by PoorRustDev | 2025-10-15 08:11:09+00:00
I went to a DOD school for most (around 90%) of my life before High School, I'm happy to answer any questions as a student that actually attended elementary school on base in a foreign country.

In general I would disagree with the posts that say they are not more discipline focused. It was a normal school, however if you were consistently a problem in class the squadron commander would be notified of a subordinates unruly child, and that would immediately solve the issues in class. I remember getting into a fight with a bully, and my military parent drilling into my head that this had career consequences if it kept happening. I believe the bully also had a similar talk because the next day at school we were no longer speaking or in contact in any way, which is a perfectly acceptable outcome in my opinion.

One difficult part that many people do not seem to understand is that as a kid you become very good at forming surface level friendships, but not many deeper friendships. This is a result of your class changing every month as parents are sent to different bases during a permanent change of station (PCS). One moment you might be best friends with someone who sits next to you in class, the next week their seat is empty, and the week after that it could be filled with someone from around the world who grew up in completely different circumstances than yourself.

One aspect that was completely different was that the DOD school was more egalitarian. No one cared who your parents were, as everyone's family was from the military. In the public schools and private schools I attended in the United States, other students focused a lot on what their parents did or what (economic) class they belonged to.

When I returned to the United States and was enrolled into the local public school, it was a nightmare. I was years ahead of the other students in all subjects. As a young child, I didn't understand why everyone was so undisciplined, and when there were problems in class the teacher seemed more than happy to do literally nothing. Students could be bullying classmates during a lecture, and the teacher would just continue the lecture as if nothing is going on. Where bullying was completely stomped out in the DOD school by the faculty, it was actively aided and grown by the public school faculty. Students who were more of the "political activist" type also actively harassed me for my parent's chosen career, and more than one public school faculty member made distasteful comments about my intelligence due to my families military background.

The faculty of the school also didn't like me (I think?), I was held back from joining the gifted program because my Spanish language grades were terrible. There was no consideration that I had never had Spanish as a class before moving back to the states, and was joining a class in the 7th grade that had studied Spanish for years at that point. Because my reading scores were so much higher than the rest of the class, I was blocked from checking out specific books I wanted to read in the library. The teachers deemed them "below my reading level" and so I was limited to a selection of about a dozen books I found extremely boring, with no option to read what interested me. I simply didn't read at school, luckily my parents took me to the county library instead. Being ahead of the other students was also disastrous to my study habits, I unfortunately turned into one of those students who could get A's without any studying, so the change to a much more difficult high school curriculum required a lot of adjustment.

As an aside, the field trips were also significantly better. In the DOD school once a year we got to go somewhere very interesting, like a real medieval castle, the white cliffs of dover to see old WW2 equipment, and even Normandy beach. In the US I had a single field trip the whole time I was in the US, and we just walked around the state capitol for an hour.

In general I found that any learning that happened at a public school to simply be a happy accident. While at the DOD schools it seemed to be the focus every day. In my opinion, public school faculty are actively the worst elements of the school system, with the student body being a close second. I don't think you can solve this issue with more funding, smaller classes, or any of the other often repeated "one simple solutions" you see posted around online. It seems to me that Americans actively despise education, and place no value on it, and that the people we let teach at public schools are the complete opposite of who you would want teaching in the first place.