41–50 of 290 posts
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> But what should we do with the rest? The answer to that question is _something_ but I think the real question is "who is 'we'?"
The parents. Offloading the responsibility of raising children is a large part of the problem.
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Military households and the dependas that inhabit them aren't the stable footing you are imagining. The worst marriage stories I've heard happen under those circumstances.
There are many schools where over 70% of kids live in single parents households. I'm sure you have bad stories, but it's not comparable overall.
I think this can be misleading in the same way some charter school results are. The easiest way to improve a school's results isn't to improve the education provided, it's to get rid of the worst performing kids. Charter schools do this by various selection effects, and artificial barriers, like ending at noon on a Wednesday. So the only kids who go there have two parents, one who probably is stay at home and can pic…
> There will be few-to-no kids of poor single moms
Plenty of poor single moms with well behaved kids. The eternal problem is the lack of discipline at home. Successful kids grow up with structure, not being told yes all the time, are held accountable, and have a soft place to land when they make mistakes.
That is certainly harder to do with a single parent home, but it happens all the time in multi-parent homes as well.
If that's the case then we really are up the creek as a nation.
my grad school linguistics professor, an internationally recognized scholar across several languages, credited the DoD Language school at Monterrey CA as having been just amazing, and who went back to teach for decades in a top five ranked US university, not only linguists but engineering kids like me.
He was the same age as my dad so had the avuncular thing going, was personable, but most of all inspiring to decades of students to look outside their curricula.
Sometimes what sounds like up a creek turns out to be an unpredictable kick ass river, I guess.
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Education is mostly about your peers. It's obviously true for prestigious universities but it's just as true for elementary schools. Charter schools kicking out problematic students isn't some loophole, it's the main point, and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain. My district has a quarter of high schoolers in charter schools. Almost all of them under the poverty line. It's not like they're…
The question is: what do you do about children with discipline problems whose parents don't care? By all accounts, there are many of these kids. A portion of them are special needs and they at least have a path for what people want to do with them, even if special education doesn't have all the resources they need... there's at least an answer to "what should we do?". But what should we do with the rest?
I think this can be misleading in the same way some charter school results are. The easiest way to improve a school's results isn't to improve the education provided, it's to get rid of the worst performing kids. Charter schools do this by various selection effects, and artificial barriers, like ending at noon on a Wednesday. So the only kids who go there have two parents, one who probably is stay at home and can pic…
That being said, the existence of competition will raise the performance of all schools.
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From the article, >> But there are key differences. For starters, families have access to housing and health care through the military, and at least one parent has a job. >> “Having as many of those basic needs met does help set the scene for learning to occur,” said Jessica Thorne, the principal at E.A. White Elementary, a school of about 350 students.
From my comment, >> don't take it seriously enough. A serious comparison would be to schools in fairly well off neighbourhoods in the suburbs. But they don't do that.
They're fully transparent about the measures of achievement they're looking at:
>> Their schools had 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.
>> the military’s schools have made gains on the national test since 2013. And even as the country’s lowest-performing students — in the bottom 25th percentile — have slipped further behind, the Defense Department’s lowest-performing students have improved in fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading.
>> Despite their high performance, Black and Hispanic students, on average, still trail their white peers at Defense Department schools, though the gap is smaller than in many states. The Pentagon has also faced scrutiny for its handling of student misconduct at its schools, including reports of sexual assault.
I'd love to see how DoD schools compare against top-notch school systems. And average school systems (in case the quality of country school districts isn't a bell curve for some reason).
The article suggests several causes: 1. Bias in population - these students all have families where at least one parent has a stable job, which isn't true elsewhere. There could also be other factors, for instance maybe people who enter the military are more motivated on average and that genetically or through parenting is passed on to their kids. 2. Better funding 3. Frequent feedback to teachers and more methodical…
No. #1 is your CO will chew your ass out in front of everyone (which is a big no-no in leadership, yet it's accepted regarding your children). I saw first hand my E6 got called to battalion CO to answer why his son was bullying other kids (I think some civilians from DoD). I still remember CO said, if you don't fix this, I march the whole damn battalion to your house and make you do push ups while your son watch. Whe…
DoD schools person here, a major point left out of this article is that if you do something bad enough in school your parent's CO will be notified and this can have real career results. In a foreign country you can get deported if you do something stupid enough to warrant it. I went to several DoD and civilian schools, NC (dod), NJ (civ), Erie PA (civ), Okinawa (dod), NJ (civ). I would say the standards are higher in…
Have a child soon to be in a similar situation, so any thoughts helpful.