COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Student Privacy
Fight back against giving kids' names to military
David Giffey, the Capitol Times
September 28, 2007
The No Child Left Behind Act is up for reauthorization this month.
There has been much necessary criticism and commentary about its
unfunded mandates, forced standardized testing, and takeover threats
to struggling public school systems.
But another critical piece of the law is often overlooked.
Section 9528, in about 200 words, requires public high schools to
give student information to military recruiters upon request unless
the families or students opt out.
The Capital Times story last Friday about opting out at East High
School exemplified the type of parental and community action required
to level the playing field between military recruitment and options
to the military. But much remains to be done, especially in rural communities.
Section 9528 has consistently escaped attention while the other very
real and controversial contents of the law preoccupy educators and
legislators, distracting them from what is happening daily as
uniformed military recruiters patrol the hallways of the 22,000
public high schools in the U.S.
The presence of military recruiters in schools is a tradition that
demands more scrutiny of the increased pressure the war in Iraq
places on recruiters to meet their quotas, for which they are paid.
Since the law threw open our school doors to new military recruitment
opportunities, the responses among the 425 public school districts in
Wisconsin have been utterly inconsistent. It is likely that some
administrators, guidance counselors, and certainly many teachers in
Wisconsin secondary schools never even heard of Section 9528. As a
result, the responses have been disorganized, inconsistent, and in
some cases totally absent.
There have been cases in which school districts immediately
relinquished student information after receiving intimidating letters
from a branch of the military, and then backpedaled after angry
parents complained.
Some districts have attempted to limit the number of military
recruitment visits per year, some have allowed other groups to
present optional information to students, some have prepared concise
opt-out forms, and some have done nothing.
The growing unpopularity of the war has resulted in reduced standards
and greater recruitment pressure on students in rural Wisconsin
school districts, where graduation rates are high and kids don't have
jobs. As a matter of fact, Wisconsin ranked fourth in the nation in
2006 for producing "high-quality" active duty Army recruits, meaning
they graduated from high school and scored in the upper half on the
Armed Forces Qualification Test.
There are many reasons to question reauthorization of No Child Left
Behind, not least being the imbalance between federal funding of the
military in 2008 at $1,228 billion compared to federal education
funding at $59 billion. Legitimate concerns are raised over the
future of public education in the face of the law's impulse to take
over school districts deemed to be unsuccessful.
Section 9528, on its own, is intimidating to school districts.
The extreme punishment that could befall a school district for
noncompliance with military recruitment mandates is described by the
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction in Bulletin No. 02.12
dated Dec. 10, 2002, which outlines "enforcement" of Section 9528.
"In addition to the potential loss of funds for failure to comply
with (Section) 9528 (a school) that denies a military recruiter
access to the requested information on students will be subject to
specific interventions. " First the noncompliant school would be paid
a visit by a senior military officer. Then "the Department of Defense
must notify the state governor within 60 days." Unresolved problems
would then be reported to Congress.
What next? Waterboarding the high school principal?
Never mind that recruiters repeatedly violate the privacy rights of
minor-age students. Never mind that they mislead, obscure and
essentially bribe vulnerable teenagers into military service, which
is, in truth, based on waging war, learning how to kill, or to accept
being killed. It's not a "career choice" the recruiters are selling.
It's a lifestyle.
The picture painted by recruiters is one of signing bonuses,
veterans' benefits and college tuition.
It would be good for the DPI to step forward with an educational
campaign and some statewide standards in order to provide students
and their families a fair chance in the face of the $4 billion spent
by the military on recruiting each year.
It would be even better if our elected officials removed Section 9528
from the law. Until then, all we citizens can do is work to learn
about and reveal the truth about military recruitment taking place
today in our public high schools.
---
David Giffey of Arena is a Vietnam War veteran and a board member of
Veterans for Peace in Central Wisconsin.
This archive consists of a topically organized selection of
articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed
publications and web sites. The archive is not complete. We have chosen
material relevant to the work of