This got touched on by a few replies, happy to see there are some others here with actual military experience chiming in. I grew up on military bases, and went

This got touched on by a few replies, happy to see there are some others here with actual military experience chiming in. I grew up on military bases, and went to schools both on and off base for 18 years. All continental US bases typically have elementary-level (K-5) school, but you typically go to an off-base school for middle and high school. When you are overseas, this isn't the case, you would most likely go to school on base K-12. I think the article gets right a lot of things, but as some other's mentioned there are also things it doesn't catch. There are still bad kids on base, who do tons of drugs, commit crimes, cheat, steal, whatever. These kids are in every population. One huge difference between on base schools and off, is if you got in trouble at school, your sponsor's (Mom/Dad whoever is the active duty in the family) CO (commanding officer) gets informed. This can lead to a tongue lashing at the least, and at the most your sponsor can get passed up on the next promotion list or demoted. Kids would get caught selling drugs, they would get suspended and then their Dad or Mom would usually make their life a living hell for a while. It would turn most kids around pretty quickly. The worst one I know about first hand was a group of kids on base in California (a very remote base btw) had a little theft ring of the base exchange (BX, like target/walmart on base). The MP's found out about it, watched them work for a while, then arrested all of the kids. They were high schoolers, probably 15-17. I think 4 got caught. The result was each of their families were kicked off base, no longer able to live in free base housing. As stated elsewhere, military families aren't paid well at all, so now these families had to move off base and rent a house. Once again, this was a super remote base, and it was easily a 35 min drive from main base to the nearest housing off base. I will tell you the rest of our school suddenly got really well behaved for the rest of the year. Once again, I think the NYT touched on most of the reasons schools were generally better, but to me discipline was a huge factor. You typically didn't have that one shithead in your class ruining it for everyone else.