The children of enlisted men and women who attend schools on military bases under the supervision of the Department of Defense (DoD) routinely outperform the vast majority of their civilian counterparts. Not only is the average test score at these schools higher than the average in all but one of the fifty states, the Black-White test score gap is only a third of what it is in the civilian population.

Through regression analyses of the 1998 NAEP Reading Assessment, the study compares DoD schools with public and Catholic schools to determine the role that school-level factors play within each organizational context. In the second portion of the dissertation the 1999 Survey of Active Duty Personnel are analyzed to further examine individual-level characteristics of DoD students not observed in the NAEP.

Overall DoD schools are more homogenous than civilian schools are in that Blacks are more likely to attend schools similar to their White counterparts than is the case in public and Catholic schools. This provides some evidence for the effects of school integration on the reduction of the test score gap without a significant reduction in the test scores of the White students who attend these same schools. Findings also show that the school-level factors that matter most in DoD schools have to do with disciplinary climate and tracking practices. Unlike in public and Catholic schools, tracking is associated with an increase in test score performance, and some evidence shows that tracking in DoD schools is a more race-blind process than in public and Catholic schools.

Finally, the findings of the SADP analyses suggest some support for the role that different rates of intergenerational social closure across race and across location play in explaining the differences in the race gap within DoD school.

Overall, the dissertation focuses on how institutions outside of the school and the family counter the ways in which race, ethnicity, and class have historically influenced educational achievement in the United States.