Will Hegseth Disrupt the nation’s top performing school system?

“If the Department of Defense schools were a state, we would all be traveling there to figure out what’s going on.” – Martin West, Harvard education professor. October 2023.

First administered in 1969, the NAEP assessment (National Assessment of Educational Progress) is the largest continuing and nationally representative assessment of what our nation’s students know and can do in subjects such as mathematics, reading, science, and writing. Refered to as “The Nation’s Report Card,” the national assessment is meant to “provide meaningful results to improve education policy and practice.”

You might think the results would be used to highlight the practices in high performing states and try to replicate their successes across the country… You would want to learn from them, you certainly wouldn’t want to completely overhaul that system…

In the United States, there is one state/jursidiction that repeatedly outperforms all others in national assessments and, no, it is not Florida. It is the Department of Defense Education Activity or DoDEA, which operates as a field activity of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and serves almost 70,000 students (children of active duty military and DoD civilian families). They operate 161 accredited schools in 9 districts located in 11 foreign countries, 7 states, Guam, and Puerto Rico. And they do a pretty great job.

In the 2022 NAEP assessment (National Assessment of Educational Progress, considered “the Nation’s Report Card), they ranked Number 1  in both 4th Grade and 8th Grade, Math AND Reading. Their students’ average scale scores ranged from 15 to 23 percentage points higher than corresponding national average scores and held steady or increased while national average scores decreased. They were the only state/jurisdiction to see a score increase for any grade/subject on the first NAEP administered since the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

2024 NAEP scores are expected to be released in early 2025.

Why do DoDEA students perform so well? It could be their focus on Early Childhood Education, with Universal All-Day Kindergarten. It could be their students have parents with jobs, health care, food and housing; their schools are well-funded and don’t have the same federally imposed requirements. It could be their investment in teacher and leader development that has continued over the past decade. It could be their focus on limiting excessive bureaucracy and instead prioritizing efforts that can have the most impact on students. It could be their commitment to continuous improvement, which focuses on the academic, health, and social and emotional needs of their students.

In a press release following the release of the 2022 scores, they credited their success, in part, to their commitment to providing “Equitable Learning Experiences for All Students” (part of their Blueprint for Continuous Improvement):

“DoDEA’s emphasis on equity in education is reflected in higher scores across their diverse population and achievement gaps that are significantly smaller than the rest of the nation. I am particularly pleased to see those efforts reflected in Black and Hispanic student groups that are outperforming the nation overall.” -Gilbert Cisneros, Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, DoDEA Press Release, 10/24/22

Oh no… they said the “E” word….

Unfortunately, the DoDEA’s committment to equity, which they credit for their overwhelming success, may make them a major target of the new Trump Administration.

Several far right organizations involved in the writing of Project 2025, already had DoDEA schools in their sights. In 2023, the Claremont Institute released an “investigative report” entitled “Grooming Future Revolutionaries: Woke Indoctrination at K-12 Schools on America’s Military Bases.” The Claremont Institute was a member of the advisory board of Project 2025.

In July 2024, American Transparency, a 501(c)3 government watchdog organization, released a report “Schools For Radicals: The Secret Push to Institute Radical DEI Curriculums within the Pentagon’s K-12 Public Schools,” which called on Congress to offer military families vouchers so they could opt-out of their “radical” DoDEA schools.

American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has suggested the Biden Administration has turned “DoDEA schools into woke indoctrination factories.” They (AEI) are excited that a second Trump presidency, with a DOD run by Peter Hegseth, will install new leaders at DoDEA who will not only “ditch DEI” (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) but reorient their schools entirely “to focus on the good, true, and beautiful.” These are codewords for the classical education movement which is “embraced by the religious right and seen by others as a Trojan horse for Christian nationalism.”

They want to convert the nation’s top performing school system into a classical school network.

[If you wonder why that is concerning, learn about what happened to New College of Florida, when right wing administrators decided to convert the progressive, high performing honors college into the “Hillsdale of the South.” Every year since, their national ranking have plummetted.]

Hegseth, Trump’s current appointee for Defense Secretary, is the perfect guy to disrupt the DoDEA schools. He is not a fan of America’s schools. He believes “the country’s public and private education system as infected with leftist ideology.” He encourages families to abandon traditional schools in favor of classical schools:

“Get your kids out of government school systems right now if you can,” Hegseth said in November during an interview recorded with Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and conservative media personality. “Save money. Move. Get a second job. Don’t take the vacation. Sell the boat. Whatever. Drive for Uber. … Because it’s about saving your kid right now.” https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/15/trumps-defense-pick-pete-hegseth-has-an-opening-to-reshape-american-classrooms-00194364

Hegseth has co-authored a book “Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation,” which calls for a revival of classical education. He and his co-author David Goodwin, the president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, understood that such a revival would have to come through school choice, because “you can’t just flip a switch and transform public schools into classical schools.”

But if you are the Secretary of Defense, you COULD “flip a switch” and transform the only district the federal government has full control over – the DoDEA schools…

As reported by Juan Perez Jr., for Politico: “A new defense secretary would have power to install a new chain of command over the military school system, and use federal contracts to marshal consultants who write new curriculum, testing and teacher training standards.”

AEI Fellow, Max Eden, noted that “while the Education Department is statutorily prohibited from sponsoring, influencing, or designing curriculum, other departments are not.” While President Trump repeats his mantra of returning education “to the states,” the DoDEA could create a national model of a patriotic classical curriculum through defense contracts. In this way, the miltary could substatially reduce the cost of shifting public schools toward a classical model. And that, especially in red states, could lead to a radical transformation of our nation’s public schools.

Beware, just like the right wing takeover of a small college in Florida portends attacks against universities nationwide, attempts to transform DoDEA schools into ideologically driven classical schools, paid for by defense dollars, may impact the curriculm in your local public schools.

Never has it been clearer that providing a high quality education system, one which allows academic success for all children, will continue to take a back seat to political agendas. If the goal is to expand conservative, patriotic classical education, the choice of the Christian Nationalists, then the most expedient way to do so is to upend the nation’s high performing school system. Sigh…