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Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

nytimes.com

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Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#191

Post by aeturnum »

greenhexagon wrote: post #177
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is both a loophole and the main point. It's the main point for people who want their children to succeed at the expense of the rest of society and it's a loophole when they try to sell that concept to the rest of society as "we can teach better for cheaper so give us your tax money and let us replace universal public education" rather than "we have thrown some of your children on the scrapheap for you to expensive…

Please also consider: removing the one or two severely disruptive students from a classroom results in drastically better education for the 20+ students who remain, which is likely a benefit to society at large. Based on my own education, a public school where every single day the same 1 or 2 students disrupted the lesson, assaulted nearby students and forced the teachers to waste hours on maintaining order rather th…

I think that all makes sense in a narrow way but I think you are sidestepping the actual challenge of education.

As the root comment pointed out - we already know that you improve outcomes by excluding low performers. Schools that can be selective take advantage of that. If you are in a position to attend one of those restrictive schools it may improve your outcomes!

However, the question of "how to do a good job educating kids" on a national level must include everyone in the measure. It might be worth having schools for troubled kids! But you have to look across the results of the troubled kids and the more normate ones. I think the root comment's point is that...this seems to have copied the techniques that charter schools use to improve their educational outcomes...but that arguably those schools are not "solving" the same problem as public schools and comparing them does not reveal any insights.

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#192

Post by jmoss20 »

eYrKEC2 wrote: post #163
stonogo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The minimum ASVAB to enlist is 31, and there are waiver programs for that. This is not a good showing. I feel like people don't appreciate how little lower-enlisted people are paid, what terrible financial literacy abounds in the ranks, and how many kids live on base but are still very firmly living in poverty. There are a lot of advantages to living on base, but this thread is pretending that the military has its sh…

If you cut off the lower tail of an IQ curve, no matter how little, you've just raised the average IQ of everyone remaining. If they're in that low IQ tail and they go through the hoops for a waiver, you've just selected for a modicum of conscientiousness.

How certain are you that the upper tail is not impacted just as much, if not more?

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#193

Post by [deleted] »

Spinnaker_ wrote: post #8

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…

[deleted]

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#194

Post by seanmcdirmid »

xormapmap wrote: post #166
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why offering parents more choices in how their children are taught could be a bad thing. I am going to give my kid all the advantages I can, of course. But...personal optimization != societal optimization. Yes, I can put my kid in a better spot to succeed, but we aren't making progress as a society, things are getting very much worse actually (e.g. income inequality). > Yes, this does suck for th…

> It is much easier to set a kid straight than try to fix an adult Is this true? Adults have free will & personal responsibility, kids are sort of at the whim of their parents and have no real legal rights when it comes to escaping a bad situation

Adults have a life time to be set in their ways. Kids, at least before they are teenagers, are extremely impressionable. While we can't fix crappy home lives, we can give them a chance at school.

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#195

Post by rascul »

nosequel wrote: post #55

This got touched on by a few replies, happy to see there are some others here with actual military experience chiming in. I grew up on military bases, and went to schools both on and off base for 18 years. All continental US bases typically have elementary-level (K-5) school, but you typically go to an off-base school for middle and high school. When you are overseas, this isn't the case, you would most likely go to…

> The result was each of their families were kicked off base, no longer able to live in free base housing. As stated elsewhere, military families aren't paid well at all, so now these families had to move off base and rent a house.

The service member generally receives a housing allowance if they live off base. I don't know if they receive it after being kicked out of base housing, though.

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#196

Post by ethbr1 »

zeroCalories wrote: post #56
ethbr1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Mother and family spent careers in early childhood education. - In order for learning to happen, kids have to be non-disruptive. - In order for kids to be non-disruptive, they have to have their basic needs met: safety, food, stability, etc. - In order for a kid's basic needs to be met, there has to be a source of income and time to care for them. Absent that chain of dependencies, young children are in no stat…

Yeah I have family in education too and it's a sad reality that schools just can't help most students because they come from broken homes. There are marginal improvements you can make like providing free lunch and good after school activities, but an actual solution would require other fundamental problems to be solved in society, or a radical reimagining of public education. On a more nutty note, for the possible re…

At the root, caring for and raising children well is an extremely time intensive endeavor.

It's hard to see a way we could fundamentally afford to pay someone to do it, at scale.

And the solutions that don't involve "someone" (at an extremely low child:caregiver ratio) don't seem like they'd produce success.

I do think schools should financially incentive performance, though! Not firing teachers, but just paying students directly for academic achievement -- make kids care.

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#197

Post by ethbr1 »

jmoss20 wrote: post #132
anarticle wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major benefit/challenge of being a military kid that moved every 2-3y is that you make friends really fast and resocialize very easily. This also means you don't have any roots. My example is often that my friends in high school were friends since kindergarten, something I have no frame of reference for. It probably only hurt in high school for sports and clique based activities. For going from highschool to coll…

Yeah, I had a similar upbringing, and this is my feeling as well. There's a massive trade-off here, but I do feel like the military kids I knew (and run into now) are radically more adaptable and sociable. Another upside, in retrospect: you end up getting to see, up-close, a huge range of the social/cultural/political landscape. It's hard to demonize an outgroup much when you at times were that outgroup -- or were at…

I've found foreign exchange students have a (lesser) version of this too.

I think it's fundamentally about increased tolerance to uncomfortable/novel situations.

Which suck. But apparently it is a learned skill! Or at least coping strategies are.

I'd be fascinated to see a study on adolescent coping strategies in non-military vs military child populations.

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#198

Post by sokoloff »

sgnelson wrote: post #130
sokoloff wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> entails using funds set aside for public schools That’s one framing. Another framing is “using funds set aside to educate the children of the district”. If you frame the funding as being for the schools rather than for the children’s education , you naturally object to it being spent elsewhere. Are we trying to run public schools or trying to educate children in the district? (My kids attended public schools.)

As to my earlier comment, I don't think anyone is saying "We shouldn't educate students" (except the parent comment that was like "only for kids whose parents care.") And for me, public schools are for the education of all the children in the district. In my head, I don't really separate the two. I believe in education for all, despite what resources their parents have. I'm going to reject the premise that I'm just f…

I may not have made my distinction clearly enough.

My city’s school district total proposed budget is $245M for next year. Enrollment is just shy of 7K.

One framing is “that $245M is for running the schools”

Another framing is “that $35K is for the education of each student in Cambridge”

The first leads you to conclude “of course we wouldn’t let a parent take even a dime of that money to put their kid in private school”

The second leads you to “of course they should have the choice to use at least 50% of that $35K allocated to each student to attend a school of their choice”

Of course the public schools are there for the education of students, but the difference in framing is whether the money starts there or rather ends there for students who choose to attend it.

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#199

Post by jvanderbot »

aeturnum wrote: post #191
greenhexagon wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please also consider: removing the one or two severely disruptive students from a classroom results in drastically better education for the 20+ students who remain, which is likely a benefit to society at large. Based on my own education, a public school where every single day the same 1 or 2 students disrupted the lesson, assaulted nearby students and forced the teachers to waste hours on maintaining order rather th…

I think that all makes sense in a narrow way but I think you are sidestepping the actual challenge of education. As the root comment pointed out - we already know that you improve outcomes by excluding low performers. Schools that can be selective take advantage of that. If you are in a position to attend one of those restrictive schools it may improve your outcomes! However, the question of "how to do a good job edu…

Actually I disagree that a measure of success of an educational system is its breadth. If serving 95% achieved vastly better outcomes and 5% received no education (or an alternative one!) Would that necessarily and absolutely be worse? What about 99/1 or 99.9 etc
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