A New Slant on ‘Military Schools’

Abstract

SUPPOSE you heard someone say, We are youth workers at heart. I'm betting you wouldn't be surprised if the source turned out to be a staff member of a community-based, after-school program, or a counselor at an alternative school, or even a teacher in a school that enrolls lots of needy students. None of these people said it, however. The comment came from a general in the U.S. Army, and he was talking to Hugh Price, former president of the National Urban League, about the the military uses to shape up young people haven't succeeded very well in traditional education and work settings. Price is promoting a conversation about, as he puts it, demilitarizing the lessons learned by the Pentagon in saving young people from useless lives. It's certainly a touchy subject, considering the criticism recruiters often hear about targeting vulnerable youths. However, Price is not recruiting struggling kids for anything except a better chance to make it through high school. Several years ago a RAND research study looked for reasons why children of military families performed so much better on standardized tests than did children from nonmilitary families, even when the comparison samples included the same percentages of minorities and low-income children. As might be expected, the environment has a lot to do with the performance of the children. Discipline is a way of life for military families, on-base schools provide safety, and after-school peer groups have focused activities to occupy students' time. Such strategies were peculiar to the military, though, and not ones that schools and communities could emulate easily. However, it might be worth revisiting why incarceration and dropout rates are low in military families and schools and digging further to uncover why certain things work for these young people. Through articles and presentations to policy groups, Price, is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has been sharing what he has been learning. He studied the results from a range of military models--basic training, the pre-military development program, the National Guard's Youth ChalleNGe Program (which he helped organize), Junior ROTC programs and career academies, and quasi-military public high schools. If governors, educators, parents, and communities really care about helping youths who drop below the radar screen of most high schools, as Price describes them, they ought to consider some of the attributes of these programs and see what they can learn. What hits you right away is that the factors that are most at engaging disaffected youths do not include test preparation, threats, or remedial tracking. Before any of the quasi-military programs Price studied get to the academic part of their mission, they create a sense of belonging for the young people. This is the centerpiece, says Price. It is critically important to be part of a peer group where progress is everyone's focus. Like the military, the programs Price studied emphasize self-discipline, structure and routine, accountability and consequences, and safety. The leaders of these programs also believe that everyone enters can be successful and that it is important to address all the needs of growth and development. Starting with a focus on youth development, according to Karen Pittman, a national expert on youth development, will get such efforts to scale a lot faster than focusing on systems development. …