Recruiting & Testing in Parochial Schools

Not only are military recruiters using football to pry open access to parochial schools, but they are increasingly relying on military testing in schools to get access to high school students’ private information without parental consent.  This is raising questions about military recruitment of children, the uniqueness of Christian education, and the undermining of traditional educational values by programs that teach militarism to youth.  Over just the past ten years, organizations such as the New York Civil Liberties Union, Rutgers School of Law, and Child Soldiers International, have raised troubling questions about the military presence in schools.  Military access to religious and parochial schools also strikes at the core of Christian identity.  For Catholics, it calls to mind the divide between the church as envisioned by Cardinal Francis Spellman (who encouraged Catholic students to join "Christ's war against the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam") and Bishop Thomas Gumbleton (who urges citizens not to “unquestioningly accept the war policies of their government.”) What’s more, critical thinking skills—so often hailed by educational progressives—may be undermined by what Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr decried as the “military mind” which “makes unthinking obedience” the greatest good in the “hierarchy of virtues."  Fortunately, the march to militarize has an about-face.  Parents, teachers, and community organizers can disrupt the drill commands.  For instance, recent cases of successful opposition to the practice of military testing in schools provide a roadmap for future activism. 

How We Got Here

A little known provision in the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB Section 9528) requires “Armed Forces recruiter access to students and student recruiting information.” It mandates that military recruiters have the same access to high schools as is generally provided to colleges. Prior to this, according to the Pentagon, high schools had barred recruiters from their premises on more than 19,000 occasions in 1999 alone.  (While some high school administrators probably did refuse recruiters’ requests because they believed it was inappropriate for educational institutions to promote military service, many activists believe the high figure to be grossly exaggerated).  Based largely on these claims, NCLB opened up a data mine for the military.

            In addition to access to high school students’ names, addresses, and telephone numbers, the Pentagon is also able to use data brokers, social media analysis, and information purchased from yearbook and class ring companies to provide military recruiting services with a virtual tour of what’s going on in Johnny’s head, if he has a girlfriend, and what she thinks of his decision regarding enlistment.

            Still, military recruiters have had a much harder time reaching the 3.5 million students who attend U.S. parochial and religious schools, what one unclassified Army document describes as an “untapped market.” As a result, recruiters have honed creative ways of reaching this population.

Prying Open a “Tough-to-Penetrate” Market

The example from Central Catholic in Portland is not uncommon. In the 2009-2010 school year, one Milwaukee recruiter was able to use his 15-hour-per-week job as a volunteer coach to mentor—and eventually enlist—five football players from Pius XI High School. (Pope Pius XI, the peace and justice pope of the 1930s, would have been appalled.)

            In 2009, the Army’s Southern California Recruiting Battalion worked with community leaders and the marketing firm Weber Shandwick to coordinate a Catholic school outreach campaign. Based on leaked meeting minutes, it seems a community leader approached at least one Cardinal with requests to open up schools in his diocese. But the Army claims that documents related to the campaign are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, and nothing is known about the Cardinal’s response.

            In 2011, an advertising specialist at the Columbus (Ohio) Army Recruiting Battalion, told the Recruiter Journal: “I hear recruiters talk about how hard it is to penetrate parochial high schools and that’s one of the reasons we participate in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.” “As we go down the street with our color guard and Army-branded vehicles,” this official said, “we’re talking to the parochial audience … the parochial parents … the parochial school administrators that may be there.”

Getting Inside Their Heads

While these efforts are worth noting, the military services know they can get more bang for their buck by getting inside the heads of religious school students. And that leads us to the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB).

            The ASVAB, the military’s “entrance exam,” has been in use since 1968. Since then it’s been used in U.S. secondary schools to screen potential recruits. The ASVAB Career Exploration Program (CEP) is the innocuous-sounding version of the military test that is currently administered in 12,000 American high schools.

            This is the tool used by recruiters to gain test results, Social Security numbers, and detailed demographic information on more than 660,000 high school students every year.

            The “career test” allows recruiters access to a student’s cognitive abilities, something they cannot find online or purchase from information dealers. (As one Army training manual noted, data obtained from the CEP “provides information you can’t get from any other list.”) A child's intellectual capabilities, career interests, and mechanical aptitude are all combined to create a precise portrait, all before a recruiter's first contact.

            Often students are given the test at school without parental knowledge or consent; many schools make the test mandatory. And existing federal safeguards that generally protect student privacy (such as the Family Educational Rights Protection Act) do not apply to these military tests.

            Largely because of its reach in the schools, and the rich data profile that the test provides, the school-based career test is arguably the military's most effective recruiting tool. Together with a regular recruiter presence in the schools, and the student contact information afforded by Sec. 9528 of the NCLB, the ASVAB-CEP makes up an important part of the military footprint in American schools. Despite this, the marketing efforts tend to mask the military’s role in administering the test.

Hiding the Recruiting’s Hand

In the parochial and religious schools, where most students are college-bound, the ASVAB-CEP has not been as widespread as it now is in the public system. Still, our analysis of data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act shows that there were approximately 450 parochial and religious high schools (including 113 Catholic schools) giving the test to more than 11,000 students in the 2012-2013 school year.

            An emination of the websites of nearly 100 such schools reveals that no sites clearly identified the ASVAB-CEP as a recruitment tool or mentioned that student data would be transferred to military recruiters. Instead, these websites carried upbeat promotional messages often lifted verbatim from Pentagon sources.

            For instance, Mount St. Mary Catholic High School in Oklahoma City encourages students to take the test under the “College and Career Placement” section of its student handbook. Rather than accurately describing test proctors as military recruiters or Department of Defense employees, Mount St. Mary’s officials refer to them as “test administrators from the Federal Government.”

            Throughout the country counselors include language provided by recruiters in their school’s promotional materials. At Newport Central Catholic in Newport, Kentucky, the test is given to all juniors every November. Last year 95 students took the test and had their test data forwarded to recruiters without parental consent.

            This scenario is repeated in thousands of American private and public schools. Often-overworked guidance counselors simply incorporate blurbs provided to them by military representatives or found on ASVAB-CEP promotional site.

            Most of the parochial schools that administer the ASVAB don’t know there’s a way to give the test while also protecting student privacy. Military regulations give schools eight choices, or “options,” regarding the release of ASVAB information. These range from Option 1, which permits results to be released to military recruiters seven days after being mailed to the student, to Option 8, which is the only one that protects student privacy and prevents data from being delivered to recruiters.

            Some schools, however, have gotten the message.

            For example, when Bishop Hartley High School in Columbus, Ohio required its junior class to take the test in 2013, it prohibited the release of student data to recruiters by selecting Option 8. A notice on the school's website correctly states that data will be kept with the school. However, Bishop Hartley is in the minority.  Nationally, Just 19.6% of all parochial and religious school students taking the test in 2012-2013 had Option 8 selected.

Option 8 for Student Privacy

Since school officials are often unaware that the different release options exist, and because recruiters aren’t going out of their way to tell them, grassroots campaigns have sprung up across the country to both inform and press for change.

            These campaigners typically don’t have a problem with schools encouraging or even requiring students to participate in the ASVAB-CEP program provided that student privacy is protected. What they are calling for are local and state-wide policy changes that would prohibit schools from automatically releasing ASVAB data to the military.

            United under the umbrella of The National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, which offers a searchable database of schools that administer the test and other resource material, these campaigners focus their public appeals around the principles of student privacy and parental consent. They support their claims with solid research, like a 2013 report from the Rutgers University School of Law which points out that administering the ASVAB in schools without protecting student privacy places guidance counselors in violation of their professional code of conduct.

            Military officials and their friends in state legislatures often impede efforts to regulate ASVAB testing in the schools.

            In March 2014, Lt. Col. Michael Coleman, Commander of U.S. Army Recruiting for Connecticut, presented testimony against a recently defeated ASVAB Option 8 bill to the Connecticut General Assembly’s Education Committee. Coleman wrote in his testimony that students taking the test under Option 8 cannot participate in the popular Career Exploration Program. In fact, military regulations expressly forbid discrimination on the basis of the release option chosen by a school or school district. 

Resistance

Despite military efforts to defeat such initiatives, more than 2,000 of the 12,000 schools that administer the ASVAB have moved within the last few years to select Option 8, including all schools in two states (Hawaii and Maryland), and school districts in Los Angeles, New York City, and other major cities.

            Nationally, selection of Option 8 has climbed from about one percent of total students tested in 2005 to 15.5% during the 2012-2013 school year.  During that time, the issue of military testing in schools has also attracted the attention of civil liberties and student privacy advocates.  A dozen state offices of the American Civil Liberties Union have sent letters warning education officials that ASVAB testing violates student privacy.  The National Lawyers Guild, Los Angeles chapter, declared that when schools release ASVAB data to the military they violate not only FERPA but state constitutions and student privacy statutes.  Finally, in its 2013 report, the Constitutional Law Clinic at Rutgers University Law School released a set of “Best Practices for ASVAB-CEP Administration,” showing that high school counselors have both legal and professional responsibilities to ensure that ASVAB student test information is not automatically released to military recruiters.  While there is growing opposition to the use of the ASVAB-CEP throughout the country, resistance is lacking in the parochial and Christian schools.

In 2001, the Vatican ratified Article 3.3 of the U.N. Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, which requires that recruitment practices involving minors must be voluntary and carried out with the informed consent of the person’s parents or legal guardians.  The Vatican ratified this treaty in 2001, yet when we brought this to the attention of officials at the National Catholic Education Association—a professional organization representing Catholic educators—they said that all ASVAB-related decisions rested at the individual school level.

Organizing around issues of military testing and student privacy has the capacity to bring about that most precious commodity in social change activism—concrete, measurable results.  By that, we mean that activists are able to look at data on how many students take the ASVAB from year-to-year and thus track their progress.  But this is also a complex issue involving the law, not to mention military jargon.  For that reason, a sure first step for anyone interested in reducing the incidence of ASVAB testing in their schools or communities would be to visit http://studentprivacy.org to learn more about the issues involved.  The website provides access to the most up-to-date data on ASVAB testing in every U.S. state and territory, allowing activists to discover how many students are taking the ASVAB in their state, and which release option their schools selected.  The second step would be to find potential allies who will aid in organizing.  Civil liberties groups are natural partners, but it is just as important to reach out to parent-teacher associations, and teachers unions.  Finally, activists can begin reaching out to school guidance counselors to urge them to select Option 8.

Building on victories at the local level, groups of activists can then start to think in terms of a state-wide effort.  That would involve affiliating with the NCPSP and approaching sympathetic state legislators who might consider sponsoring an ASVAB Option 8 bill.  Activists who approach this last stage must be prepared for the long-haul, for—as recent experiences in Connecticut have demonstrated—any effort to regulate the ASVAB or protect the privacy of students taking it will be vigorously opposed by the military.  It is instructive to recall the words of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement: “People say, ‘What is the sense of our small effort?’ They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.”

This article appeared in the Sept. - Oct. 2014  edition of Sojourners Magazine

Patrick Elder is the director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy.  Seth Kershner is a freelance writer working on a book about military counter-recruitment activism.