On the National Assessment of Educational Progress,
a federal exam that is considered the gold standard for comparing
states and large districts, the Defense Department’s schools outscored
every jurisdiction in math and reading last year and managed to avoid widespread pandemic losses.
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 schools reopened relatively quickly during the pandemic, but last year’s results were no fluke.
While
the achievement of U.S. students overall has stagnated over the last
decade, 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.
“If
the Department of Defense schools were a state, we would all be
traveling there to figure out what’s going on,” said Martin West, an
education professor at Harvard who serves on the national exam’s
governing board.