[somenameforme]

This seems like a clear selection bias. One of the reasons, and probably the main one, that public schools are awful is because a very small number of highly disruptive kids can completely ruin the education of an entire class of other kids. Public schools generally have no way to get rid of these children and their parents also generally don't care. These are also of course the kids that are going to score abysmally on any sort of standardized score.

By contrast at these schools for military kids, behavioral or academic problems can have direct and serious consequences on the parents and end up having the bump into issues with their command. There's going to be an overall greater degree of focus on discipline in the school, as well as the households, and so on. In many ways the most surprising thing is that the overall difference is only about 10%.

EDIT: As mentioned elsewhere, you also know that the parent(s) in these households are going to have minimum of IQ that's higher than the normal minimum since that's a prerequisite for enlistment. So you're getting a rather overt selection bias there.

[Waterluvian]

I’m not sure this “thinking” on public education holds up if you look outside the U.S. where countries with emphasis on public education so consistently outperform the Americans.

I guess at best it might be that there’s problems unique to American culture that makes public education not work. But that feels unlikely to hold up. I think the premise is simply wrong.

[somenameforme]

It's not really about "emphasis". For instance the US is one of the highest spenders in the world, even PPP adjusted, per student on education. I think it's largely about educational culture and goals. For instance in many/most places in Asia there tends to be far less tolerance for disruptive students. Many places even have varying forms of corporal punishment, even when there are technically regulations or laws against it. There are also generally parallel education systems where people can, from relatively young ages, pursue vocational school instead of normal schooling.

Basically the US education system is more focused on a sort of one-size-fits-all education with the only real differentiation being a 'normal' or 'accelerated' track (with some places like California even gradually moving against that remaining differentiation). This is in spite of having a far more diverse population in every possible way than other countries which focus on more of having educational systems which work to the strengths of each student.

[moi2388]

Well, my country has public schools, but children are segregated by educational prowess. The smartest kids go to schools which are completely separate from the less intelligent ones. If you fail, you might get sent to a lower school system.

So this would explain why these disruptions would not appear in my country (or to a far lower degree)but would in the US school system.

[rickydroll]

How would your country school system deal with kids like me, ADHD with spots of brilliance and spots of, "how do you remember to breathe?"

[moi2388]

There is special guidance, so usually you can just do the level you “ought” to be in.

If it’s really severe there is special education as a last resort.

More commonly modified lesson plans, or teachers will be instructed to let you out of the classroom for a bit, or give you tasks like “fetch this item from the front desk” in between.

It’s certainly not perfect, but there is quite some guidance and individual measures possible.

[Retric]

An apples to apples comparison adjusted for things like Americans who have English as a second language or other countries removing people from school roles significantly shrinks the differences.

A surprising number of the absolute best schools in the world by those same criteria are US public schools due to the population and resources going to those schools. So the issues are not quite so simple as they might first appear. The US education system isn’t efficient, but it’s also not as bad as generally perceived.

[almostgotcaught]

> An apples to apples comparison adjusted for things like Americans who have English as a second language or other countries removing people from school roles significantly shrinks the differences.

"If I remove all the data that hurts my case, the data clearly supports my case!".

Those people that you want to exclude aren't transients - they're either current or future Americans which are called immigrants. So if you want a well-functioning democracy, economy, society, etc you have to educate them effectively too, not just the people that were born here.

[Retric]

The point isn’t excluding buckets, the point is to have multiple points of comparison.

If we want to know which system you should copy, you want understand the factors that make that system more challenging. America doesn’t need to deal with severe malnutrition, but we may want to copy elements from countries dealing with such issues.

Unless of course the goal is a hit piece for whatever emotionally agenda you you’re pushing.

[almostgotcaught]

I have no idea what this comment means.

I'm pointing out that "an apples to apples" comparison is all of the people in the seats at the schools because all of those people live, work, and (eventually) vote in your country.

[Retric]

I edited for clarity, but an apples to apples comparison means to compare like to like not to compare everything.

I can weigh a bag of groceries, that’s a metric I can collect on everything you’re buying but it doesn’t tell me if you’re making healthy choices at the grocery store.

Similarly I can look at the test grades of everyone in Ukraine right now, but that tells me more about society in general than the countries school system.

[whimsicalism]

the “problem” unique to America is that we like to take in the poor and huddled masses (who don’t test well), while the EU likes to watch them sink and die in the Mediterranean.

[Gud]

This is objectively not true.

If anything, the opposite is true. Europe receives less educated individuals who will be a burden on their welfare, while the USA has cheap labor from South America and attract top talent globally.

[whimsicalism]

name me a single EU nation with a higher per-capita rate of immigrants from developing countries. it is simply not true that Europe has more immigrants without strong education background than the US, there is no way of cutting the data

[Gud]

You are changing the goal posts. The USA doesn’t have a welfare state the same way Sweden has.

[whimsicalism]

i’m not changing anything - you are the one who brought up welfare. my point is and always has been that the US has a multi-decades long run of relative immigration permissiveness towards people from poorer countries - and that will impact education outcomes.

[pyuser583]

I think the election bias is as simple as: at least one of the parents has a job.

The public schools run by the military are fairly normal public schools. They aren’t “military schools.” They aren’t more discipline-focused.

They do have the advantage of offering federal salary and benefits to teachers. That means they can be pretty picky about who they accept, resulting in higher quality teachers.

[ottah]

I'm a former military brat, and went to DOD schools from 1990 to 1998. My school had a mix of Air Force, Navy, Army and NATO kids. Here's what I remember.

* Almost every parent had college education.

* Classrooms generally were small, with around 20ish kids per class.

* Facilities were very well maintained and funded. Nothing was ever really broken, or stayed broken for long. Nothing looked worn, equipment was generally kept up to date. We had our own bowling alley, swimming pool, theater, lecture halls, music building, indoor basketball courts and two soccer fields, one baseball diamond.

* There weren't really any kids with parents struggling financially. Parents were involved with the school on open days.

* There were some problem kids, but everyone moved so often, it didn't matter.

* If a kid ever did something bad enough the parent would get in trouble. One family I knew had to move back the US after the kid said a racial slur.

* You didn't make any lasting friends, because again, everyone moves frequently.

Basically, short answer, you went to the same school as the officer's kids, so the schools were nice for everyone. Moral of the story, send your kids to schools in affluent neighborhoods.

[RetiredRichard]

"This creates a “bit” of challenge. We can observe that the military implements systematically and produces superior results, but we cannot cleanly separate method effects from selection effects without experiments that will never happen."

The article keeps bring up selection effects

[roenxi]

There also seems to be a misconception about what failing an audit means. If you have an organisation spending an ungodly amount of money in ways it can't track ... you would expect all the services for its own members to be gold plated.

Organisations with bad budget discipline aren't usually short on benefits. What disadvantages are there for them to provide the best conceivable services? Nobody expects them to be able to justify the spend.

[culll_kuprey]

> in these households are going to have minimum of IQ that's higher than the normal minimum since that's a prerequisite for enlistment.

Is it? I know they’re a lot more selective than historically, but I was under the impression that a low 30-something asvab score qualifies you for at least infantryman. Is that really above average IQ?

[s1artibartfast]

If you take any distribution and cut off the bottom X percent, the new average will be higher. I think this is the point they are making.

Simply excluding the mentally handicapped or dysfunctional drug addict parents would have an effect

[culll_kuprey]

While I’ll grant you the mentally handicap. I promise you there are many in the military with dysfunctional drug addicted parents.

[s1artibartfast]

yes, but we are talking about the children of active military families. There are fewer dysfunctional crackheads and whatnot in the active service than general population.

[godelski]

I agree it is likely selection bias but I don't think it is likely for the same reasons.

These kinds of results often correlate strongly with parental income levels, which put another way "zip code". Yeah, the military isn't known for great salaries and you'd be right to point at plenty of rich counties, but how many rich counties are there to poor ones? We don't have the distributions and that's what makes this hard to read.

Despite that, we do have some distributional information. Lucky for us, they included the demographics! Taking what we know above, we can actually back investigate to at least provide a "sniff test". Looking at the DoDEA scales, they are pretty low variance in comparison. Unless you think Asians are genetically smarter than whites, blacks, or hispanics then it needs to come down to other factors, which includes culture. The culture will probably be suppressed a bit in the military data, as military naturally creates a more homogeneous setting, but some variance will still exist for this part as well as some likely imbalances in incomes and other things.

An important part of this rich correlation is that it ties very much into stable household. Certainly having active deployment will disrupt the household a bit, but some of that normalizes and well... let's be honest, there is a stable income and stable food situation at home. That's a major factor in a lot of households.

So the real question would be "How do DoDEA schools compare to national schools when you exclude national schools that have a significant number of families that do not have a stable income?" I believe that would be a more fair comparison, though that would really just bring us to "apples and oranges" instead of "oranges and tomatoes". The claim is that the difference is due to some organizational influence, i.e. one that is actionable (like the way teachers teach or students are disciplined, etc), but frankly we just have so little data we can't rule out a million other things.

[lovich]

In what world is the US military suddenly known for having higher IQ than average in the enlisted ranks?

[wmf]

It's about the minimum not the average. The minimum in the military is around 90 IQ while public schools could have students with 70-90 IQ who are disruptive but technically not disabled.