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 Kershneris a freelance writer working
on a book about military counter-recruitment activism.