The Draft: No Child Left Behind

There are a number of dangerous signs that the United States military is increasingly encroaching into civilian life. One of the most alarming signs is that a new law now requires all high schools to provide the Pentagon with the names, addresses and phone numbers of its juniors and seniors. Any school that refuses to comply with these provisions buried deep within the No Child Left Behind legislation and the new National Defense Authorization Act stands to lose all federal funding.

Once in possession of this information on our kids, the military targets them individually for recruitment. The recruitment techniques in 2003 are high-tech, glitzy and potent... via Madison Avenue, words wrapped in the flag and fear of terrorism. Recruitment is now hard-sell, insistent and targeted to the most vulnerable students: people of color and the less privileged. Recruiters buy lists of student names, just like telemarketers buy phone numbers of prospective consumers. Information from SAT tests is regularly sold to the military. Recruiters have even brought a portable climbing wall around to schools in order to entice students. They have provided students with phone cards which were only activated after the card connected the student to the recruiter to hear his pitch. Recruiters know their job and are dedicated to convincing the highest number of students that the military offers them the best opportunity for the future. They are at Tomales High, in West Marin County, every week through June....and in other Marin schools as well.

Parents are rarely told, or manage to find out, that they have the legal right to opt out of having their kids so intently targeted by military recruiters in the schools. It is only necessary to sign a short statement to that end and give it to the school to be put in the student's file. The West Marin Alliance has prepared an easy-to-use form, in both English and Spanish, which parents can use to opt out of this invasion into their family privacy. Forms are available free at all West Marin libraries. It is recommended that other areas provide the same service for their communities.

The United States military is becoming a major player in US public education. In middle schools, students are targeted with programs such as the Young Marines and the Navy's Starbase-Atlantis. In high schools, the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) is being used as a way to entice kids into the military life. Currently, about 500,000 students in more than 3,000 high schools are in the program, with JROTC units authorized in another 500 schools (figures from In These Times).

As state and local monies for education dry up due to budget woes, school districts all over the US are desperately getting money for their education systems via publicly funded military academies. An example from In These Times is that 2,000 eighth-graders applied for the 140 spots in the Chicago Military Academy, a JROTC school that serves the African American community in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side.

JROTC classes are independent of input from the schools through which they operate. And the classes are taught by former military officers, who are not required to be certified to teach or have a degree in education. They teach what they want: an Army JROTC textbook states that "At the close of the Civil War, after the large Union forces were disbanded, a small regular Army was given the task of pacifying the Indians.....fortunately for the Army, the government policy of pushing the Indians farther west then wiping them out was carried out successfully." A Navy textbook adds that "Not all nations are blessed with great resources. We need the resources other countries can provide to maintain our standard of living." Around 45% of students in JROTC enlist.

For those among the working poor and in communities of color, joining the military is perceived as the "way out" and the "way up." In an Army textbook, the following quote sums up how the military sees the relationship of citizens to the government: "Citizens owe allegiance to their government, which in turn grants them rights and privileges of citizenship." The Declaration of Independence, however, provides a different definition, turning the previous statement around to state that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed..."