Military readiness is much more than the effective training of forces for deployment. As one community in central Missouri demonstrates, it includes ensuring that military-connected children have an excellent public school experience, giving their parents peace of mind that a career in the military doesn’t have to mean sacrificing a child’s education.
The lowering of educational standards for Navy recruits adds fuel to a national effort that would provide state-level educators with Defense Department data that could help address the recruiting crisis.
Schools and communities lack the data from the armed forces to demonstrate to their students that upon graduation they are well prepared to succeed in the military.
The U.S. military takes into consideration the quality of local public schools as it decides whether to maintain military commands and offices where they are or move them elsewhere. This provides communities with another big reason to focus on improving schools, because the economic impact of any single military installation can be enormous.
Ukraine is fighting to retain its freedom from the grips of Moscow while at the same time trying to approximate a K-12 education for the nation’s 5.7 million school-age children. It highlights the resiliency of Ukrainian children.
