January 4th, 2005 1:03 pm
Leave No Sales Pitch Behind


New York Times

The fine print in President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act is slowly dawning
on the parents of high school students across the country as the war in Iraq
drags on: military recruiters can blitz youngsters with uninvited phone calls
to their homes and on-campus pitches replete with video war games. This is all
possible under a little noted part of the law that requires schools to provide
the names, addresses (campus addresses, too) and phone numbers of students or
risk losing federal aid. The law provides an option to block the hard-sell
recruitment - but only if parents demand in writing that the school deny this
information to the military.

Hard-pressed recruiters have stepped up the sales pitch to meet wartime
manpower shortages. One sergeant filmed by the NewsHour on PBS recently sounded
like a salesman from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross as he exhorted a campus
group: "I mean, where else can you get paid to jump out of airplanes, shoot
cool guns, blow stuff up and travel, seeing all kinds of different countries?"

The Pentagon insists that it enjoys the same entree to high school students as
college and corporate recruiters. But clearly, No Child Left Behind has given
the military a thumb on the scale with the threat of lost money. Some students
on the cusp of adulthood describe the recruiters as merely offering another
option in life; others complain of outright pestering.

Recruiters have learned to focus on the most promising markets - typically
lower-middle-class schools. No one can complain of unfairness in a draft-free
society where many have found fine careers in the military, with recruitment
part of the process. But it is objectionable when the government tucks a
decided advantage for its wartime armies' salesmanship into a law invoked in
the name of children.