Military Presence in Our Schools

Kevin Young -

“Counter-recruitment,” alternatively known as “truth-in-recruiting” or CR for brevity’s sake, involves providing young people and their parents with information about alternatives to military enlistment (college, vocational training, job opportunities, scholarships, etc.). At the same time, CR campaigns can provide a sense of the terrible realities of war by exposing students and parents to the words of soldiers, veterans, and foreign war victims. Since most military recruits enlist 1) because they see no other option, and/or 2) because they have a deluded and romantic view of war, the military, and US foreign policy, CR efforts can fill two important gaps in young people’s knowledge.

One of the lesser-known aspects of the “No Child Left Behind” Act of 2001 is a provision requiring all public high schools to provide military recruiters with students’ private contact information. The only way to avoid the release of this information is to submit a signed “opt-out” form to school administrators every year by a district-specific deadline, usually sometime between mid-September and mid-October. School administrators are legally obliged to send the opt-out form home with students, but many do not, and often the forms get overlooked within the massive information packets sent home at the start of the school year. The months of August, September, and October are thus particularly crucial for CR efforts.

What follows is an analysis of the importance of counter-recruitment and a brief starters’ guide for those who might be inclined to engage in it this fall, with links to sample leaflets and educational information.

  https://www.nnomy.org/parents | Versión en español

   Dr. Teresa Whitehurst -

"Temptation is not random, nor is it one-size-fits-all. Instead, it will always attach itself to our unique talents and aspirations. One of temptation's cleverest tricks is to seduce that which is a strength. Our strength can become our downfall because we're tripped up through the misuse or misdirection of our talents and ambitions."

- Jesus on Parenting: 10 Essential Principles That Will Transform Your Family

My daughter works in the guidance office of her high school. She runs errands, takes calls, files paperwork, and does all she can to help guidance counselors as they advise and assist college-bound students. But demand is low this year: With recruiters sitting in the hallway, playing rock music at a cafeteria table at lunch, and striking up chummy conversations with kids every chance they get, and with every senior's first period devoted not to academics but to watching Channel One's recruiting TV, military prep is winning young hearts and minds away from college prep.

On parent-teacher night, I entered the guidance office and noticed large recruiting posters on the wall. There were no college-recruiting posters or ads of any sort. Inside the guidance counselors' offices, students can't help but see more military posters and stacks of glossy recruiting brochures, booklets, and magazines. If you didn't know better, you'd think you were at the Army Recruiting Office near the mall, not a public school guidance office that's supposedly dedicated to helping students make the most of their educational experience and continue on to college or trade school.

A guidance counselor may never say a word about joining the military. But then again, she really doesn't need to: the recruiting posters and materials do it for her. Students can't help but see them, and if they ever pick up a brochure while they're waiting, they're bound to feel the pull of exceedingly well-researched appeals to teen psychology.

Michelle Renee Matisons and Seth Sandronsky -

With globalization, the expansion of capitalist production has doubled the planetary work force, and U.S. elites in New Jersey and other “blue and red states” are defunding urban education services and then conveniently refunding education through private market interventions. As corporate America flexes its political power by renting lawmakers at all levels, mass incarceration of the racialized populace has been a key social policy reflecting this trend of globalized class power. Like the War on Drugs that parallels it, the War on Public Schools directs public attention to a singular cause for the class inequality inherent in the capitalist system. Both “wars” masquerade as comprehensive solutions to crime and poverty, fixating on symptoms and not root causes of social problems.

Racialized class power is found everywhere in predatory reform targeting poor urban school districts. Like the War on Drugs, it disproportionately affects poor people of color, but poor urban and rural whites are casualties in both wars too. The bipartisan War on Public Schools picks up and exacerbates social outcomes created by the bipartisan War on Drugs: urban communities continually bear the brunt of a political system unified by racialized class power. Far from withering away, contemporary U.S. capitalism increasingly relies upon the state’s regulatory powers.