Improving America’s schools can sometimes seem like an impossible task. Politicians have been promising to do so for decades, yet the U.S. remains well behind many other countries in basic measures of learning. The Covid pandemic, with its extended school closures, aggravated the problems.They're adequately funded and everyone (parents) has jobs and health care.
But making progress really is possible, and a story by my colleague Sarah Mervosh describes perhaps the best case study. The network of schools run by the Defense Department has been performing well for years and continued to do so during the pandemic. These schools are typically on military bases, and they educate about 66,000 children of service members and Defense Department civilian employees.
Last year, this school system outperformed all 50 states on reading and math scores for both eighth graders and fourth graders. Before the pandemic, the military schools did well but were not ranked No. 1. The schools also have smaller learning gaps between white and both Black and Hispanic students than other schools have.
“If the Department of Defense schools were a state, we would all be traveling there to figure out what’s going on,” Martin West, an education professor at Harvard, told Sarah.
Give me my $10 million education grant you cowards!
I'll add an additional guess: they don't follow every bit of "trendy" education advice coupled with expensive technology pushed by the foundations that fund the Education Nonprofit grifters.
(In case it's not obvious, the first sentence is a joke. They aren't charter schools and there is a union)