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Release of Student Information to Military at 20

Release of Student Information to Military at 20

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NNDecember 2023  


"You are part of the national network of peace groups working to stop the militarization of schools and young people! "

 

 

1062: NNOMY News February March 2022 -
Public School Release of Student Information to Military at 20

 

Hello ,


"In 2022, we are at the twenty year mark of the implementation of the 9528 Provision attached to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) legislation requiring schools to allow military recruiters into public schools or lose federal funding by the George W Bush Administration. In the intervening years community groups and activists that tried to implement limits and guidelines, on a district by district basis, for those recruiter visits have seen their work eviscerated by lax community oversight and a rapacious military recruiting command looking for every opportunity to expand their access to potential young recruits while disregarding the privacy rights of school administrations, parents and students alike.

 

Concurrently, in the last 20 years, we have seen a national military counter-recruitment movement diminish in its scope and urgency as groups have “aged out”, not feeling a connection with the succeeding generations of youth and a normalization of militarism in our culture that has made previous concerns for Defense Department over-reach into the civilian society much less urgent and visible. This issue of the NNOMY news, Public School Release of Student Information at 20, explores the challenges and opportunities for change for the next generations to develop an awareness of the implications of expanding militarism for their futures and their world."


#counter-recruitment | #nnomypeace | #peacefulcareers | #demilitarize |  www.nnomy.org

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The house that war built

02/21/2022 / Gary Ghirardi / NNOMY - Under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), public high schools must give the names, addresses and telephone numbers of students to military recruiters, college/university recruiters and prospective employers if the recruiters request the information (ESSA, Title VIII, 8528). However, students or their parents have the right to instruct the school in writing that this information is not to be released.

 


The Militarization of the US Education System: Supporting war with recruiting and research

04/21/2021 / Kathy Barker /  pdf  / Power Point resource by activist Kathy Barker of Washington Truth in Recruitment in Seattle Washington has produced this thorough review of the extent of military programs in our high schools and colleges and universities, A good resource to inform activists who choose to do counter-recruitment and other forms of youth demilitarization activism inside public schools and communities.

 



 

Ethnic Studies Take 2: The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum

January - March 2022 / Isidro Ortiz, PHD / Draft NOtices / COMD - The Covid-19 pandemic has exacted a heavy toll on education and posed many unprecedented challenges to educators at all levels. As reported by Emma Dorn and her colleagues in “COVID-19 and education: The lingering effects of unfinished learning,” during the 2020-21 academic year, “the impact of the pandemic on k-12 student learning was significant.” Moreover, “the pandemic widened preexisting opportunity and achievement gaps, hitting historically disadvantaged students hardest.” Students in high schools became more likely to drop out of school, and “high school seniors, especially those from lowincome families, are less likely to go on to post-secondary education.” At the same time, the Defense Department has announced a new STEM strategic plan that would further militarize the nation’s schools. The plan would focus on student populations regarded as “underserved and underrepresented in STEM,” including military children, racial minorities and female students.

 


Youth Are Challenging the US War Machine as Tensions Escalate With Russia

What we cannot do is rally our compassion on the basis of whether or not we think the U.S. war machine can drop some bombs and make it better. Making things better is not what the war machine is for,” says Kelly Hayes. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Hayes talks with organizer Yaira Matos from the youth antiwar group We Are Dissenters about militarism, international solidarity, and why the U.S. war machine cannot be made good.


Dissenters is a youth-led, anti-militarism organization that is leading a generation of young people to reclaim our resources from the war industry, and reinvest in life-giving services and in solidarity with people across the world that are fighting for different liberation struggles. So we’re really grounding ourselves in the belief that these really bloated military budgets that we see every single year, every single new administration is time and time again reinforcing investing in death and violence and the development of war machinery, incarceration tactics, and policing, deportation, immigration apparatus. All of these things that fall in line with militarization are things that we know time and time again the government chooses to invest in. ‍

 


 

STEM strike for peace

https://www.facebook.com/StemStrikesForPeace


The Pledge


1) The human species faces an unprecedented ecological crisis.
Wildlife communities are collapsing, sources of clean water are being contaminated, air quality in cities is falling, and famine threatens tens of millions of people, all while the climate changes rapidly and unpredictably. Solving this crisis will require cooperation between nations and an extraordinary expenditure of resources.


2) Meanwhile, the world spends its time and money on war.
In 2015, governments collectively spent $1.5 trillion on militaries. The endless drone strikes, proxy wars, and torture, usually of marginalized or indigenous people, make international cooperation impossible.


3) The S.T.E.M. community contributes heavily to the war machine.
In addition to civilian scientists who work for defense companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, at least two hundred thousand active duty U.S. military personnel perform science, engineering, and technical roles. In 2017, America allocated $184 billion of its $583 billion military budget for research, design, and procurement of weapons and equipment. Without the cooperation of the S.T.E.M. community, drones, nuclear bombs, and fighter jets would not be possible.


4) We can do better.
From flying a camera billions of miles to Pluto, to putting a personal computer in everyone's pocket, scientists and engineers continually accomplish amazing feats. What if a significant portion of the S.T.E.M workers in defense instead pursued solutions to the ecological crisis? Not only would we have enough minds to scale up known technology, like clean energy and permaculture, but, through collaboration with other disciplines, we could develop solutions not yet dreamed of.


5) We demand that 90% of the money currently spent on research, design, and procurement for militaries worldwide be instead given directly to the S.T.E.M. community.
This reallocation can take many forms, from transferring money to existing institutions, like the National Science Foundation in America, to creating new organizations that allocate the money democratically across nations. As it stands, the demands of war dictate what we research and engineer. It is time we decide for ourselves the best use of our minds.
In order to weaken the military-industrial complex and build leverage for our demand, we pledge not to work for any military or defense company.


To sign on to this pledge, simply visit https://stemstrikesforpeace.org/

 


 

Venezuelan journalist reflects on pivotal life moments deciding whether to join U.S. military

Feb. 18, 2022 / Ruxandra Guidi / True Jersey - t’s my third year at Nutley High, the only high school in this northern New Jersey town of fewer than 30,000 people. It’s also my third year living in the United States.

Everything still feels new.

One day, my guidance counselor, a soft-spoken Irish-American man whose name I cannot remember, sends a letter to the apartment where my mom and I live. He is tall, like one of the oaks in the park towering over me. It’s time to talk about my future, he tells us.

A week later, we are sitting in his office, facing the school’s courtyard. It’s winter and the weathered greenery outside looks sad and scraggly.

“Your grades are pretty good,” he tells me, pointing out how my favorite subjects must be creative writing and French.

Indeed, I’d been thinking I’d like to become a writer who travels. Or maybe a traveler who writes. I don’t know. The possibilities are so new. But the school counselor isn’t listening. He talks over and past me.

“Have you considered the Army?” he asks, looking at my mom. “It’s a great option for many Hispanics. You’ll get your college paid for and they’ll help you get your citizenship.

 


 

Drop in Public Trust in Military Officers Portends Danger

01/24/2022 / Thomas W. Spoehr, The Daily Signal - Gallup recently released a poll describing how American’s confidence in military officers had declined to its lowest level since it began measuring in 2001. The big news was that between 2017 and 2022, Americans who believe military officers possess “high ethics” declined by a full 10 points, down to 61%.

An optimist could see this as unfortunate but tolerable, since military officers remain one of the most respected professions, falling only behind medical professionals and grade-school teachers. A more candid appraisal, however, would see this for what it is: a vote of declining confidence by America in its oldest and heretofore most trusted institution. The military needs to make the necessary course corrections to address this situation or be prepared to endure the consequences.

 


 

Can we demilitarize our minds? And our Country? Before it is too late?

8/09;2021 { Anne Barron - Gary Ghirardi | mediaLeft - August 9 - Today marks a terrible day in US "self-defense" when we dropped another atomic bomb on the Japanese people seventy-six years ago, this time on the industrial city of Nagasaki. True - Japan was an aggressively militarized society with a strong industrial base when we dropped "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" bombs from above. This US response to increasing Japanese military power was based on lies told us about the Japanese mindset. We need war to stop war.  And did it? The US nuclear attack created terrible consequences, a chain and swell of events that now threaten human (and world) existence.

We are repeatedly told that we are an exceptional people - smart, energetic, richer than any other country – best schools, best democracy and best military and more bombs than other countries. Yet our minds have been militarized – through our schools, our police, our sports, our media, even our video games. Are we exceptional enough to demilitarize our minds (and society) before it is too late?  

 

 


Recruitment, counter-recruitment and critical military studies

‍Despite constituting the formal mechanism by which states and militaries persuade and enrol their personnel, military recruitment is poorly understood in the social and political sciences. Tied either to a normative and partisan sociology which aims to provide applied solutions for recruitment and retention programmes, or subsumed under a broad banner, by critical scholars, of a global ‘cultural condition’ of militarisation, studies of recruitment lack the rigour they should be afforded. In exploring these issues, the paper offers a vision of critical military studies which takes seriously the efforts of counter-military recruiting activist and protest movements in the US and UK. Counter-recruitment activism is billed as the most practical way to resist policies of militarism and militarisation. In promoting locally situated, practical solutions to the effects of militarised cultures (often as part of activism in schools), it aims to expose the relationship between, and acts to correct, both local and global injustices. In reviewing the practical and conceptual basis for counter-recruiting strategies, and speaking to broader movements in feminist scholarship on militarisation, the paper demonstrates the importance of critical studies of military recruitment, and in so doing, argues for a critical military studies which is situated amidst the people and places militarism affects.



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