WHAT IS IT?
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was the name given by the Bush administration to their 2001 modification of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Under NCLB, schools and school districts could lose federal funding if they failed to make student contact information available, upon request, to military recruiters and colleges (however, students were allowed to opt out of such releases). This law also required that military recruiters be given the "same access“ to school campuses that is granted to college and employment representatives.
The Obama administration revised this law and renamed it the "Every Student Succeeds Act" (ESSA). The recruiter access provisions remained and were, in fact, made more robust. Instead of all students being able to opt themselves out of schools handing recruiters their information, now only their parents or legal guardians can do so if the students are under 18 years of age.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
By requiring schools and school districts to give out student’s information to recruiters by default, instead of giving the parents an option to “opt in” to this, the process is effectively obscured. Parents and legal guardians may ignore the fact that recruiters are in possession of their children’s address, phone number, and name. This gives recruiters the ability to use a sophisticated sales’ pitch in favor of enlistment without a parent’s or legal guardian’s supervision and knowledge.
This is also facilitated by the “same access” clause, made even more egregious by the fact that it equates military enlistment to job and college recruitment. Although there are purported job training and educational benefits gained by joining the military, there are significant risks which distance a military career from other types of jobs and future opportunities. These risks can include physical harm and psychological injuries (also known as PTSD), as well as not obtaining the benefits which were originally promised in the recruitment pitch.
WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT?
- If you are a parent or legal guardian of a person younger than 18 years of age, contact your school to learn about their opt-out policy.
- If you are a student and are younger than 18, ask your parents or legal guardian to contact the school on your behalf. If you are older than 18, you can submit your own opt-out request to the school.
- Spread the word! Tell other people in your school, other parents and guardians or write to your community newspaper or school publication.
- Hand out opt out forms, or ask school authorities (teachers, the principal, counselors) to hand them out.
- It is legal for schools to adopt a policy restricting the activities of recruiters on campus, as long as the restrictions also apply to college and employment representatives. Such policies have been adopted in some of the nation’s largest school districts.
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Revised 02/20/2020
What is recruiter abuse - 
Militarism is a value system that stresses the superiority of some people over others. Under militarism, the people deemed inferior are dehumanized as enemies who must be overpowered by any means necessary. Those who deem themselves superior are permitted to take whatever they want from others — land, freedom, natural resources, cultures, lives — by force.
The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global, Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible. - Chris Hedges (From his article: 
.jpg "Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team members, some armed with assault rifles, preparing for an exercise")
David Swanson is the author of the new book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, by Seven Stories Press and of the introduction to The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush by Dennis Kucinich. In addition to cofounding AfterDowningStreet.org, he is the Washington director of Democrats.com and sits on the boards of a number of progressive organizations in Washington, DC.
Jorge Mariscal is the grandson of Mexican immigrants and the son of a U.S. Marine who fought in World War II. He served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego.
Matt Guynn plays the dual role of program director and coordinator for congregational organizing for On Earth Peace, building peace and nonviolence leadership within the 1000+ congregations of the Church of the Brethren across the United States and Puerto Rico. He previously served a co-coordinator of training for Christian Peacemaker Teams, serving as an unarmed accompanier with political refugees in Chiapas, Mexico, and offering or supporting trainings in the US and Mexico.
Rick Jahnkow works for two San Diego-based anti-militarist organizations, the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities and the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft. He can be reached at: 
Pat Elder was a co-founder of the 
Edward Hasbrouck grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He considers myself primarily a political activist. Hasbrouck began his resistance to the violence of illegitimate authority as an elected but nonvoting student representative to the local school board and as an activist for peace, disarmament, and students' rights. His first book was a handbook for high school students on their legal rights co-authored in the summer of 1977, between high school and college, as an intern for the student service bureau of the Massachusetts Department of Education. He majored in political science at the University of Chicago until leaving school to pursue direct involvement in political activism.
