The resilience of America’s military-connected students

Second of two parts

The Department of Defense Educational Activity (DoDEA) schools in the South, including those at Fort Benning, were originally a reflection of the military’s progressivism under President Harry Truman. Because the military integrated before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, many of the schools on bases in the South originally opened as the first racially integrated educational institutions in the region.

DoDEA schools remain highly popular among the communities they serve and powerful commanders on base. The unusual arrangement funnels federal resources disproportionately to those military-connected students on DoDEA-serviced installations in the South, arguably at the expense of young people living on bases in other regions, who almost invariably attend the local traditional public school — for better or worse.

On the flip side, the domestic DoDEA schools, like their equally well-funded counterparts overseas, have built up a reservoir of educational policy-making talent and experience. In many ways, the schools have been at the forefront of the latest trends in education.

Every new school facility built or expanded by DoDEA, beginning a few years ago, now follows a radically different floor plan from the traditional prototypical school building. McBride Elementary School, which opened this academic year on Fort Benning, looks more like a trendy student center at a university than an elementary schoolhouse.

Open, warehouse-sized rooms allow teachers to simultaneously co-teach dozens of students who would ordinarily be closed off in separate areas. Moveable desks, portable technology, and small break-out areas create an ideal environment for project-based and collaborative learning, according to proponents.

According to Todd Carver, Faith Middle School's assistant principal, the building itself becomes a vehicle for instruction. Builders left out ceiling tiles in the new Faith annex, which allows the 6th graders who attend classes there to learn about HVAC systems and electrical wiring. Solar panels, a wind turbine, and LED lights just outside the classroom are used to teach the students about green energy, and keep the class focused on STEM.

The bigger, flexible learning spaces are part of a larger pedagogical trend that values student-centered inquiry-based learning, where teachers serve as "learning guides" rather than lecturers. Even at the elementary school level, students are encouraged to work in groups and collaborate on projects, rather than sit quietly in straight rows of desks as they take notes. The new DoDEA schools look identical to the models that 21st Century School proponents have pushed for.

The new layouts requires teachers to pool resources and work in teams. At McBride, all four or five teachers assigned to a grade level are in the same room all day, which is meant to allow them to keep collective track of their students and easily incorporate cross-disciplinary connections. Some teachers adapt to the new style better than others.

“It’s not easy teaching in an environment like this,” said McBride principal Phyllis Parker as she walked through the adjoining sections that house her kindergartners and first graders. “It’s like being on stage.”

Overall, however, Parker, her counterparts at Faith, and the base’s leadership are all strong believers in the 21st Century School concept. The administrators say they have already seen a bump in performance for students enrolled in the newly constructed schools, and Parker said she has fielded visitors from traditional public schools across the state weighing whether to adopt the new model.

Nevertheless, a few educators said privately that convincing some parents and teachers that the new classroom layouts are an improvement has been a struggle — similar to some reports from civilian school districts that have taken similar measures. Opponents argue that the model was tried unsuccessfully in the 1970s and failed because the larger classrooms were too noisy and choatic. Proponents say advances in personalized education technology make the schools more viable today than they were 40 years ago.

Outside the gates

The DoDEA success story is only a portion of the patchwork system used to support the education of military-connected students. For the 80 percent of children with parents in the service who attend public schools, the support system is comparatively threadbare.

The presence of tax-exempt, federally owned land within a traditional school district’s boundaries often puts education systems at a budgetary disadvantage. Washington, which understands that most local schools are financed through local property taxes, provides “Impact Aid” to cover the shortfalls.

In practice, however, the federal government has underfunded the program, which mainly benefits districts with large numbers of military-connected students and Native American children. As of 2015, the federal government was reportedly only paying local districts 56 percent of the total amount it owed, by its own calculations.

To Washington’s credit, the federal policy did take a step forward in how it thinks about military-connected students with the 2015 passage of the landmark Every Student Succeeds Act, an overhaul of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind, said Mary Keller, the president of the Military Child Education Coalition (MCEC).

Keller and her team were successful in pushing Congress to make states disaggregate and report on student-achievement rates of their military-connected students. Prior to the change, Keller said that in many cases states didn’t have a solid grasp on who or where their military connected students were.

MCEC was also a leader in coordinating a push between the Department of Defense and The Council of State Governments to create an interstate compact aimed at securing state-level policy changes for children of active duty service-members. To date, the compact that has come out of those efforts has been signed by all 50 states and the District of Columbia and has brought about needed reforms, said Keller.

Moving gets “increasingly complicated in terms of academic continuity” as military-connected students get older, said Keller. In particular, the compact pushes states to be more flexible in handling academic record and credit transfers, kindergarten start dates, and graduation requirements.

High school seniors moving from Virginia to Georgia in years past may have been barred from graduating in time because they never passed Georgia’s state history course. Under the interstate compact’s changes, students in that difficult situation may be able to get the requirement waived or complete their Virginia graduation requirements and earn a diploma from their previous state remotely.

MCEC, and advocates for military-connected children, also largely backed the adoption of Common Core state standards for similar academic continuity reasons. Top Pentagon officials, like former Major General James "Spider" Marks, have indicated that the quality of a host state's educational standards factors prominently in where the military chooses to allocate resources. Despite the military's traditional hesitancy to avoid weighing in on contentious local domestic policy issues, the brass has signaled their belief that allowing military-connected children to move among high-quality public schools with minimal disruption in scholastic expectations is key to maintaining a well-oiled defense force.

Finally, DoDEA, the defense department agency that runs the military-only schools on base, also has a competitive grant program designed to support the academic missions of traditional school systems that neighbor military installations. The agency said it doles out tens of millions of dollars each year to support every child in those grant-winning school systems — military-connected and civilian.

Muscogee County has been a frequent recipient of these federal grants in recent years. The school system used the funds in conjunction with neighboring Columbus State University’s Coca-Cola Space Science Center to create an open-source library of educational podcasts, created by teachers and vetted by experts, that county officials said are regularly used by schools across the country and internationally.

Darlene Register is the Muscogee County Schools official charged with coordinating the system’s DoDEA grant and does much of the outreach to the 6,000 or so military-connected children in the 30,000-student district. Register said that the ability to use the federal grant to help all students is an important feature of the program that officials should think about as they work with military-connected children more broadly.

From her time as a school counselor, and then as Muscogee’s military student transition consultant, Register said she realized the importance of “not singling out the military kids. They don’t want to be singled out, they just want to be part of the school.”

With that in mind, however, Register also notes the importance of not losing sight of the stresses that come with a military lifestyle for students.

“You always hear about how resilient these military kids are,” she said. “They are, but there are some that are not, and you’ve got to have somebody there for them. Even the ones that act like they are, sometimes they’re really not. They could crack at any time.”

This story was originally published May 12, 2017 at 4:49 PM with the headline "The resilience of America’s military-connected students."