Schools on military bases outdoing public schools

http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/schools-on-military-bases-outdoing-public-schools/article_b7897415-cdc2-50d3-a512-016749b951d6.html

How to explain the difference?

It has become fashionable for American educators to fly off to Helsinki to investigate how schools there produce such high-achieving Finns. But for just $69.95 a night, they can stay at the Days Inn in Jacksonville, N.C., and investigate how the schools here on the Camp Lejeune Marine base produce such higher-achieving Americans — both black and white.

They would find that the schools on base are not subject to former President George W. Bush's signature education program, No Child Left Behind, or to President Barack Obama's Race to the Top. They would find that standardized tests do not dominate and are not used to rate teachers, principals or schools.

They would find Leigh Anne Kapiko, the principal at Tarawa Terrace Elementary, one of seven schools here.

Test preparation? "No," Kapiko said. "That's not done in Department of Defense schools. We don't even have test prep materials."

At schools here, standardized tests are used as originally intended, to identify a child's academic weaknesses and assess the effectiveness of the curriculum.

Kapiko has been a principal both inside and outside the gates, and believes that military base schools are more nurturing than public schools. "We don't have to be so regimented, since we're not worried about a child's ability to bubble on a test," she said.

Military children are not put through test prep drills. "For us," Kapiko said, "children are children; they're not little Marines."

Under Obama's education agenda, state governments can now dictate to principals how to run their schools. In Tennessee — which is ranked 41st in NAEP scores and has made no significant progress in closing the black-white achievement gap on those tests in 20 years — the state now requires four formal observations a year for all teachers, regardless of whether the principal thinks they are excellent or weak. The state has declared that half of a teacher's rating must be based on student test scores.

Kapiko, on the other hand, has discretion in how to evaluate her teachers. For the most effective, she does one observation a year. That gives her and her assistant principal time for walk-through visits in every classroom every day.

"We don't micromanage," said Marilee Fitzgerald, director of the Department of Defense Education Activity, the agency that supervises the military base schools and their 87,000 students. "Individual schools decide what to focus on."

A family's economic well-being has considerable impact on how students score on standardized tests, and it is hard to make exact comparisons between military and public school families. But by one indicator, families at military base schools and public schools have similar earnings: The portion of students who qualify for federally subsidized lunches is virtually identical at both, about 46 percent.

What is clear is that the base schools have made impressive progress in narrowing the achievement gap.

In the last decade, the gap in reading between black and white fourth-graders at base schools has dipped to 11 points this year (233 compared with 222), down from a 16-point difference in 2003 (230 compared with 214), a 31 percent reduction. In public schools, there has been a smaller decrease, to a 26-point gap this year (231 compared with 205) from 30 points in 2002 (227 compared with 197), a 13 percent reduction.