[RSCT] The Military Invades U.S. Schools: How Military Academies Are Being Used to Destroy Public Education

[S. Kashdan]

The Military Invades U.S. Schools: How Military Academies Are Being Used to
Destroy Public Education

By Brian Roa

TruthOut.org, Posted on July 1, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/141034

For the past four years, I have observed the military occupation of the high
school where I teach science. Currently, Chicago's Senn High School houses
Rickover Naval Academy (RNA). I use the term "occupation" because part of
our building was taken away despite student, parent, teacher and community
opposition to RNA's opening.



Senn students are made to feel like second-class citizens inside their own
school, due to inequalities. The facilities and resources are better on the
RNA side. RNA students are allowed to walk on the Senn side, while Senn
students cannot walk on the RNA side. RNA "disenrolls" students and we
accept those students who get kicked out if they live within our attendance
boundaries. This practice is against Chicago policy, but goes unchecked. All
of these things maintain a two-tiered system within the same school
building.



This phenomenon is not restricted to Senn. Chicago has more military
academies and more students in JROTC than any other city in the US. As the
tentacles of school militarization reach beyond Chicago, the process used in
this city seems to serve as a model of expansion. There was a Marine Academy
planned for Georgia's Dekalb County, which includes 10 percent of Atlanta.
Fortunately, due to protest, the school has been postponed until 2010.
Despite it being postponed, it is still useful to analyze the rhetoric used
to rationalize the Marine Academy. Many of the lies and excuses used to
justify school militarization in Chicago and Georgia may well be used in
other cities as militarism grows.



Not for Recruiting?



A favorite lie used to defend the expansion of military academies is that
they are not used to recruit for the military.



"This is not a training ground to send kids into the military," Dekalb
Schools' Superintendent Crawford Lewis told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
in March. Those same words could have come straight from Col. Rick Mills,
director of military academies and JROTC in Chicago, who explained away
recruitment in a similar fashion.



"This is not a recruiting tool, but a way to help students succeed at
whatever career they might choose," Mills told the Chicago Tribune.



Yet military academies receive money from the Department of Defense (DoD).
The DoD would be derelict in its responsibilities were that money not spent
as an investment in future soldiers. Accepting the claim that there is no
recruiting in military academies makes about as much sense as allowing gangs
to fund and operate within schools, on the assumption that they won't
recruit on school grounds.



Moreover, since military academies are staffed with ex-service members (many
don't even require valid teaching certificates), students are likely to
receive career advice that favors a military path.



There are more blatant examples of recruiting at RNA. The cadets the label
applied to students at military academies have taken a school-sponsored
field trip to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Furthermore, last
year the school hosted Adm. Michael Mullen, the current chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen told the cadets that the Navy was a "great
career choice." RNA has hosted ten admirals in their short four-year
history.



In addition to these direct tactics, the academies use more insidious
approaches. A military culture permeates these schools. Students dress in
uniform, receive demerits, and are introduced to the military hierarchy and
way of life. For example, I have witnessed students marching with fake
rifles. This cultivation of a militarized mind is the best explanation for
why 40 percent of all Naval Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program
graduates wind up entering military service. This statistic is especially
telling, considering that less than one percent of the population has served
in the military at any given moment since 1975.



The Choice Argument



Military academies are promoted as an option within the public school system
for parents. We heard it from Arne Duncan (ex-CEO of CPS and current
secretary of education) and we hear it from Dale Davis, public information
officer for the Dekalb County School System, who calls the military school
"an addition" for parents to consider. Compare that with what Colonel Mills
said in December 2007 in the Online News Hour: "The purpose of the military
academy programs is to offer our cadets and parents an educational choice
among many choices in Chicago Public Schools and to provide an educational
experience that has a college prep curriculum, combined with a military
curriculum."



We must dissect what kind of "choice" parents are given. If one's only
choices are a school in desperate need of repair or a shiny new military
academy, parents will often "choose" the "better" school.



The unbalanced funding presents an incredibly difficult decision for many
parents, as Marivel Igartua, mother of a cadet inside the Naval Academy,
told me. She didn't want to have to send her daughter to RNA, but she felt
squeezed into the choice because her area school was in such bad shape. The
unequal allocation of resources, which favors military academies, can serve
as a form of economic coercion upon parents.



If public schools were given the resources they need to improve, then we
could offer parents a more real choice.



Military pushers also argue that the academies are a popular option among
parents. According to Mills, quoted in In These Times in 2005, "These kinds
of programs would not be in schools if there weren't kids who wanted it,
parents who supported it and administrators who facilitated it."



Arne Duncan claimed there were waiting lists filled with children hoping to
attend a military academy. However, CPS has never released the so-called
waiting lists, and concrete numbers tell a different story. RNA's goal for
student enrollment for this year was 500-600 students. RNA finished the year
with 376 students. Where's the demand?



Military Academies in the Context of Dismantling Public Education



Viewing militarization in the broader scope of "school improvement" can
provide a helpful lens. In Chicago, military academies often represented one
offshoot of a general plan to break down public education and replace it
with charter schools and contract schools, siphoning public money to
business people and "nonprofits." However, these "chosen" schools don't
perform any better than public schools. A recent Chicago study compared ACT
scores between charter schools and neighborhood schools, and no
statistically significant difference was found. There was a difference in
the number of English language learners and special-needs students accepted.
Charters received fewer of both students. We see the same dichotomy with
Senn and RNA.



What may be more problematic is that sometimes the charterization movement
masks hidden agendas Sometimes the hidden agenda is union busting. Sometimes
it's gentrification. Sometimes it is militarization. We have seen all of
these hidden agendas in Chicago. We all agree that public schools are in
desperate need of renovation and repair. But simply demonizing public
schools as failing without giving them the resources to succeed and
replacing them with experimental schools is unjust.



The push to destroy public schools and replace them with military academies
and charter schools was further facilitated under the mayoral control of
schools in Chicago. Mayoral control means that a city's once publicly
elected school board is replaced by mayoral appointees partial to the agenda
set forth by the mayor. In Chicago, it also meant replacing the school
superintendent, who was legally mandated to have public education
experience, with a CEO, who is only mandated by his scruples. Duncan served
as the CEO for several years. He helped administer and finish off the
largest militarization of a school system in the US, under the banner of
"school improvement."



If we look at the history of Chicago's "school improvement" plan, we can see
the hidden agenda pushed by the charter movement. According to Pauline
Lipman, writing in Substance News in 2005, it is a plan whose blueprint was
ripped from the Commercial Club of Chicago, a conglomerate of Fortune 500
companies in Chicago. Schools are closed and reopened while students are
shuffled around to other schools, which are often performing worse than
their original school. Little regard is paid to the education of the
majority of students, almost all of them poor, black and Latino/a. Simply
put, Chicago's plan is not a school improvement plan. It is the dismantling
of a public good for the benefit of a chosen few. School militarization was
accelerated as this plan was being implemented in Chicago.



The pushing of similar plans can be expected throughout the US now that
Duncan is secretary of education. With the stimulus bill's $100 billion in
emergency aid for public schools and colleges, Duncan is in an incredible
position of power. He could use it to promote renovation and increase
resources to existing public schools. Or he could spend it on costly
privatization and militarization, squandering our tax money and endangering
our children's futures.