Gary J Carter
2008-09-19 23:52:59 UTC
Public Military Academies: Prep Schools? Or Blatant Recruitment Pools?
By Allen McDuffee, In These Times. Posted September 19, 2008.
Public school systems are increasingly opening their doors to military
academies -- primarily in poor urban areas.
Matthew Hartman had every intention of enlisting in the Army directly
after his graduation in two years. But it was Col. Sterling Stokes and
his military staff who convinced Hartman that college, not the
battlefield, was a better option. At least for now.
"They persuaded me that there is always time to serve my country and
that maybe I would be able to serve even better if I went to college
first," Hartman, 16, says.
The Richmond, Va., native is a junior at the Franklin Military Academy
in Richmond, where Stokes is principal. He earned the highest score on
the 2008 National Chemistry Olympiad in his school, and is the type of
student college admissions counselors would like to see among their
applicants.
But for Cadet Hartman, the military seemed like a natural progression.
Academies like Franklin Military are part of the country's rapidly
expanding Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) program. The
academies are exclusively JROTC and the Department of Defense helps
fund them -- part of a growing trend to introduce military schools
into the public school system in primarily poor urban areas where many
school systems are struggling, if not failing.
These academies aren't boot camps for delinquents. There is no
compulsory military service upon graduation. And they're not the
realization of the Bush administration's machinations. In fact,
administrators insist the academies are college prep schools.
But for many, the evidence isn't so clear. Critics like Darlene
Graminga, of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker
pacifist organization, suggest that cases like Hartman's are few and
far between, and that the military academies are a veiled attempt to
recruit American youth.
Graminga, program director of the group's Truth in Recruiting Program,
says, "I hardly doubt that it's a coincidence that these schools are
prospering at a time of war."
Despite such concerns, public military academies are wildly popular
among many parents and students.
Chicago -- with more academies than any other city -- can't build them
fast enough. Chicago's sixth academy will open this fall. In all, the
city has one-third of the country's academies.
Each year, the Chicago Public Schools accepts only about 10 percent of
academy applicants. For the 2007-2008 school year, approximately 7,500
students applied for 700 openings in the freshman class.
Extending JROTC
Military academies are part of the JROTC program that began in 1916.
Former Secretary of State and retired Gen. Colin Powell is credited
with advancing JROTC in its current form, in part by influencing
then-President George H.W. Bush in 1992 to more than double the size
of the program, from 1,500 JROTC programs to 3,500.
In his book, My American Journey, Powell wrote: "Inner-city kids, many
from broken homes, found stability and role models in Junior ROTC.
They got a taste of discipline, the work ethic, and they experienced
pride of membership in something healthier than a gang. Junior ROTC
is a social bargain."
In Virginia, the Richmond School Board and its Superintendent Richard
Hunter conceptualized Franklin Military Academy -- the country's first
secondary military academy -- on the heels of the Vietnam War in the
late '70s. It opened its doors to 130 freshmen in the fall of 1980.
The following year, academies opened in St. Louis and Sandy Hook, N.J.
After a 16-year gap, the Kenosha Military Academy in Wisconsin was
built in 1998. Since then, the academies have grown at a rate of one
to two a year.
"Students have to make the choice on their own to be here," says
Stokes, Franklin's principal.
Once a student makes that first step, the application process is
rigorous, including an interview and a written commitment from the
parents, as well as the student.
Motivated
"We're aiming at kids who aren't in trouble but who aren't fully
realizing their potential, either," says Ozzie Wright, principal of
the Philadelphia Military Academy. "We often see kids who have all the
makings of being good students, but have very unstable home lives
because of economics and family structures. We can make a difference
in these students' lives."
Elaine Macon-Johnson, who is in her fourth year at Franklin, teaches
technology and business. She had arrived at the academy unwillingly,
as part of a job reassignment, doubting whether public military
academies should even exist. After a few years at Franklin, she says
she became a convert.
"All I have to do is teach now," Macon-Johnson says. "Before, I would
have to spend so much time as disciplinarian." These days, she says,
"I don't have behavior problems. And on the rare occasion that
something does happen, it's somebody else's job to take care of, not
mine."
Many academy teachers, most of whom don't have military backgrounds,
say they feel the same way. Walking down the hallway in between
classes, military instructor Sgt. Gary McCray says, "Look at this.
When you were in school, did you ever see it so calm?" referring to
the students quietly moving from one class to another, conversing.
"Everybody is so relaxed," McCray says.
Roberto Rodriguez, a first-year Marine Military Academy cadet, says,
"I like that we could become leaders and we know every student. No
bullies, none of that, so it's real cool."
Students attending the military academies are required to take one
four-year military-related course. The JROTC curriculum includes
military history, military protocol, civics and physical fitness.
Students often participate in drill team, color guard and
extracurricular activities, such as rock climbing and traveling. Some
schools arrange an international trip each year for a limited number
of students, and nearly all the academies send a large number of
students to the Army-Navy football game each year. For the many
students who have never been out of state -- even out of their city --
this is an appealing perk.
Recruitment factories?
As part of the 1916 National Defense Act, JROTC was created to prepare
American youth to fight in World War I, if needed. And JROTC falls
under the recruitment section of the Pentagon's budget.
Principals are quick to say that they are not asked to boost the
numbers of graduating students who enlist. Stokes says, "It's not like
we have been given [an enlistment] quota here."
But in February 2000, former Secretary of Defense William Cohen told
the House Armed Services Committee that JROTC is "one of the best
recruiting devices we could have." And Powell wrote in My American
Journey, "Liberal school administrators and teachers claimed that we
were trying to 'militarize' education. Yes, I'll admit, the armed
forces might get a youngster more inclined to enlist as a result of
Junior ROTC. But society got a far greater payoff."
In a difficult period for military recruiters, the Pentagon is
expected to spend $20.5 billion in 2009 on recruiting, some of which
will be distributed to JROTC. Pauline Lipman, a professor of education
at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told PBS in December 2007,
"It would be really naive to think that the military would, in fact,
be expanding these schools and these programs and pouring millions of
dollars into the schools at a time when they actually are having a
recruitment crisis, if the schools were not about recruiting
students."
The Army has tried to accommodate its recruitment woes by reducing its
annual recruitment goal, raising the maximum enlistment age from 35 to
42, lowering mental aptitude standards, and welcoming in the
overweight, the physically injured and formerly convicted.
Military statistics over the last two decades indicate that 30 percent
to 55 percent of JROTC students eventually enlist. The military
academies, however, maintain that their enlistment rates after
graduation ranges between 4 percent and 10 percent.
"If the Defense Department is looking to us for recruitment, then they
are making a bad investment," says Wright, the principal at
Philadelphia Military Academy.
But the numbers are inconclusive, if not misleading. The academies
collect their data through exit interviews with graduating students.
If a student goes directly into the military upon graduation -- and
the student has made that decision at the time of filling out the
questionnaire -- he or she would be part of that 4 percent-to-10
percent pool. However, if he or she doesn't directly enlist and
instead, for example, goes to college on a ROTC scholarship, then the
academies, like other public high schools, don't have the mechanisms
in place to track the student after graduation.
Ambiguities
Hugh Price, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, once advocated
using the military's discipline to help at-risk youth. As vice
president of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1988 until 1994, he
helped conceive and launch the quasi-military program for school
dropouts that came to be known as the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe
Program.
Price says he now thinks that schools have better options than a
military presence. He wants to demilitarize public education and
wonders whether the government can "find a way to make the attributes
of the military model generic? Can it be done without the military? We
need to find a way to help the struggling youth of America without
funding from the military."
Under the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act, any school
that receives federal funding must allow access to military
recruiters. One of the military instructors at Franklin boasts that
the school had a good relationship with the area recruiters. "Oh
yeah," he says, "We see them all the time."
The academies often bill themselves as college prep schools. And
looking at the schools and the learning environments, it appears they
are making a difference in the students' lives. Arne Duncan, CEO of
the Chicago Public Schools system, boasts that the city's military
academies have a 94 percent graduation rate versus the district
average of 84 percent.
But Oskar Castro, national coordinator of the AFSC's Youth &
Militarism program, isn't convinced.
"Where is the evidence?" he asks. "So many of these schools are so
new, and they claim that it's too early to tell [whether a school is
successful], so why are we still building them if we don't know?"
And the AFSC's Graminga argues that the academies don't produce better
results than other schools that are part of the small charter school
programs, currently en vogue among public school leaders in large,
urban environments.
"We have seen small schools projects be successful and the successes
that are related to the military academies are in line with that," she
says. "But there doesn't seem to be anything inherent to the military
academies that leads us to say, 'Now, they've got the answer!' "
If Graminga is right, that might explain the success at Franklin
Military, which has less than 500 students and an exceptionally low 15
to 1, student-teacher ratio.
Opportunity knocks
Powell and others argue that the military has historically given
opportunities to those who have limited options. But making that
argument also acknowledges that the military uses the academies as a
recruiting tool. And given the academies' demographics and the
destruction of the GI Bill, which once provided funding for a college
education, one can reasonably ask whether the Department of Defense is
truly concerned with sending poor black and Latino kids to college.
In Richmond, Franklin Military consistently accommodates a 95 percent
African-American student body in a city that, according to the 2006
census, has a population of which 20 percent exist below the poverty
line and 54 percent are African-American.
Academy administrators maintain that these are the realities of urban
America. Philadelphia Military's Wright says, "The wealthier families
in cities have the advantage of sending their children to private
schools and a certain portion will go to the better public schools.
But in cities, we know we are facing a particular demographic."
The military, he adds, has a "history of providing opportunities" to
underprivileged sectors of society.
If interest by school districts in military-sponsored education is any
indication, we can expect to see a tremendous growth in the number of
academies. What is less clear is whether the military academies would
be considered successful if the public school systems in these urban
areas were doing an adequate job.
"If the military branches are formally involved as sponsors, operators
and funders," says Price, "it is naive to expect them to resist the
temptation to [use] these programs as a recruitment pipeline. If
anything, given global conditions, the pressure on them to do so
probably will intensify instead of subside."
Allen McDuffee writes about politics and Middle East affairs. He blogs
at governmentalityblog.com and is currently working on a book project,
No Child Left Unrecruited. He lives in Brooklyn.
By Allen McDuffee, In These Times. Posted September 19, 2008.
Public school systems are increasingly opening their doors to military
academies -- primarily in poor urban areas.
Matthew Hartman had every intention of enlisting in the Army directly
after his graduation in two years. But it was Col. Sterling Stokes and
his military staff who convinced Hartman that college, not the
battlefield, was a better option. At least for now.
"They persuaded me that there is always time to serve my country and
that maybe I would be able to serve even better if I went to college
first," Hartman, 16, says.
The Richmond, Va., native is a junior at the Franklin Military Academy
in Richmond, where Stokes is principal. He earned the highest score on
the 2008 National Chemistry Olympiad in his school, and is the type of
student college admissions counselors would like to see among their
applicants.
But for Cadet Hartman, the military seemed like a natural progression.
Academies like Franklin Military are part of the country's rapidly
expanding Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) program. The
academies are exclusively JROTC and the Department of Defense helps
fund them -- part of a growing trend to introduce military schools
into the public school system in primarily poor urban areas where many
school systems are struggling, if not failing.
These academies aren't boot camps for delinquents. There is no
compulsory military service upon graduation. And they're not the
realization of the Bush administration's machinations. In fact,
administrators insist the academies are college prep schools.
But for many, the evidence isn't so clear. Critics like Darlene
Graminga, of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker
pacifist organization, suggest that cases like Hartman's are few and
far between, and that the military academies are a veiled attempt to
recruit American youth.
Graminga, program director of the group's Truth in Recruiting Program,
says, "I hardly doubt that it's a coincidence that these schools are
prospering at a time of war."
Despite such concerns, public military academies are wildly popular
among many parents and students.
Chicago -- with more academies than any other city -- can't build them
fast enough. Chicago's sixth academy will open this fall. In all, the
city has one-third of the country's academies.
Each year, the Chicago Public Schools accepts only about 10 percent of
academy applicants. For the 2007-2008 school year, approximately 7,500
students applied for 700 openings in the freshman class.
Extending JROTC
Military academies are part of the JROTC program that began in 1916.
Former Secretary of State and retired Gen. Colin Powell is credited
with advancing JROTC in its current form, in part by influencing
then-President George H.W. Bush in 1992 to more than double the size
of the program, from 1,500 JROTC programs to 3,500.
In his book, My American Journey, Powell wrote: "Inner-city kids, many
from broken homes, found stability and role models in Junior ROTC.
They got a taste of discipline, the work ethic, and they experienced
pride of membership in something healthier than a gang. Junior ROTC
is a social bargain."
In Virginia, the Richmond School Board and its Superintendent Richard
Hunter conceptualized Franklin Military Academy -- the country's first
secondary military academy -- on the heels of the Vietnam War in the
late '70s. It opened its doors to 130 freshmen in the fall of 1980.
The following year, academies opened in St. Louis and Sandy Hook, N.J.
After a 16-year gap, the Kenosha Military Academy in Wisconsin was
built in 1998. Since then, the academies have grown at a rate of one
to two a year.
"Students have to make the choice on their own to be here," says
Stokes, Franklin's principal.
Once a student makes that first step, the application process is
rigorous, including an interview and a written commitment from the
parents, as well as the student.
Motivated
"We're aiming at kids who aren't in trouble but who aren't fully
realizing their potential, either," says Ozzie Wright, principal of
the Philadelphia Military Academy. "We often see kids who have all the
makings of being good students, but have very unstable home lives
because of economics and family structures. We can make a difference
in these students' lives."
Elaine Macon-Johnson, who is in her fourth year at Franklin, teaches
technology and business. She had arrived at the academy unwillingly,
as part of a job reassignment, doubting whether public military
academies should even exist. After a few years at Franklin, she says
she became a convert.
"All I have to do is teach now," Macon-Johnson says. "Before, I would
have to spend so much time as disciplinarian." These days, she says,
"I don't have behavior problems. And on the rare occasion that
something does happen, it's somebody else's job to take care of, not
mine."
Many academy teachers, most of whom don't have military backgrounds,
say they feel the same way. Walking down the hallway in between
classes, military instructor Sgt. Gary McCray says, "Look at this.
When you were in school, did you ever see it so calm?" referring to
the students quietly moving from one class to another, conversing.
"Everybody is so relaxed," McCray says.
Roberto Rodriguez, a first-year Marine Military Academy cadet, says,
"I like that we could become leaders and we know every student. No
bullies, none of that, so it's real cool."
Students attending the military academies are required to take one
four-year military-related course. The JROTC curriculum includes
military history, military protocol, civics and physical fitness.
Students often participate in drill team, color guard and
extracurricular activities, such as rock climbing and traveling. Some
schools arrange an international trip each year for a limited number
of students, and nearly all the academies send a large number of
students to the Army-Navy football game each year. For the many
students who have never been out of state -- even out of their city --
this is an appealing perk.
Recruitment factories?
As part of the 1916 National Defense Act, JROTC was created to prepare
American youth to fight in World War I, if needed. And JROTC falls
under the recruitment section of the Pentagon's budget.
Principals are quick to say that they are not asked to boost the
numbers of graduating students who enlist. Stokes says, "It's not like
we have been given [an enlistment] quota here."
But in February 2000, former Secretary of Defense William Cohen told
the House Armed Services Committee that JROTC is "one of the best
recruiting devices we could have." And Powell wrote in My American
Journey, "Liberal school administrators and teachers claimed that we
were trying to 'militarize' education. Yes, I'll admit, the armed
forces might get a youngster more inclined to enlist as a result of
Junior ROTC. But society got a far greater payoff."
In a difficult period for military recruiters, the Pentagon is
expected to spend $20.5 billion in 2009 on recruiting, some of which
will be distributed to JROTC. Pauline Lipman, a professor of education
at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told PBS in December 2007,
"It would be really naive to think that the military would, in fact,
be expanding these schools and these programs and pouring millions of
dollars into the schools at a time when they actually are having a
recruitment crisis, if the schools were not about recruiting
students."
The Army has tried to accommodate its recruitment woes by reducing its
annual recruitment goal, raising the maximum enlistment age from 35 to
42, lowering mental aptitude standards, and welcoming in the
overweight, the physically injured and formerly convicted.
Military statistics over the last two decades indicate that 30 percent
to 55 percent of JROTC students eventually enlist. The military
academies, however, maintain that their enlistment rates after
graduation ranges between 4 percent and 10 percent.
"If the Defense Department is looking to us for recruitment, then they
are making a bad investment," says Wright, the principal at
Philadelphia Military Academy.
But the numbers are inconclusive, if not misleading. The academies
collect their data through exit interviews with graduating students.
If a student goes directly into the military upon graduation -- and
the student has made that decision at the time of filling out the
questionnaire -- he or she would be part of that 4 percent-to-10
percent pool. However, if he or she doesn't directly enlist and
instead, for example, goes to college on a ROTC scholarship, then the
academies, like other public high schools, don't have the mechanisms
in place to track the student after graduation.
Ambiguities
Hugh Price, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, once advocated
using the military's discipline to help at-risk youth. As vice
president of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1988 until 1994, he
helped conceive and launch the quasi-military program for school
dropouts that came to be known as the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe
Program.
Price says he now thinks that schools have better options than a
military presence. He wants to demilitarize public education and
wonders whether the government can "find a way to make the attributes
of the military model generic? Can it be done without the military? We
need to find a way to help the struggling youth of America without
funding from the military."
Under the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act, any school
that receives federal funding must allow access to military
recruiters. One of the military instructors at Franklin boasts that
the school had a good relationship with the area recruiters. "Oh
yeah," he says, "We see them all the time."
The academies often bill themselves as college prep schools. And
looking at the schools and the learning environments, it appears they
are making a difference in the students' lives. Arne Duncan, CEO of
the Chicago Public Schools system, boasts that the city's military
academies have a 94 percent graduation rate versus the district
average of 84 percent.
But Oskar Castro, national coordinator of the AFSC's Youth &
Militarism program, isn't convinced.
"Where is the evidence?" he asks. "So many of these schools are so
new, and they claim that it's too early to tell [whether a school is
successful], so why are we still building them if we don't know?"
And the AFSC's Graminga argues that the academies don't produce better
results than other schools that are part of the small charter school
programs, currently en vogue among public school leaders in large,
urban environments.
"We have seen small schools projects be successful and the successes
that are related to the military academies are in line with that," she
says. "But there doesn't seem to be anything inherent to the military
academies that leads us to say, 'Now, they've got the answer!' "
If Graminga is right, that might explain the success at Franklin
Military, which has less than 500 students and an exceptionally low 15
to 1, student-teacher ratio.
Opportunity knocks
Powell and others argue that the military has historically given
opportunities to those who have limited options. But making that
argument also acknowledges that the military uses the academies as a
recruiting tool. And given the academies' demographics and the
destruction of the GI Bill, which once provided funding for a college
education, one can reasonably ask whether the Department of Defense is
truly concerned with sending poor black and Latino kids to college.
In Richmond, Franklin Military consistently accommodates a 95 percent
African-American student body in a city that, according to the 2006
census, has a population of which 20 percent exist below the poverty
line and 54 percent are African-American.
Academy administrators maintain that these are the realities of urban
America. Philadelphia Military's Wright says, "The wealthier families
in cities have the advantage of sending their children to private
schools and a certain portion will go to the better public schools.
But in cities, we know we are facing a particular demographic."
The military, he adds, has a "history of providing opportunities" to
underprivileged sectors of society.
If interest by school districts in military-sponsored education is any
indication, we can expect to see a tremendous growth in the number of
academies. What is less clear is whether the military academies would
be considered successful if the public school systems in these urban
areas were doing an adequate job.
"If the military branches are formally involved as sponsors, operators
and funders," says Price, "it is naive to expect them to resist the
temptation to [use] these programs as a recruitment pipeline. If
anything, given global conditions, the pressure on them to do so
probably will intensify instead of subside."
Allen McDuffee writes about politics and Middle East affairs. He blogs
at governmentalityblog.com and is currently working on a book project,
No Child Left Unrecruited. He lives in Brooklyn.