Who Runs the Best U.S. Schools? It May Be the Defense Department

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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.

“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.

Prudence Carter, a Brown University sociologist who studies educational inequality, said the Defense Department’s results showed what could happen when all students were given the resources of a typical middle-class child: housing, health care, food, quality teachers.

The changes shared similarities with the Common Core, a politically fraught reform movement that sought to align standards across states, with students reading more nonfiction and delving deeper into mathematical concepts.

The approach is meant to guard against what Dr. Dilmar, the school’s principal, calls “pockets of excellence” — a teacher who helps students soar in one classroom, while an instructor down the hall struggles.

Instead, the goal is to raise the floor for all students, something that Jason Dougal, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, sees in top-performing countries like Finland and Singapore.

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