We have failing schools therefore we need quasi-military environments

[flashl]

Demilitarizing What the Pentagon Knows About Educating Young People

Craig R. Barrett, the chairman of the board of Intel, once said that “the biggest ticking time bomb in the U.S. is the sorry state of our K-12 education system.” He invoked that dire metaphor to awaken Americans to the fact that the educational quality of the nation’s workforce will determine our global competitiveness. Yet, the collateral damage from this time bomb, as it slowly detonates, could extend as well to America’s standard of living and civil society. Even the nation’s military readiness is at risk because of the diminished pool of academically qualified potential recruits for the all-volunteer armed forces.

Several realities drive home the severity of the underachievement problem. According to ACT Inc., the nonprofit testing organization, the academic skills needed for success in the workplace are converging with those required for success in the first year of college. Further, the U.S. economy will rely increasingly upon minorities, because they, and especially Latinos, will make up a steadily growing proportion of the adult workforce. Minority students have surged to 42 percent of public school enrollment nationally, up from 22 percent a mere three decades ago.

= snip =

Compounding these academic gaps, alarming numbers of Latino and black youngsters drop out of high school. Less documented but no less ominous is the phenomenon of student disengagement—youngsters who lose interest in school and give up trying to achieve.

The enormity and urgency, the gravity and, yes, the persistence of this challenge demand out-of- the-box thinking and creative interventions. My exposure over the years to the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program, a quasi-military youth corps aimed at turning around the lives of dropouts, persuades me that the “military way” of education and training holds considerable promise.

The U.S. military enjoys a well-deserved reputation for its ability to reach, teach, and develop young people who are rudderless, and for setting the pace among American institutions in advancing minorities. Young people receive military-style education and training in an array of settings, most typically after enlisting in a branch of the military. Various branches partner with local school districts to operate Junior ROTC programs, career academies, and military-like public schools.

[sonofliberty]

1. military anything is a bad Idea

just teach your children. We may be in a sorry state when motivation to learn is lost. But what do you expect when we slowly surrender our children and civil liberties and our privacy in the name of security.

[flashl]

2. We are just lab rats of social experiments

The deciders make public policy that remove resources that benefits American communities, then they blame the communities when they fail. Then, they offer a deal that you can’t resist like militarizing your schools.

[Trillo]

3. Sorry, can't access the article.

:wtf:

But I suspect it's backwards based on your snips. The religious fundamentalists have been propagating zero tolerance in military-like K-12 private schools for much longer than the public schools have been using non-religious policies of zero tolerance.

'Outside-the-box thinking' from crystalized, tyrannical, and authoritarian structures! :rofl:

[flashl]

4. I suspect its some nut job who wrote that commentary in Education Week !

Because it was in Education Week, it took me minutes to decide whether it was a parody.

more from the article:

Some schools already embrace combinations or variations of these attributes. This fact and the foregoing lessons gleaned from the military approach to training suggest several potentially important interventions that should be considered:

What will we do for the millions of America’s children who are marginalized academically and destined for social, civic, and economic oblivion in the 21st century?• Offer reading- and math-immersion programs patterned after the military’s fast-track instructional methods and focused on students who are performing below grade level, or the equivalent of “below basic” on NAEP.

• Establish quasi-military public middle schools and high schools that emulate those attributes and methods of military education and training that are appropriate for schools serving civilian youngsters.

• Create quasi-military public boarding schools that provide safe havens and more intensive, comprehensive, and sustained educational and developmental supports for young people whose home and community environments are especially destructive.

• Establish quasi-military alternatives to incarceration, patterned perhaps after ChalleNGe’s Bravo Company in Oklahoma, for adolescents who have run afoul of the law but genuinely want to straighten out their lives. Those who squandered this second chance would be remanded to reform school or jail.

These promising concepts are too controversial, untested, and potentially costly to take to scale on the fly. That is why each one should be launched in several locales as a demonstration project and be subjected to rigorous evaluation. If the pilot programs produce compelling results in turning around young people teetering on the brink of academic and personal failure, the stage will be set to take the successful models to scale.

Millions of America’s children are marginalized academically and destined for social, civic, and economic oblivion in the 21st century. Their plight stems from many underlying factors: family and economic circumstances beyond their control; their own indifference to achievement and disenchantment with formal education as they’ve known it; and the continuing difficulty that schools face in meeting these young people halfway, and then shepherding them to the doorstep of successful adulthood.

The U.S. military figured out how to nurture and unleash the potential of aimless young people like these generations ago. By demilitarizing and deploying what the Pentagon knows, we can transform this troubled and troublesome cohort of America’s youths into solid citizens and valued societal assets.

Hugh B. Price is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, and a former president and chief executive officer of the National Urban League. As vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1988 to 1994, he was instrumental in conceiving and launching the quasi-military program for school dropouts that came to be known as the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Corps. This essay is based on a paper he wrote for the Brookings Institution, the full text of which is posted on its Web site, http://www.brookings.edu/.

[Trillo]

12. I was in ROTC, and attended a private military academy

in the 9th and part of 10th grade, before I was expelled. Perhaps I can offer a little insight? (thanks for the excerpts)

My apologies in advance for including some personal anecdotes, it's nearly impossible for me to make my response to the article's points in a coherent manner without doing so.

Regarding your clips, few things stand out:

Offer reading- and math-immersion programs patterned after the military’s fast-track instructional methods

This by itself is, I believe, a great idea. K-12 school has been slowed down to the point of absurdity and boredom for some in some selected high-aptitude subjects, and this can affect a student's motivation by means of belittling their primary natural aptitude.

It's always important to remember that if you have a small sub-group of advanced students, it's more profitable to slow them down to the speed of the slower ones in class. This has its consequences to the slowed-down student's feelings about academic learning, perhaps some more than others, but it's an effect worth noting.

Establish quasi-military alternatives to incarceration, patterned perhaps after ChalleNGe’s Bravo Company in Oklahoma, for adolescents who have run afoul of the law but genuinely want to straighten out their lives. Those who squandered this second chance would be remanded to reform school or jail.

I debated with myself whether to include the last sentence. I believe there is too much mind-association of military type schools to reform schools already, that may in part explain their popularity for populations considered 'in need of discipline'. Some kids simply like, even love, them. I did, and was not forced to go, I was offered the choice of going by my parents (but of course the "academic benefits" of going to that particular military academy were "sold" to me in some respects).

Some military schools, but NOT ALL, seem to have an accepted nature of excellence with regards toward academics. It can be inducted that it's not the military style or structure that causes this excellence.

Modern School Mathematics
Geometry
by Jurgensen, Donnelly, Dolciani
Published by Houghton Mifflin, 1969.

Ray C. Jurgensen, Chirman of Mathematics Department and holder of Eppley Chair of Mathematics, Culver Military Academy, Culver, Indiana. Mr. Jurgensen has been a member of the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG) writing team on geometry and a lecturer at the National Science Foundation institutes for mathematics teachers.

Alfred J. Donnelly, Master Instructor and holder of the William Pitt Oakes Chair of Mathematics, Culver Military Academy. Mr. Donnelly brings to his authorship a rich bacground of both study and teaching of mathematics.

Here's where it gets more personal to me:

If the pilot programs produce compelling results in turning around young people teetering on the brink of academic and personal failure...

I was expelled for breaking an unstated rule, and the very same hierarchy that required me to memorize an honor code, and enforced it with senior-student honor courts in the event of transgression. With respect toward my explusion, administration lied about it, the record apparently indicates my parents withdrew me, but that is not the whole truth, my parents had been given two choices, both of which would result in my leaving the school. Hypocrisy, evidently a human trait, runs strong in some, if not all, military schools.

One of the strawmans of the benefits of military type K-12 schools is that according to military training methods, as I understand them, is they first tear you down in basic type training (or "plebe" status in academies where you have zero privileges and extra servant-like duties), then they give you every single last rule you need to follow, and if you follow those rules, you'll be fine.

What I found was the opposite, I found a rule that the religious fundamentalists (I had no basis in their religion's doctrine at that time (my parents weren't particularly religious, though their parents were)) had zero tolerance for, and that the school apparently didn't want to tell us in advance about, and which then expelled me for breaking. I had never read the bible, nor did the school require reading it, but evidently I was supposed to know those things through some sort of psychic mechanism.

Isn't it the peak of arrogance and hypocrisy to punish any on a whim without advance notice the activity carries sanction? I give that particular military school a Big "F".

My roundabout point is that in my life, the "personal failure" (if it can be called that: from an academic perspective I believe it's correct, from my personal standpoint, it's something else) was caused by the military school and their association to right-wing religious whackos.

I had been expelled from other schools, but they didn't cause me to 'give up' academically because I deserved punishment, I did things wrong at those other schools, knew that I did things wrong, and can accept the prescribed punishment as emanating from poor choices I made at the time.

In the military school, however, the expulsion was unjust, I did my very human best to follow all their rules because I DID NOT want to get kicked out again. My parents weren't lawyers, nor did they hire me a lawyer, nor did they require the school put the truth on the transcript, essentially subverting my ability to later sue as I got older and wiser, overcame the induced guilt, and realized what really had happened there.

The school's lawyers played legal chess with my parents and I lost. The military school was fundamentally a liar masquerading as a truth teller. Perhaps, so too is the Brookings institution.

The bottom line of what I learned from them is that following the rules results in punishment. The bottom line of what I learned in other schools was that not following the rules results in punishment. So, what I've learned, by putting those two major, overriding lessons together, is that School is Punishment, and which has pretty much set me against educators in general, even though I know there are many individual teachers that have hearts of gold. For me, the lesson resulted in an unsolvable paradox which immobilized me with respect toward my attitude about schools in general.

This didn't set me against learning, but since that time I've also learned that the competitive aspects of society do not acknowledge any learning that takes place outside of a formal curriculum in any substantial way. So the educators, through educational establishments, are acting monopolistic as a de facto oligopoly, and turning society and its members and other formal structures such as commerce and business against any former students that expel both educators and formal schooling, as well as training programs reminiscent of such, from their lives.

I understand that nearly every private school in the United States is religious in some nature, many have chapels and mandatory attendance on a regular basis to a minister's sermons, though the fundamental religious nature is often downplayed by words classifying it as 'non-denominational' or some such tripe. Other private schools may be of other, non-Christian faiths.

This is fundamentally at odds with our U.S. constitution, specifically to 'compel' any student into any religious program, except, perhaps, in the case of the parents' religion in association with the parents' routine activities.

We already know that there's a rather severe problem in the U.S. military with Christian Fundamentalists achieving high rank, who then speak out against others not in their faith or following their faith's rules, and making life difficult for the non-religious under their command.

The last thing that should be tried is military type school training with the general population, because a few academics want to study it. There are hidden risks and children are too important to deliberately ruin for a few elites' studies and personal career advancement.

---

As an afterthought, I'm still waiting for my so-called excellent compulsory education to pay off. I'm now old enough to realize it never will. Thanks educators :(. And thanks Mom and Dad, for caring enough to pay extra for an excellent education:grr:. And to my lifetime partner, I offer my sincere apology that I never wanted to bring kids here, it was the only method I knew that could absolutely guarantee they would not be subject to educators lies and the tyranny as I experienced it :cry:. Those kids we never had are better off not being called here by us, it is the best love we could give them O8).

[flashl]

13. The offering is appealing to OUR common sense. It is the hidden INTENT that concerns me. n/t

[rucky]

5. A perfect companion to facism! n/t

[WinkyDink]

6. The main problem lies in its framing, to wit: Regarding citiznes, HUMANS, as mere workers who "will

determine our global competitiveness."

Such a conscripted view of the human mind, heart, and soul can result in nothing more than a bored, angry, resentful, and rebellious person who knows he is being trained and tested only to enrich those who would just as soon he go somewhere else to fight and die---which is, of course, not good for our society at large, let alone the economy.

Starve the soul; feed the beast.

P.S. When shows such as "American Idol" get mocked, just remember they at least are showing young people who want to SING, not become a cog in a corporate wheel, not become cannon fodder, not become a criminal.

[The2ndWheel]

7. Well...they want to sing on TV so they can get a record contract

If they just wanted to sing, we wouldn't see them on American Idol. Even the bad singers, they might get their 15 minutes.

Back to the cogs. We are cogs. We're nothing but cogs in the machine. That's where organized, formal education has to go. It's making every human fit into one system. Why else would we do it? To make the child a well rounded child? Maybe, in a way. If too many people have too many points and odd angles, it would be much more difficult to make them fit. Take off a little here, move something over there, and then you get some nice grooves for the wrench and screwdriver when it's time to put everything together. If that doesn't work, you take the hammer and just pound away at it until it fits.

[aikoaiko]

8. while not "the solution" it seems like some kids respond well to disciplined educational environmen

I was one of those kids.

[flashl]

9. Troubling to me is the peppering of "quasi-military" throughout the essay. n/t

[erpowers]

10. I Support JROTC and ROTC

I think having JROTCs and ROTCs is a good thing. I really do not think they hurt young people; I do think they have the ability to help kids. I think a little more should be done to help assure that kids who join JROTC and ROTC go on to succeed. I think the students who join the JROTC should be made aware of all the colleges that have ROTC programs. In addition, the people should be informed of all the scholarship programs that can be used to help them pay for college.

In terms of getting better test scores I have always been a supporter of the idea that American schools need to be fully funded and that students should be able to do more than just sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher. I contend studnets should be taken outside the class and allowed to conduct experiments outside the classroom. It seems the real problem with black and latino students is that they tend to go to poorer schools than white kids. As a result they do not have the tools that white kids have. In some white schools the science classes actually perform experiment where as in some poor black and latino schools there are very few materials to conduct any experiments. In addition, it seems that at some white schools the teachers who are hired actually have to know how to teach the subject they were hired to teach. On the other hand in some black and latino schools the teacher either do not know what they are teaching, do not know how to teach what they are teaching, or just do not want to teach the class.

[flashl]

11. Sound like the 50s ...

Many activist and scholars in different fields have acknowledged that Brown vs Board was DOA before the recent SCOTUS decision on education.

Silently, everyone knows that defacto segregation exists in America and not only in schools. More and more everyone is using the new buzzwords “structural inequities”.

Structural inequities suggest that public policy decisions like increase spending on corrections versus education are part of the problem.

I have a problem with offering a solution that directs children who were intentionally disenfranchised to quasi-military style schools.

We are witnessing the results of decades of public policies that chose to spend on corrections versus education, which gave families without financial means little recourse. In many of these neighborhoods, children are in the school to prison pipeline. Now, stink tanks are offering then an escape into a military environment.