> If DoDEA demonstrates sustained K-12 excellence, the military’s technical training programs showcase something even more striking: the ability to take 18-year-old high school graduates and transform them into operators of extraordinarily complex systems, safely and at scale.

What I found most striking is that last word: scale. Most people employed to write software cannot write original applications of any size. They certainly cannot thus scale solutions forward if they cannot author solutions in the first place. This is supremely costly for these profit oriented companies. The military on the other hand must scale because while they do not have profits or revenue margins to chase they do have budget constraints. The result is an organization that can do more with less.

One way you can pattern-match this dichotomy between different parts of the Pentagon might be to look at how many private contracts are involved with the project, and how large they are. Certainly seems to be a correlation there.

>The Army Corps of Engineers successfully operated small nuclear reactors for remote sites from 1954 through 1979. The Shippingport commercial reactor (America’s first civil nuclear power station) grew directly from the naval nuclear program.

Hope author goes further into analyzing the diff between army and navy engineering culture, because it is clear that naval engineers built the foundations here :)

Post is titled Pentagon but how does the cross-service learning work exactly in the Schools

> This same institution operates America’s highest-performing school system. DoDEA students scored 234 in fourth-grade reading on the 2024 NAEP, outperforming the national average of 214. That’s roughly two grade levels ahead. In eighth-grade math, DoDEA scored 291 versus 272 nationally. When 2024 NAEP results showed national reading scores declining, DoDEA was the only jurisdiction where scores increased.

How again do we know this isn’t entirely due to selection effects?

For K-12, it's not complicated: every student and parent knows that a student f-up will have consequences for the service member.

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%.