Maintaining this blog has helped me keep abreast of issues in High School education that I probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise. Usually I'm interested in literacy issues and preparedness of freshman that come into my classes. But sometimes I learn about policies and trends that surprise me.

For example, did you know that the No Child Left Behind Act has a stipulation that requires schools to give the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all their students to military recruiters? I didn't. And it troubles me a bit.

David Goodman's article, "No Child Unrecruited" -- from the Nov/Dec 2002 issue of Mother Jones -- reports that "buried deep within the law's 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student -- or face a cutoff of all federal aid." A little research at the Dept. of Education website turns up an Oct 2002 Press Release that confirms this and explains the policies and laws regarding military access to student records. I was surprised to learn from the release that "the Department of Defense has developed a national high school data base to document recruiter access. Presently, 95 percent of the nation's 22,000 secondary schools provide a degree of access to military recruiters that is consistent with current law."

Apparently a student or a parent of a student can "opt out" of providing directory information at their school, and this will ostensibly prevent them from being included on any list the school provides to the military. But there are still questions about student privacy rights, compliance with the "opt out" provision, and suspicion about recruitment strategies that have some educators angry.

Goodman also wrote a related article in early 2002, "Recruiting the Class of 2005," about how militant JROTC programs are increasing their presence on campuses -- especially in poor school districts -- by offering free books, materials, and other incentives for schools to expand the JROTC presence. Goodman writes: since 1992, "the number of jrotc units and cadets has doubled. There are now nearly 500,000 students enrolled in the program at some 3,000 schools nationwide, and the Defense Department plans to spend $234 million on jrotc this year -- nearly quadruple what it spent a decade ago."

This isn't exactly a "back-door draft" and as a veteran of the Army myself, I think that military service is a perfectly valid way to build a post-high school life and give back to the country. But the privacy issues here concern me and I don't understand why military recruitment policy belongs in an education law that ostensibly deals with student learning and school accountability. Who are they really accountable to?

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