stop abandoning our inner cities

        That way we don't need all that security. Also, there's no sign that security does any good. It's not stopping shootings. It does give cops lots of overtime and gave us the concept "school to prison pipeline", so there is that. Oh, and it makes great security theater for people who don't want to do anything about gun violence.
        
        And no, the Dems aren't at all like that. Racism doesn't last long in the party. There's some NIMBYism, but it's more than countered by massive infrastructure spending Dems like to

        • Re:

          Well, I agree with you on principle - don't abandon ANY area, especially our inner cities. However, due to the racist policies and practices of the sadly not so distant past, the "ghetto" areas are messed up enough that they need major corrective actions - and I have no easy answers as to what corrective actions would work.

          Sending "everybody" to prison doesn't work, obviously, and is bad. But by the same token, just funding schools better doesn't seem to work either.

          I'm with you on the security thing, by

    • That wouldn't fly

      because property taxes are scary as hell since if you mess 'em up they take your house. You need a reason to get your taxes that way instead of just taxing income.
      
      Also fun fact, they're a wealth tax, since most Americans have all their wealth, such as it is, tied up in a house.

• Public schools have slowly taken on the role of "parent" and need to get out of that and back into just teaching academics. Everything else is a slippery slope.
  If people want a school for "teaching things parents should teach" then perhaps there should be a separate one just for that. Go to academics school in the AM, and "your parent's aren't teaching you how to adult, so we will" in the afternoon.

  • Re:

    Actually, they have taken on LESS of a parent role because parents want more and more control over public schools and what they do. More and more of this "I know my kids better than you" bullshit, when in reality most parents essentially know next to nothing about their children - even the good ones with close relationships. The other part of the problem is that people have differing opinions on what "parenting" means. Should parents control their children's outfit? No, but plenty think they can and do. Sho

    • Re:

      There was a newspaper editor in town whose story preference was missing children, specifically 15 year-old females. In all cases, the teenager would reappear a month or two later, unharmed. It was lesson on how many parents pretend their daughter will remain an 11 year-old for the next 6 or 7 years: That parents can't control how quickly a girl grows-up.

      Over the last 20 years, the demand for censorship has actually increased. This censorship is aimed at obviously, nudity and strangely, educational mater

  • Re:

    In order for that to happen we're gonna need some universal basic income and housing, or minimum wage is going to have to ramp up so anyone working 40 hours can rent an apartment.

• Many academic studies as well as intuition establish the correlation between school spending and student outcomes. The "Defense Department estimates that it spends about $25,000 per student, on par with the highest-spending states like New York." So, it's not a surprise that student outcomes for DoD schools would match that high level of spending.

  The cited NY Times article shows numbers for test score improvement over a ten-year period, but it's less clear if the absolute numbers show the same ordering.

• >" But she sees little of that at her school in Fort Moore, Ga"

  And if I had to guess it is probably because:

  1) They treat all the students the same- they don't pander
  2) They probably have more strict discipline and structure
  3) They probably inform the parents more
  4) The parents probably ARE more involved
  5) They probably don't pander to parent excuses
  6) They probably make sure the teachers are held to standards
  7) They probably hold the students to actual academic standards

  Funding probably plays only a min

  • Re:

    I'd add... the local church doesn't get a say in the curriculum. Nor does the local Republican political association. Racism isn't tolerated, and there is likely less income inequality - after all, all the kids have at least one parent employed in the military, right? Nobody's desperately poor and not eating properly. I doubt it's perfect, but I'd bet it's better than the average school environment in a low-income area by almost any measure.

    A school that does not disseminate nor tolerate bullshit, with

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    • Re:

      there is likely less income inequality

      There's definitely less income inequality, but it's not totally absent. When I went to high school at Fort Campbell, the general environment was quite good overall, but there were still the cliques of officers' kids that liked to show off their new clothes and often new cars that the enlisted kids' folks couldn't afford (with a few exceptions, most of us NCO kids walked or took the bus), and there was some definite social stratification as a result. Plus, officer hous

      • Re:

        True.

        E-5 with 6 years in, about the minimum to have a kid in school: $3,424/month. $41k/year
        O-7 with 20 years in, a bit old to have a 1st grader: 14,738/month. $177k/year.
        Note: O-7 is a 1 star general, what you'd expect to see commanding the base. Short of places like the Pentagon, you don't expect to see higher on a regular basis.

        This is about 4 times the income.

        A more realistic one might be an E-6 with 8 years: $4042, vs an O-5 with 10: $8701, knocking it down to a factor of 2. Still can be noticable, b