Why The Pentagon run the best schools and the safest nuclear program

I’m not sure this “thinking” on public education holds up if you look outside the U.S. where countries with emphasis on public education so consistently outperform the Americans.

I guess at best it might be that there’s problems unique to American culture that makes public education not work. But that feels unlikely to hold up. I think the premise is simply wrong.

I think the election bias is as simple as: at least one of the parents has a job.

The public schools run by the military are fairly normal public schools. They aren’t “military schools.” They aren’t more discipline-focused.

They do have the advantage of offering federal salary and benefits to teachers. That means they can be pretty picky about who they accept, resulting in higher quality teachers.

"This creates a “bit” of challenge. We can observe that the military implements systematically and produces superior results, but we cannot cleanly separate method effects from selection effects without experiments that will never happen."

The article keeps bring up selection effects

I agree it is likely selection bias but I don't think it is likely for the same reasons.

These kinds of results often correlate strongly with parental income levels, which put another way "zip code". Yeah, the military isn't known for great salaries and you'd be right to point at plenty of rich counties, but how many rich counties are there to poor ones? We don't have the distributions and that's what makes this hard to read.

Despite that, we do have some distributional information. Lucky for us, they included the demographics! Taking what we know above, we can actually back investigate to at least provide a "sniff test". Looking at the DoDEA scales, they are pretty low variance in comparison. Unless you think Asians are genetically smarter than whites, blacks, or hispanics then it needs to come down to other factors, which includes culture. The culture will probably be suppressed a bit in the military data, as military naturally creates a more homogeneous setting, but some variance will still exist for this part as well as some likely imbalances in incomes and other things.

An important part of this rich correlation is that it ties very much into stable household. Certainly having active deployment will disrupt the household a bit, but some of that normalizes and well... let's be honest, there is a stable income and stable food situation at home. That's a major factor in a lot of households.

So the real question would be "How do DoDEA schools compare to national schools when you exclude national schools that have a significant number of families that do not have a stable income?" I believe that would be a more fair comparison, though that would really just bring us to "apples and oranges" instead of "oranges and tomatoes". The claim is that the difference is due to some organizational influence, i.e. one that is actionable (like the way teachers teach or students are disciplined, etc), but frankly we just have so little data we can't rule out a million other things.

In what world is the US military suddenly known for having higher IQ than average in the enlisted ranks?

The military training programs have exactly one goal and that is to train. They have the ability to set their standards and enforce them ruthlessly. Public schools have many goals besides education, have to keep their students (and more importantly the parents of those students) happy, and have no ability to select their students and very little ability to fail them out and remove them, and can be sued for anything at any time. It's pretty clear why military training is superior.

As for software, I have never heard the military or government accused of being good at building it, so I don't really see your point there.

Everyone has budge constraints. I think this is a bit unfair to SWE. Of course sometimes you ship bad performance code quick and pay extra cloud bills to chase extra revenue sooner.

I don't think you're looking at this the right way.

I would say that the training programs illustrate that the military generally treats its workforce as the result of external factors. Someone else decides who will be in the military, and the military has to figure out what to do with them.

Companies usually see things very differently. They feel free to say that they won't train because they want to hire someone who's already trained. If that approach doesn't work well, they can put even more effort into searching for The Ideal Employee and taking advantage of the fact that, if you ignore the time you spent searching for him, his time-to-become-productive is so low.

The military imposes strict IQ thresholds on those seeking to join.

That's the point of the Armed Forces Qualifying Test.