America’s Best Schools
DoDEA Director Dr Shirley Miles (US government photo)
I once remarked at a somewhat crowded restaurant that the United States military’s comparative advantage seems to be running schools rather than winning wars. Turned out the guy next to me was a Marine and he took the remark in the wrong spirit. Rapid backpedaling ensued. But snark aside, the fact remains that the DoDEA schools have an extremely impressive record. You can find public school districts that outperform DoDEA on the National Assessment of Educational Progress but they’re invariably districts with very favorable demographics. The military schools’ population is decidedly downscale, “Forty percent of students are minorities, 50 percent of the students eligible for free lunches, and a 35 percent annual mobility rate.” And yet, DoDEA gets good results and has a much smaller achievement gap between white and minority students than you see elsewhere.
It’s not entirely clear what lessons you should take for public school reform from these facts since the DoDEA schools are run in a totally different way from public schools in the United States. But one lesson is that there’s a decent case that public education in the United States really ought to be radically different from how it is; much more standardized and centrally directed rather than seen as basically a local community amenity.
DoDEA does a lot of early childhood, operates a uniform six-year curriculum cycle, has a lot of parental involvement (the ability to issue orders to parents helps), and even though soldiers are often from low-SES backgrounds they and their families have access to very comprehensive social services.
76 Responses to “America’s Best Schools”
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July 18th, 2009 at 8:50 am
One thing I noticed when my kid went to a DoDEA school was that discipline was very good. One main reason is that if your kid steps out of line, the principle can call your commander and get him to weigh in. The last thing you want is this to happen. To some extent, the military is a big family where your boss can get into your family business if he thinks it is affecting readiness. They will sit down with you and talk about divorce, kids whatever.
July 18th, 2009 at 8:52 am
It’s not clear what lessons to take from the facts? How about this little tidbit that likely makes all the difference in the world….
Rather than molding the system to the children, the children are molded to the system. It’s the same reason Parochial schools excelled on next to no money, compared to the dysfunctional edifices erected by the NEA.
July 18th, 2009 at 9:27 am
As someone who has taught in DoDEA schools as well as in American public schools, I can say that the schools themselves are not run all that differently. DoDEA schools resemble high quality suburban schools more than anything else. As much attention as the idea that a commanding officer can order parents to get involved in their kids education, I didn’t see much of any of this in practice. What makes DoDEA succeed relative to U.S. schools with similar demographics is mostly (in my opinion) due to parents all having steady work and receiving time off to attend teacher/parent meetings. When parents of inner-city kids are barely able to hold their lives together, the kids education is bound to suffer.
Also, it’s interesting to note that DoDEA educators have a very strong union, the schools are not subject to No Child Left Behind, and there is no merit-pay system. It’s almost like it counters every conservative talking point about education!
July 18th, 2009 at 9:28 am
I don’t really know what you can take away from this, other than the things we already know. Either force the parents to get involved, or select the students whose parents want to get involved, and you’ll get spectacular results regardless of socioeconomic status.
July 18th, 2009 at 9:29 am
There’s always someone around saying a dictatorship would be more efficient than messy old slow public local democracy. Of course, after our experiences of the 20th century, they don’t call it a dictatorship, they call it “standardized” and “centrally directed”, with a generous dose of just being able to issue orders.
On closer examination, however, it seems very few of these dictatorships have done what was proclaimed. Mussolini did not make the trains run on time and Hitler did not raise the German standard of living in the 30s. We’ve had a “Drug Czar” for decades now, and fighting drugs hasn’t been centralized or standardized- in fact, 23 agencies nationwide form endless “coalitions” and “task forces” with an almost limitless variety of police agencies. They get their tips the old fashioned way- threatening bit players with 100-year prison terms unless they can feed someone else into the machine.
So, as kind as it is of Mr. Yglesias to spend 10 or 20 minutes thinking about how our local schools could be improved, I think I will continue to trust my own judgment, and that of my neighbors. I don’t see any benefits to a “standardization” process that drags our schools down to a Texas standard.
July 18th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Doesn’t it seem at least possible that the a group of parents that are 100 percent military has at least something to do with this? And doesn’t that lead to some uncomfortable conclusions? Lower middle class minorty students seem to do fine in base schools. But not in schools at large. Is that due to curriculum, necessarily?
So does an ideal educational policy tell other schools, “be more like military schools”? Or does it tell parents, “be more like military parents”?
Not to get all boot-strappy here, but that conclusion seems at least as valid as any other.
July 18th, 2009 at 9:53 am
I do think virtually all countries with successful education systems have a standardized, rationalized curriculums, so that everyone — teachers, students, administrators, parents, and the general public can have a clear idea of what is expected.
Many of these countries have teacher’s unions as well.
There is no reason national standards should couldn’t also allow space for local interests and for teacher initiatives. What we have now is as arguably as bad as Mussolini, namely the tyranny of various commercial testing and textbook companies, whose own profit trumps the public interest. The standards should be arrived at in consultation with disinterested parties, not people trying to sell things.
July 18th, 2009 at 9:55 am
At least one of the parents had to make a minimum score on some type of intelligence test to be able to join the military. The Air Force and Navy are technology driven and have even higher standards.
I also find the high school graduation rate odd. consider the parents are older, it means that the parents are senior NCO’s or officers. That means that the parents are achievers.
July 18th, 2009 at 10:29 am
The Army implements a virtual IQ test for admittance, through its testing regime via the ASVAB to select the members who are eligible to enter its ranks. How can we detect the role of IQ given the regimented nature of the international testing and its verboten status in academia? Hey, guess what, some social scientists have figured it how to glean that information, using data from the PISA and the TIMSS, which are international achievement tests.
A fairly recent paper to make a ripple on the education scene is that of Woessman and Fuchs (2004), titled, What Accounts for International Differences in Student Performance? A Re-Examination Using PISA Data.
Here’s the abstract:
“We use the PISA student-level achievement database to estimate international education production functions. Student characteristics, family backgrounds, home inputs, resources, teachers and institutions are all significantly related to math, science and reading achievement. Our models account for more than 85% of the between-country performance variation, with roughly 25% accruing to institutional variation. Student performance is higher with external exams and budget formulation, but also with school autonomy in textbook choice, hiring teachers and within-school budget allocations. School autonomy is more beneficial in systems with external exit exams. Students perform better in privately operated schools, but private funding is not decisive.”
From the paper: “As in previous studies, students’ family background is consistently strongly related to their educational performance. We find that the effects of
family background as measured by parental education, parental occupation or the number of books at home are considerably stronger in reading than in math and science.”
This does not distinguish your ideology from mine per se. Perhaps it is nepotism and white privilege driving these gains. Or perhaps, the differences are largely genetic, as I and many other “hereditarians” largely believe (Eysenck, Jensen, Spearman). So we have to make sure the start point of our causal chain also holds, that genetic variation amongst individuals correlates to educational outcomes. And they do, see Hernstein & Murray, 1994. So we have the “top” and “bottom” of the chain, so to speak.
Since most correlation coefficient estimates of the heritability of IQ range from 0.4 – 0.6 during early childhood, rising up to about 0.8 at adult-hood, it makes sense that the children of the relatively smart people in our military educated by those schools would have relatively better outcomes (See Black, Devereux, and Salvanes’ Discussion Paper, Like Father, Like Son? A Note on the Intergenerational Transmission of IQ Scores in SSRN).
Abstract: “More able parents tend to have more able children. While few would question the validity of this statement, there is little large-scale evidence on the intergenerational transmission of IQ scores. Using a larger and more comprehensive dataset than previous work, we are able to estimate the intergenerational correlation in IQ scores, examining not just average correlations but also how this relationship varies for different subpopulations. We find that there is substantial intergenerational transmission of IQ scores; an increase in father’s IQ at age 18 of 10% is associated with a 3.2% increase in son’s IQ at the same age. This relationship holds true no matter how we break the data. This effect is much larger than our estimated elasticity of intergenerational transmission of income of approximately .2.”
Clearly IQ is not all there is to life, seeing that you, and others like you can ignore this compelling data. Indeed, you were given your abilities by “God” (or Rawls’ ghost), Matt, able to use that brain of yours to graduate from Harvard to hopefully do some good with it.
I suggest you use that ability. So, it behooves you, like it does Ezra Klein, to “wonk out” to these papers before advancing more theories.
July 18th, 2009 at 10:30 am
What makes DoDEA succeed relative to U.S. schools with similar demographics is mostly (in my opinion) due to parents all having steady work and receiving time off to attend teacher/parent meetings. When parents of inner-city kids are barely able to hold their lives together, the kids education is bound to suffer.
That’s an interesting point. Perhaps schools are affected not so much by the median status of kids as by how many kids are in a truly desperate situation and require extra resources.
July 18th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Now wonk it out…now wonk it out…
Now get jiggy wit it! Now get jiggy wit it!
July 18th, 2009 at 10:55 am
IIRC, the military will not accept anyone with an IQ below 80. That is roughly 1/3 of the population.
Since IQ is highly heritable, this means the military gets a much more promising population to work with.
July 18th, 2009 at 11:06 am
> But one lesson is that there’s a decent case that
> public education in the United States really ought
> to be radically different from how it is; much more
> standardized and centrally directed rather than seen as
> basically a local community amenity.
I truly hope that at some point MY and his cohort (Ezra Klein, etc) go out and get some real work experience before they manage to successfully argue these large-scale, “centrally controlled” solutions into Administration policy. These are essentially the same “shared services” solutions that 28 y.o. geniuses from Accenture, McKinsey, etc have damaged/destroyed so many US companies with. Then again, MY and EZ are fit the recruiting profile for the dis-management consulting firms to a tee so perhaps this is not surprising.
BTW, the teachers of the US Overseas School District are all union members (used to be AFT; not sure if it is still them or the NEA now). How does that fit into MY’s “teachers unions are bad” trope?
Cranky
Sure is easier to maintain rigid order in a classroom when the child’s father can be sent to the brig for the child’s misbehaviour…. Not sure if that type of rigid order produces the kind of diverse, thoughtful, flexible little Citizens we all claim we want though.
July 18th, 2009 at 11:08 am
> So, as kind as it is of Mr. Yglesias to spend 10
> or 20 minutes thinking about how our local schools
> could be improved, I think I will continue to trust my own
> judgment, and that of my neighbors. I don’t see any
> benefits to a “standardization” process that drags our
> schools down to a Texas standard.
In fact, Yglesias has stated directly that (1) he has never volunteered a single hour at his local DC elementary school or any other (2) he has no intention of ever doing so. To me is a direct measure of the worth of his advice on how to run schools.
Cranky
July 18th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Cranky,
The best policy for nurturing diverse, thoughtful, flexible little citizens is whatever best teaches the most students basic literacy in language, math, art, and PE (in the wider sense akin to “health”). And by basic, I mean standardized.
The critical thinking and decision-making skills that are democratically relevant grow out of some very “standardized” aptitudes.
July 18th, 2009 at 11:57 am
I suppose it’s a Rorschach test that some people immediately say “The Army doesn’t accept any one, or used not to, who couldn’t score above xxx on an IQ test and IQ is highly heritable” and others of us immediately say “All these parents have a steady job that gives them time off to meet with the teachers.” I’m not saying one or the other side is right, just that it’s interesting which way our knees jerk.
Well all right, I will point out that my side has the person who actually taught at these schools.
And also that at least some people caution that within-population estimates of heritability of IQ can’t be used to estimate heritability of IQ between populations. (See p. 54 here, though I understand that some have disputed this article.) That would for instance apply to the study Benjamin cited about transmission of IQ; since it was about the relatively homogenous Norwegian population, it doesn’t necessarily support whatever point he was making about Americans.
But mostly I think it’s interesting how different people reached for explanations that supported our pre-existing views.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
This is a perfect example of the problem with “reform” thinking in the US school system.
While I think our education system can and should be improved, it is so easy to look at a school doing well, and say: “aha! this is what we need to do!”
The trouble is, a *HUGE* amount of the success of any given school has absolutely nothing to do with the school itself. It has to do with the culture and poverty rate of the families the kids belong to (the SES of the children).
I really doubt it that the DoDEA does all that much different from the average public school: what matters is the families the kids come from.
Which is a giant problem, because our current thinking is to increase charter schools and school choice, which means all of the most supportive families put their kids in “good schools”, and the rest of the kids are ghettoized into “bad schools”. The reality is that the difference in teaching is very small between the best schools and the worst schools: the overwhelming amount of the differentiation comes from the culture of the school’s communities, which is more or less completely beyond the control of the school itself (well, that and the huge funding disparities that exist between “bad schools” and “good schools”).
And yet, the “failing schools” are punished for not working magic (as are the *kids* of the “failing schools), while the “best schools” are rewarded for having done precious little different from the failing peers, other than somehow gaining a reputation for begin good, or just being lucky enough to be situated in a high SES area.
This is the fundamental issue of school reform, and so few “reformers” address it AT ALL. Very frustrating.
[Sorry for all the scare quotes, but I detest the loaded language used in this debate, as it hobble certain schools and groups of people right from the outset.]
July 18th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
As far as IQ goes, I would much rather teach a child whose parents are active and engaged in her education than one with 20 points more IQ whose parents are apathetic and uninvolved. I have worked with both types in my career and it’s not even close which is the easier task. I think most teachers would agree, and I think it’s telling that few teachers subscribe to the “IQ as destiny” hypothesis.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Thank goodness you liberals subscribe to Science and not Faith.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Rightwingers use the idea that all kids can be high achievers as a means to blame teachers and teachers’ unions for the problems in schools and also as an excuse for high unemployment.
Anyone who attended a non-exclusive school is aware that a lot of the kids were never going to be high achievers and it was clear who they were.
If the goal is to provide a livlihood and a decent living for everyone, then provisions for low achievers are required, and denying that they exist is not helpful.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Hello All,
Some things I would like to point out having gone through the DoD school system:
1) Class sizes are usually small, as are the schools themselves – my High School class at Ft. Campbell was about 130 versus 450 at the school I graduated from. The smaller number of students allowed the administrators and teachers to really know us and our schedules, so you couldn’t wander the halls with the story of, “it’s my study hour” since they knew what your schedule was supposed to be.
2) That ’social safety net’ and ‘at least one parent in every household has a full-time job’ combine to produce a very different social dynamic than what you see in schools with otherwise similar demographic make-ups outside of military bases. The conclusion then is that we should perhaps work on increase social services and jobs availability for everyone…
3) The actual curriculum and quality of teaching seemed to be fairly similar from my experience both in and out of DoD schools, so I suspect that the quality and content of instruction are not really that important, nor does the standardization of curriculum really have much of an affect (in so far as any school district will have its curriculum standard throughout its system.
4) That “35 percent annual mobility rate” is a bit misleading, since both the reasons for moving and the support for such a move are radically different between the civilian and military populations. I think that the disruption is a lot less than would be expected – and that the school system on base is much more used to new students coming in (here, you might think of all DoD schools as a single ‘district’ in the sense that now a common curriculum does play into the student’s favor.
5) My wife is a middle-school teacher, and he school is so overcrowded that the speech pathologist has to work in the hallway and some teachers have carts rather than desks. Everyone knows that this is affecting student performance (in a negative way), but there’s no money to do anything about it – so one thing that is missing from Mr. Yglesias’ analysis is a comparison of per-student spending between DOD and other school systems. (As well has how much of that cost goes to retaining instructors versus building new facilities – at Ft. Campbell, my high school was in two buildings, one of which was built in the 70’s and the other in the 40’s, and the number of students in the population has been dropping.
Anyways – just pointing out that the issue is complex, and there are more things to be done than just look at a good school system and say, ‘hey – let’s do things *that* way’, especially since there are a number of external factors (social and economic) that affect education yet are not changed by education policy!
July 18th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
By the way, I forgot to cite the study that allows one to use PISA testing as a proxy for IQ and/or “cognitive ability”, that study is: The g-Factor of International Cognitive Ability Comparisons – The Homogeneity of Results in PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS and IQ-Tests Across Nations (Rindermann 2007)
Abstract: International cognitive ability and achievement comparisons stem from different research traditions. But analyses at the interindividual data level show that they share a common positive manifold. Correlations of national ability means are even higher to very high (within student assessment studies, r = .60–.98; between different student assessment studies [PISA-sum with TIMSS-sum] r = .82–.83; student assessment sum with intelligence tests, r = .85–.86). Results of factor analyses indicate a strong g-factor of differences between nations (variance explained by the first unrotated factor: 94–95%). Causes of the high correlations are seen in the similarities of tests within studies, in the similarities of the cognitive demands for tasks from different tests, and in the common developmental factors at the individual and national levels including known environmental and unknown genetic influences.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
I’m sure there’s a huge difference in terms of parental involvement and attitudes too.
July 18th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Odds are that your judgment sucks. Not saying your judgment actually sucks. Just that, overall, the not knowing anything else, odds are pretty good that it does.
In the same way that conservatives try to blame the lack of high achievement on unions, without thinking about how to deal with lower achievers, many liberals use the “we need to focus on producing thoughtful, creative thinkers” as a way of avoiding responsibility to maintaining high standards.
July 18th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Donkey Benjamin,
I don’t really understand what you’re driving at. Is your point that we needn’t bother ourselves with other factors related to raising student achievement, because IQ explains most of it? It seems like we could say that IQ is important and we still have to find ways to raise achievement, which would presumably raise IQ scores as well.
As a corollary, no one doubts that height is highly heritable, but a population’s height can also be raised through better nutrition. It doesn’t make sense to simply point out that North Korean kids are shorter than South Korean kids because their parents are shorter and nothing can be done about it because of the heritability of height.
July 18th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
> Odds are that your judgment sucks. Not saying your
> judgment actually sucks. Just that, overall, the
> not knowing anything else, odds are pretty good that it does.
Again, I have plenty of real-world experience with the “strategic management consultants” who are recruited from the same demographic as Matthew Yglesias, their wonder-plans for standardizing and centralizing everything, and with the incredible havoc that such centralized-from-headquarters thinking does to the people who are trying to do the real work of the organization. In fact I think the badly wounded City of St. Louis School District had a mortal blow administered to it by just such a management consulting firm with ideas very similar to MY’s only 3 years ago, and now that the management consultants have hied out of town with their up-front fees the parents and community are left with even LESS than nothing to try to salvage. So I would prefer to see a little more humility and self-doubt from the MY’s and Tyro’s before I will take them seriously.
Cranky
July 18th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Don’t read too much into the free and reduced lunch statistic. Military housing is not included as income for eligibility. Additionally, military families have the option to shop at commissaries or post exchanges, forgoing sales tax. Obviously those families aren’t wealthy, but the actual income/expense ratio isn’t at all similar to comparable non-military families.
Also, if you are a high school student attending a DoDEA school chances are your parent not only has a job, not only was screened, but also has been constantly evaluated on motivation, performance, ability to work with others, ability to supervise or lead other people. Chances are they’ve been in the military for 15+ years, which means they would have been successful at getting promotions. People who don’t get promoted aren’t asked to stay in for 15+ years. So information about high school graduation rates are a little misleading. Kids whose parents didn’t make the cut aren’t included in the figure.
And of course, as others have mentioned, there are a whole host of activities and community services available on military bases. Military bases are essentially gated communities where everyone is sorted out in a hierarchy. Families might not have a lot of income, but they have incredible benefits and safe communities compared to civilians with similar incomes. Its like comparing low-income students in Finland to low-income students in the USA.
One last thing to consider is that the military is one of the least racist and most integrated institutions in America. To the extent that racism impedes learning, academic progress, and achievement, you are going to see far less of it in DoDEA schools. DoDEA might have a similar proportion of minorities in their system as compared to New York State, but I would bet a million dollars that the distribution of students isn’t as skewed as it would be in certain NY schools. You simply aren’t going to see segregated military schools.
July 18th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
To be allowed to enlist in the military, you must pass Armed Forces Qualification Test, which is an extremely g-loaded cognitive test that functions very much like an IQ test.
The IQ average for enlistees (male and female) in 1998 across all services would be about 107 for white enlistees, 102 for blacks, and 103 for Hispanics, versus roughly 100 for the total white population, 85 for blacks and 90 for Hispanics.
That shows the impressive patriotism of minorities who possess more options in life than the average. A little known fact is that the average black enlistee comes from a home with an income above the national average for blacks, and almost identical to the average income among white enlistees.
http://www.defenselink.mil/prhome/poprep98/html/2-afqt.html
July 18th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Moreover, the military constantly discharges individuals for drug use, insubordination, laziness, criminality, obesity, and just generally being a screw-up. So, military parents rank higher than average on the Conscientousness, the other key factor along with IQ. Also, it runs an up-or-out system where it discharges people who are not actively messing up but aren’t successfully progressing toward higher rank.
So, the parents of students in Defense Department schools are selected from the less messed-up half of the population.
The one downside for the DoD schools is that the constant moving around of military families notoriously causes “military brat” syndrome.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
serialcatowner @ 5: Centralization and dictatorship are completely different things. It is possible to imagine governments which are dictatorships but decentralized (say, if every single Mayor in the United States was a dictator) and it’s possible to imagine governments which are centralized but democratic. (Such as, say, France.)
July 18th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
“The military schools’ population is decidedly downscale, “Forty percent of students are minorities, 50 percent of the students eligible for free lunches, and a 35 percent annual mobility rate.” And yet, DoDEA gets good results and has a much smaller achievement gap between white and minority students than you see elsewhere.”
I’m sure Matt assumes anybody who enlists in the military must be a loser from the bottom of society, but that’s a Daltonesque bias.
Ever since the Korean War, the military has, by law, been prevented from allowing people who score in the bottom 10% of the population in IQ (roughly 80 or lower) from enlisting. This law eliminates about 30% of the black population. (Robert McNamara got around this law for awhile with his Project 100,000 during the Vietnam War, but it worked out about as well most of McNamara’s bright ideas, and the Joint Chiefs vowed never again.)
During the best years for recruiting, 1992-2004, after the downsizing at the end of the Cold War and before people wised up to how rotten the Iraq War was, only 1% of enlistees were allowed in with a score below the 30th percentile on the AFQT, which is the equivalent of a 92 IQ, well above the national average for blacks.
As the 1994 book All that We Can Be by prominent sociologists Charles Moskos and John Sibley Butler pointed out, black enlistees in the Army tend to be drawn from quite respectable lower middle class families, often ones with a multigeneration history of enlistment and long term service as sergeants.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
The article mentioned partnering with local schools. Do we have any data on the performance of military children at public schools or conversely non-military children at schools whose methods parellel the DoDEA?
In line with some other comments my baseline assumption is that we have a radically skewed sample here. The children of military parents are likely to differ on a wide range of genetic factors and of course the culture is much different from civilian.
Given that there is extensive evidence that genetics and culture matter it is hard to believe we are not getting biased results.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Steve Sailer,
Please see my question at #25. You sight a lot of information that basically says that a student’s background counts for a lot when it comes to educational achievement. Does that mean that it accounts for everything and efforts to raise achievement are in vain? Is the analogy of the increasing average height (a trait at least as heritable as IQ) in places like South Korea and Japan due to better nutrition over the last 50 years appropriate or way off base?
July 18th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Nonetheless, it would definitely be worth inquiring into pedagogical differences between DoD schools and typical public schools.
The military has a tradition of putting its best minds to work figuring out how to simplify complicated systems so that people with 95 IQs can learn them and implement them under stress (e.g., with bullets flying around).
In contrast, the education industry has a long tradition of over-complicating and over-abstracting relatively simple tasks (such as teaching the times tables). Typically, Ed School professors with 115 IQs pick up esoteric concepts from professors with 130 IQs in harder social science departments, then teach them to their 100 IQ students who go on to be public school teachers, who are then supposed to teach them to their 85 IQ inner city school students. Thus, the incredibly pretentious academic jargon that teachers get indoctrinated in, and its irrelevance to the problems of training 85 IQ students.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
NS in Nova writes:
Steve Sailer,
Please see my question at #25. You sight a lot of information that basically says that a student’s background counts for a lot when it comes to educational achievement. Does that mean that it accounts for everything and efforts to raise achievement are in vain?
We can learn a lot from how the military does things. To enlist in the military, you must take the enormous ten-part ASVAB test, which consists of a subset comprising the core four-part AFQT test, which is functionally a first-rate IQ test. (Much of the data in “The Bell Curve” was supplied to Murray and Herrnstein by military psychometricians who had paid to give the AFQT in 1980 to the 12,000 young people in the nationally representative National Longitudinal Study of Youth, which has continued to track their progress through life for 29 years now.)
The other six parts of the ASVAB superset test specific skills such as knowledge of auto repair.
The military carefully studies each recruit’s test scores to determine what kind of training to give him. For example, enlistees who tend to just barely pass the IQ minimum tend to be sent to truck driving training, while higher scorers are more likely to be sent to, say, avionics training.
In other words, the military uses old-fashioned IQ testing and tracking of the kind that was dominant in U.S. schools after the Sputnik scare, but that fell out of favor later in the 1960s and 1970s because of “disparate impact” by race.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Think of a water glass.
Different people get different size glasses based on genetics. So that determines the upper and lower bounds of IQ for each person.
How full that glass gets filled depends on environmental factors such as nutrition, amount of human contact in infancy, exposure to learning opportunities (very important for language), and especially peer group exposures.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
In general, pundits like Matt have no clue how much the U.S. military relies on IQ testing. It’s not politically correct, so the military tries to keep a low profile on it, but it’s an overwhelming reality.
For example, the military’s AFQT is the main IQ test relied upon in The Bell Curve. I spent two hours talking to the retired head of psychometrics for one branch of the military who had given to Charles Murray the military’s data that makes up the central section of The Bell Curve, and he was very pleased that the book accurately represents the military’s experience with predictive usefulness of IQ testing.
A good introduction from a liberal source is a 2005 article, “The Dumbing-Down of the U.S. Army: And some modest proposals for countering the trend,” by Slate’s Fred Kaplan.
http://www.slate.com/id/2127487/
The Slate article criticizes the U.S. Army’s new plan to get more recruit by lowering its high school graduation and IQ standards.
“Further evidence that the war in Iraq is wrecking the U.S. Army: Recruiters, having failed to meet their enlistment targets, are now being authorized to pursue high-school dropouts and (not to mince words) stupid people… More than that, the Los Angeles Times reports today that 4 percent of recruits will be allowed to score as low as in the 16th to 30th percentile—a grouping known as “Category IV”—on the U.S. Armed Forces’ mental-aptitude exam.
“… As of 2003 (the last year for which official data are available), just 6 percent of active-duty Army soldiers lacked a high-school diploma or a GED. Just 1 percent scored in Category IV on the aptitude test.
“Not since the mid-1980s—when the military brass first decided to reject low-scoring applicants—have the all-volunteer Army’s standards been allowed to dip so steeply.”
[Well, to be precise, Congress banned the enlistment of anyone scoring below the 10th percentile back in the early 1950s because of documented trouble in training and accident prevention among people with IQs of 80 or less. In 1992, the military virtually stopped accepting new enlistees below the 30th percentile (IQs below 92, which is about half a standard deviation above the African-American median). Since the end of the Cold War, only 1% of new enlistees have scored below the 30th percentile.]
“Several career officers are dismayed by this new policy—not least because it reverses the progress that has been made these past two decades in the buildup of a professional army.
“In the mid- to late-1970s—in the wake of the Vietnam War, the height of popular disenchantment with the military, and the start of the all-volunteer armed forces—as many as half of U.S. soldiers hadn’t finished high school, and as many as one-third were Category IV.
[One of the little-known reasons for the notoriously low quality of enlistees during the Carter Era was the "Misnorming" fiasco: The military's norms for scoring applicant's entrance tests results on the new ASVAB (the 10 subtest exam of which four were the traditional highly g-loaded IQ-like tests, long known as the AFQT, the ones used in The Bell Curve) were set wrong (too easy), and thus the military let in many applicants from 1976-1980 that they would have rejected if they had known how stupid they really were. Misnorming was corrected in 1980, then Reagan pushed through pay raises for soldiers and boosted patriotism. The test scores and subsequent on-the-job performance of recruits went way up, then reached a peak in the post-Cold War era when the military downsized and shed a lot of lesser talent. The average IQ of new enlistees (not even counting officers) has been over 100 for at least the last 13 years.]
“The new policy will leave the Army’s ranks in far better shape than they were back then. But officers, analysts, and many recruiters are disturbed by the trend, the lowering of a barrier, the reversal of an accomplishment.
“Should they be disturbed? Is it important that nearly all our soldiers have a diploma or score better than abysmally on an aptitude test? Yes and yes, for at least two reasons.
“The first reason is sociopolitical. Not many nations have an all-volunteer army, and the concept could not be sustained if the burden of service fell entirely on the lowest classes—on those who joined the military because they couldn’t find jobs elsewhere. The inequity would be intensified—rendered impossible to ignore—if the face of this lower-class army were disproportionately black. This was precisely the kind of military we had in the early days of the all-volunteer force: overwhelmingly poor, uneducated, and African-American. But this is no longer the case. The racial mix, reading levels, and aptitude scores of today’s Army are not much different from those of 18-to-24-year-olds in American society as a whole.”
“But the point of an army is to fight wars, not to promote social equality. So, the more critical reason to lament the Army’s declining standards is their likely impact on military skills. This is a high-tech army, where even tank crews and artillery spotters deal with digital displays and computerized commands. Low-tech missions, too—foot soldiers on patrol in the sorts of “stability operations” they’re conducting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia—require a degree of alertness, sensitivity, initiative, even rudimentary foreign-language skills, that goes beyond a rote ability to follow orders and shoot straight.”
July 18th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
I went to DOD schools during middle school and some of high school. I have also been to public schools and so can compare the merits of each. DoD schools are in fact remarkably flexible. It is generally understood that the students there move around often and so are at different levels of education(since they come from different school systems). The wage gap among parents at these schools is dramatic and so much is done to even things out. School uniforms are mandatory and many kids receive free or reduced price lunches. These things set DoD schools apart, but in all honesty the living conditions of the students and the students themselves are what make these schools exceptional.
Each student not only has at least one parent employed, but at least one parent in the military. Because of this, the kids live unusually structured lives. Also worth noting, each student goes home to a decent house in a safe neighborhood full of kids of all ages, everyone has health care, and if I remember correctly breakfast was offered at the beginning of each school day. The students move around often and seem more capable of dealing with adverse situations, and often times are very well-rounded, even worldly. Also worth noting, parents are more involved with the child’s education. Many students aspire to be military men and women, but I also noticed that many parents wanted their children prepared for a non-military life. I had friends who were only allowed to watch the History Channel and other educational networks, could only play video games for a limited amount of time each day, and couldn’t go outside until their homework was finished.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Also, whatever their socioeconomic background, most military families tend to have very “middle-class” values — hard work, discipline, order — that probably mix will with DoD schools’ standards.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
The military’s experience with IQ testing offers a highly useful perspective on the Ricci case and Judge Sotomayor’s not very well-informed thinking about testing.
The key point is that the military doesn’t use much in the way of racial preferences in enlistments. From 1992-2004, practically everybody had to have an IQ of at least 92 just to enlist, even though the AFQT has a gigantic Disparate Impact: an IQ of 92 is only about the 30th percentile among whites while it’s about the 68th percentile among blacks.
If the courts didn’t offer so much deference to the military, the Pentagon would be in trouble on the EEOC’s notorious Four-Fifths rule that says that the lowest scoring racial group on any employment test must pass at least 80% as well as the highest scoring group, or the EEOC will want to know the reason why. (Of course, even with burden of proof under the strict standard of “business necessity,” the Pentagon could successfully defend the AFQT in court against a discrimination charge because it has done countless studies correlating AFQT scores to on-the-job performance in the military.)
But because of the relatively colorblind use of the AFQT in determining enlistment eligibility, the IQ gap among enlisted personnel is only five points, one-third of the 15 point IQ racial gap in the general population. Thus, the military only uses modest racial preferences in promotion’s above the rank of private.
In contrast, fire departments that aren’t allowed to use a colorblind and effective initial hiring test end up with an entry-level workforce with IQ gaps closer to the national average. Then, they must use heavy-handed racial preferences in order to avoid disparate impact in promotions.
For example, to meet the EEOC’s Four-Fifth’s Rule, Chicago recently gave out an entry level firefighter’s test that was passed by 17,000 out of 20,000 test-takers, with the new hires to be chosen by “lottery” from among the top 85% of the people who walked in off the street because they wanted a job as a fireman. Under this kind of system, the minimum passing IQ is somewhere around 74.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Isn’t it striking what an informative discussion we can engage in as long as the know-nothings don’t start screeching “Racist!”?
July 18th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Awareness of the military’s heavy reliance on written tests also points out the ignorant class bias in so much liberal commentary on the Ricci decision. Obviously, the military and firefighting require fairly comparable skills. Yet, consider all the complaints that 60% of the weight in the promotional exam in New Haven was given to a blind-graded objective written test of firefighting knowledge, and only 40% was given to subjective non-blind graded oral tests where almost two-thirds of the judges were minorities.
Think of all the condescending commentary by liberal legal pundits that assumed that all firemen need is to be big and strong and brave and have command presence, just like being in the military. So, why do those morons need written tests? They aren’t like us brilliant lawyers who had to take the LSAT (which by the way has a racial gap almost identical to the 2003 New Haven firefighter promotional test — the median black score on the LSAT would only fall at the 12th percentile among white takers of the LSAT).
In truth, both war fighting and fire fighting have become highly technical jobs. The military, which has been giving out IQ tests going back to primitive ones in 1917 has the world’s largest body of social science research on the predictive power and unbiasedness of written tests.
July 18th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
> Isn’t it striking what an informative discussion
> we can engage in as long as the know-nothings don’t
> start screeching “Racist!”?
Not sure what you mean by “discussion” Sailer: after you started spewing your racist garbage in bulk the reality-based voices stopped posting. You are talking to yourself.
Cranky
July 18th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Dear Cranky:
Thanks for your well-informed, data-driven insights. You clearly have put in a lot of study and hard-thinking over the years on these important issues.
Steve
July 18th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Steve,
You’re avoiding the substance of my question. Why do we have to treat IQ as determinative when environment can have such a large impact on other highly heritable traits?
July 18th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
I’m sure the Yglesian commentariat abhors the sick Klansman ideas churned out on a regular basis by the likes of Mr. Sailer. But they need to ask themselves what ground they have for doing so. The creeds of the Georgetown cocktail partygoer are, “If it feels good do it”, and “Everyone’s opinion deserves respect.” In Mr. Sailer’s case, of course, what makes him feel good is to churn out racial propaganda that would make the late and unlamented Gobineau blush.
Mr. Sailer is simply the logical outcome of a world whose chattering classes are afraid of four little words: “And He was made Man.” In those four words, the refutation of both Sailerite racism and Foucault-style Nihilism are contained.
July 18th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Hector, isn’t threadjacking a sin?
July 18th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
“Why do we have to treat IQ as determinative when environment can have such a large impact on other highly heritable traits?”
Think about your example of the increased height seen in Japan over the last half century. The relevant fact for education policy is that it took a half century. If in the 1960s, you had wanted to train Japanese youths to be world class athletes, you would have done better focusing on, say, developing Japanese youths’ expertise in gymnastics or baseball rather than in basketball. It would have been unfair to that generation of Japanese children to just pretend away the height gap on the grounds that their grandchildren might be closer to the global average in height, so they must now try (and fail) to be world class basketball players.
Similarly, a racial IQ gap exists right now and it’s not going to completely vanish in less than a generation or two, and it might never vanish. It’s current existence has enormously pervasive implications for education, law, social policy, and the like, most of which is hushed up in the press for fear of being Watsoned, as happened to America’s most prominent man of science in 2007, James D. Watson.
An tremendous amount of social science effort has gone into trying to figure out how to close this racial IQ gap since LBJ’s Great Society. Unfortunately, in all those years, nobody has come up with much of a clue.
I’ve been following the testing social science since 1972, when education funding was the national high school debate topic. (My first nationally published letter-to-the-editor was about Christopher Jencks’ meta-analysis of the Coleman Report data in his 1972 book “A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America,” which I wrote when I was a high school freshman.)
The end of Jim Crow dual school systems in the 1960s appears to have narrowed the IQ gap somewhat. But, since then, there’s been only, in the most generous interpretation, a modest amount of evidence for a narrowing of the racial gap in adult IQs.
So, we are going to have to live with the effects of a racial gap in IQ for many years to come. Maybe it will someday disappear, I don’t know. But it exists now and we can’t actually wish it away by demonizing anybody who says it probably will never go away as evil and getting them fired like Dr. Watson.
July 18th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Here’s a well-informed, data-driven comment for you Steve: Of the 15 comments from 28 to 42, you wrote nine of them. Your nine comments comprise nearly 80% of the words in those 15 comments. So it does seem as though your idea of an informative discussion is one in which you’re the only one talking. Oddly, I agree; the best discussion you can be involved in is one that doesn’t involve anyone else.
July 18th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Steve,
Thanks for answering my question. You agree that the gap in IQ between the races can be narrowed or even eliminated, but you seem to have no interest in doing so. Instead you make it a priority to argue for policies that risk keeping the gap in place indefinitely. That is a pretty good definition of racism.
July 18th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
There are influences on academic performance other than IQ – but _they_ appear to be strongly heritable as well.
July 18th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Today’s armed forces are a lot different from the army of “From Here to Eternity.” It’s harder to get into the military (especially the Navy and Air Force) than it is to get into nearly all colleges, and it’s a lot easier to get kicked out of the military than to get kicked out of college. So we’re talking mostly about the kids of average-to-bright and well-behaved parents. No wonder they do well. A lot of the kids in your big-city schools don’t have fathers at home, and quite a few of them don’t know who their fathers are.
July 18th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
I’ve written frequently since 2004 on how the global gap in IQ between developed and Third World nations could be narrowed by fortifying staple foods with iodine and iron micronutrients, as has been done in the U.S. since before WWII because shortages of those nutrients can cause cretinism and other IQ-depressing medical problems.
I’ve also repeatedly advocated over the last decade encouraging African-American women to breastfeed their babies since there is some evidence (unfortunately not as solid as with iodine and iron) that breastfeeding raises IQ, and black women breastfeed at a much lower rate than white women.
On the other hand, having followed the social science literature over the last 37 years, I am quite familiar with what hasn’t worked to narrow the racial gap in IQ. Thus, I consistently advocate educational reforms that can help all children come closer to achieving their individual potentials without assuming that their existing IQs will magically change.
For example,
- offering progressive education to the brightest and most self-motivated and back-to-basics education to the below average students
- tracking students in separate classes so that quicker students can go at a quicker pace and slower students can go at a slower pace.
- offering European-style vocational education for those not academically-inclined.
- enforcing discipline in the classroom so that the worst troublemakers don’t deny an opportunity to learn to the majority.
Unfortunately, all such commonsensical policies have Disparate Impact by race and thus are suspect in the current intellectual environment.
July 18th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
NS in NOVA, I think you actually owe Sailer an apology. Like it or not, he actually has advocated for several things that he believes have a chance to narrow the IQ/achievement gaps, as described in his last comment. I’ve been checking his blog for years and he has talked about these things repeatedly. Whether or not you agree with anything he says, your charge was false.
Also, in general, I wish Sailer’s opponents would spend more time attacking his arguments and alleged “facts” and less time attacking him.
July 18th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Ed,
Don’t be too hard on NS in NOVA, he’s been a good contributor to the discussion. It’s the spittle-emitting rageaholics who scream “Racist!” at anybody who knows what they are talking about who are the problem.
Steve
July 18th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Overall, the military’s schools don’t have super test scores — on the 8th grade NAEP math test in 2007 they scored only a little above the average state in the union.
http://nationsreportcard.gov/math_2007/m0005.asp?tab_id=tab2&subtab_id=Tab_1#chart
But, broken down by race they did quite well, finishing second to only Oregon among blacks, highest by a noticeable margin among Hispanics, and almost exactly average among whites (the average white enlistee comes from a family making only about 3/4th income of the national white average):
Defense National Avg
Overall 285 280
White 291 290
Black 272 259
Hispanic 282 264
The relative success on the NAEP of the Department of Defense schools — and without, as NS in NOVA pointed out, conservative educational nostrums such as merit pay, vouchers, union-busting and the like — demonstrates that a lot of the social problems that concern liberals are related to the human capital of the parents. Enough human capital to be a career sergeant in the military ameliorates a lot of social problems caused by the underclass.
One obvious policy implication is that immigration policy should be focused on preventing immigration by people whose children have a high likelihood of winding up in the underclass. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. Canada’s immigration system is a model of rationality compared to America’s.
July 18th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
“much more standardized and centrally directed rather than seen as basically a local community amenity. ”
Or the opposite: much less standardized and centrally directed, as the schools are products of the local culture and answer to a very strong mayor whose supervisors at the state and federal level have little interest in the school as long as there are no problems since their is no political gain to be had. The parents therefore get more from exercising their voice (and have the option of sending their kids to the local public school). Also, much smaller, with motivated parents, tougher teachers and curriculum, and with far more attention paid to traditional curriculum and tradition itself than to progressive ideals.
July 18th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
The best natural experiment of large vs. small school districts that I’m aware of is to compare two otherwise similar suburban areas: the San Fernando Valley northwest of downtown Los Angeles versus the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. The main difference between these two huge (million plus people) suburban areas is that most of the San Fernando Valley is part of Los Angeles City and the Los Angeles Unified School District, while the San Gabriel Valley consists of dozens of independent municipalities and independent school districts.
As far as I can tell, this is why Southern California’s Asian population has chosen to settle primarily in the San Gabriel Valley rather than in the San Fernando Valley (in my childhood, Asians were about equally distributed between the two, but that balance has radically shifted). By concentrating their numbers, Asians can take over small school districts such as Arcadia in the San Gabriel Valley and impose their high standards upon the schools, but they have no hope of taking over the LAUSD politically, so they avoid the San Fernando Valley.
July 18th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
[...] 1. What are the lessons of military schools? [...]
July 18th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
If it is all due to the parents, then a public school that is on a military installation such as Fort Shafter Elementary in Hawaii should have scores similar to the DoDEA schools. If the results are due to the performance of the DoDEA then public schools that are 90% or more military dependents should have similar results as the surrounding public schools.
My guess is that schools such as Fort Shafter are similar to DODEA instead of the other elementary schools in Honolulu.
July 18th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Thanks for answering my question. You agree that the gap in IQ between the races can be narrowed or even eliminated, but you seem to have no interest in doing so. Instead you make it a priority to argue for policies that risk keeping the gap in place indefinitely. That is a pretty good definition of racism.
No, Steve has never said that we should not adopt policies that will decrease the racial IQ gap (if we can find policies that do so). He has said that we should not adopt policies that ignore the racial IQ gap and that pretend it does not matter.
Indeed, it is difficult in the current environment to argue for policies that decrease the racial IQ gap because it is taboo to mention that it exists or that it means anything, which would sort of be a prerequisite to actually trying to ameliorate it.
As for military schools, the point is simply. Military schools do better in lrge pa because they select higher IQ students. Does that mean that IQ is destiny and that we might as well throw the low-IQ kids out on the street because we can do nothign for them? No. What it does mean, however, is that we have to control for the IQ factor when dealing with what makes military schools different from civilian schools.
July 18th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Glaivester,
Some of what Sailer says, about IQ gaps and how to address them, is not racist. Does that matter? The fact is that Mr. Sailer has said a lot of other stuff on his site that is indubitably racist. The fact that he may not be spouting a racist line right now is neither here nor there.
The subtext of a lot of Sailer’s writing is that Asian men are effeminate p*ssies who cannot compete with hyper-masculine Black men in the high-stakes contest for White women. If that’s not racist, I’m not sure what is.
If Sailer is really onto something so compelling and counter intuitive, then why doesn’t he publish it in a respectable journal of biological anthropology, instead of on Mr. Yglesias blog.
July 18th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Eh, what the hell.
Steve, I went to Barnes & Noble today. I took a look at the Study Aids section, and I saw no fewer than eight different ASVAB study guides. Please explain how a test which can be stuided and prepared for can be an effective measure of inherent cognitive ability. Show your work.
July 18th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
I respectfully disagree. Mr. Sailer gets around to mentioning his ideas for remedying the achievement gap after twelve posts and thousands of words (and being asked twice). He may have similar posts on his blog, but his overwhelming focus is seeking further stratification of society based on IQ. Advocating for the maintenance of racial inequality is a racist argument.
July 19th, 2009 at 12:48 am
Less stratification of society with regard to IQ would, for example, mean that we would have had someone other than Raymond Spruance (thought to be the smartest of all our admirals) commanding the carriers at Midway. We would have a Navy that looked a little more like America –
but we would have lost. It was a near-run thing as it happened.
If we had placed _more_ emphasis on IQ, we would have kicked out Halsey before he and his fleet commander Slew McCain managed to sail the entire fleet into a hurricane – twice.
July 19th, 2009 at 5:04 am
To change the world in the direction you want it to go, you first need to understand how the world works.
But, you can’t begin to understand reality until you are brave enough to not worry about know-nothings screeching “racist” at you for following the data wherever it leads. Once you do decide that truth is better for humanity than ignorance, lies, and wishful thinking, you’ll begin to notice that all truths connect to other truths, while politically correct cover stories are just intellectual dead ends.
Once you stop being fearful of what you’ll discover if you are honest with yourself, you’ll notice that thinking for yourself is fun. Figuring out how the world works is a blast.
July 19th, 2009 at 7:46 am
[...] Matt Yglesias is intrigued: It’s not entirely clear what lessons you should take for public school reform from these facts since the DoDEA schools are run in a totally different way from public schools in the United States. But one lesson is that there’s a decent case that public education in the United States really ought to be radically different from how it is; much more standardized and centrally directed rather than seen as basically a local community amenity. [...]
July 19th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Any advantage the leverage of military discipline over parents might give schools for military dependents is trivial compared to the gigantic advantage those schools have:
The parents of the pupils are all selected for high IQ.
And the kids inherit their parents’ high IQ’s. (Genetically, at least 60%, plus culturally– the military culture is more uniform than civilian culture.)
It is wonderful that military-dependent schools work just as well for kids of all races, with parents of all socio-economic backgrounds. However, ANY schools could do that if they were allowed to set a (high) minimum floor on the parents’ IQ’s!
The military does not discriminate against enlistees on the basis of race, or SES, or religion– but it discriminates very stiffly on the basis of IQ. All prospective recruits are given IQ and aptitude tests, and only those with fairly high scores are actually permitted to enlist– so everyone in the military is smart regardless of their other characteristics.
Since smart parents make smart kids, most of the kids in military-dependent schools are smart, so naturally their average performance level is very high.
Again, the good results of military-dependent schools can be replicated in civilian schools any time with little effort: just sort out the pupils by IQ (or by parents’ IQ, which is a strong proxy for kids’ IQ) and teach appropriately to the IQ level of each class.
Why don’t we do this? School authorities are afraid of baseless but probably career-ending charges of racism. The fact is the average IQ of American blacks is much lower than that of American whites, so sorting students by IQ would result in classes with many blacks and few whites, and vice-versa. That would look like racism, even though the selection would be perfectly color-blind. (The military knows this… a much smaller proportion of blacks qualify to enlist. This sounds dreadful but it is a simple fact– the US military will only take 2 out of every ten blacks based on IQ, but will take 5 out of 10 whites based on IQ.)
So rather than face up to the IQ facts, we run lousy schools.
July 19th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Focusing on race and IQ is easy, because it yields quantitative data: race is a discrete variable, IQ is normally distributed, etc. Focusing on culture and mores is difficult, because those things are qualitative and harder to control for. The military are something like an ethnic minority, with certain common values that transcend race. I believe that explains the better performance of DoD schools.
There are plenty of developmentally delayed adults living independently or semi-independently, who have personal responibility, know how to take care of themselves, hold down a job, etc. They succeed despite low IQ because they have been taught the right values. As President Obama said the other day, “No Excuses!”
July 19th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Every study ever done shows virtually no correlation between curriculum/standards or teachers and student success. All indicators point to outside-the-school factors, as is obviated by the DoDEA success; these families, military families, have a history of striving, not to mention the fact that they are fed, insured, and safe–things most inner-city kids lack.
Matt, stick with basketball and light rail. Education needs guys like you to STFU!
July 19th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
This discussion has certainly had a much higher signal to noise ratio than is typical. If Matt’s education postings don’t improve after his getting so comprehensively schooled here, it won’t be his commenters’ faults.
July 20th, 2009 at 10:33 am
50 percent of the students eligible for free lunches
Hey, how about taking the price tag of one or two of those F-22s and, you know, pay soldiers decent salaries?
Radical, I know.
July 20th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Schools And The Achievement Gap
http://thefrustratedteacher.blogspot.com/2009/07/schools-and-achievement-gap.html
July 20th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
How interesting, and contrary to my own experience. I attended DOD high schools in Europe in the early 70s and they sucked. Never having written a paper in high school, I was unbelievably badly prepared for an Ivy college education in 1974.
July 21st, 2009 at 11:31 am
My favorite school as a kid was a school on base in Korea. I wasn’t aware of particularly military aspects of it, but being a small base with few kids, we had 4 grades together in one classroom. By having older kids in class with me, I was made curious by some of the things they were learning (that I did not yet understand). I also remember having my curiosity encouraged.
Of course, that was NOT the case at the base school in Japan when I was in second grade. My teacher used to drag me around by my ear because I had too much imagination.
I think it DID help that, in comparison with the public schools I attended later, discipline was not a problem and the hoodlums didn’t run the school.
July 21st, 2009 at 2:04 pm
meksika biberi