In our allegedly failing school system, there's a place where not only do kids score above the national average but where the achievement gap between black and white students is much lower and shrinking faster than the nation as a whole. Charter schools? Voucher programs? Online schools?
Actually, as the New York Times' Michael Winerip lays out, it's schools on military bases that outperform public schools on the reading and math sections of the National Assessment of Educational Progress at both the fourth and eighth grade levels. And the achievement gap in reading for fourth graders is just 11 points on military bases, compared with 26 points in public schools.
That's huge. And the answer isn't George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind or Barack Obama's Race to the Top—those education laws don't apply on military bases. It's not standardized tests, which "are used as originally intended, to identify a child’s academic weaknesses and assess the effectiveness of the curriculum."
So if it's not the hot new things in corporate-backed school reform, what might it be?
Winerip offers a few less hot, less new answers:
The average class in New York City in kindergarten through the third grade has 24 students. At military base schools, the average is 18, which is almost as good as it is in the private schools where leaders of the education reform movement — Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York; the former education chancellor in New York City, Joel I. Klein; and Bill Gates of Microsoft — have sent their children.
A 2001 study on the success of the military base schools by researchers at Vanderbilt University cites the importance of the smooth relations between the teachers’ union and management, and Ms. Fitzgerald said that continued to be true.
Then there are the factors outside the classroom: While roughly the same percentage of students qualify for free lunches at military base schools and public schools, "Military parents do not have to worry about securing health care coverage for their children or adequate housing. At least one parent in the family has a job." And when you're looking at that narrowing achievement gap between black and white kids, it's relevant that "The military has a far better record of integration than most institutions. Almost all of the 69 base schools are in the South" and were opened during the age of legal segregation to keep military kids out of segregated schools.
Kids with health care and housing and employed (if not wealthy) parents, in small, integrated classes, taught by union teachers who are not micromanaged and driven by test prep materials. It's not the vision of education being promoted by Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee; in stark contrast to their vision, it's what's working.