Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, January—March 2010

- Pat Elder

The Armed Service Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) is a public service provided to high schools free of charge. The program helps teens find their strengths and helps them set goals for their future.

Officials try to keep recruiters away from the test as much as possible.

— DoD statements on the ASVAB

Every school year hundreds of thousands of high school students across the country are encouraged — and often required — to take a four-hour military exam during school hours. The test, with a name few can remember (the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB), is an integral part of the Pentagon's overall recruitment program. Heightened public concerns about the administration of the school testing program are contributing to its decline, particularly in the last few years.

Many school officials, persuaded by claims that the ASVAB helps students choose appropriate careers, encourage students to take the test. Since 1968 the Pentagon has used the ASVAB to gather a treasure trove of data on 16- and 17-year-olds. ASVAB data goes beyond the name, address, and phone numbers of high school students that military recruiters may receive as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2001. Students who take the ASVAB divulge their Social Security number, gender, race, ethnicity, birth date, statement of future plans, and, significantly, their aptitude in ten critical subtest areas.

The ASVAB is the military's entrance exam given to all fresh recruits to determine their aptitude for various military occupations. The test was also administered to 621,000 students in 11,900 high schools across the country during the 2006-2007 school year, the last year for which such data is available. Nationally, the number of students taking the ASVAB dropped 19 percent from 2002 to 2007, accelerating a steady decline that began in 1990.

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From Draft NOtices, October—December 2009

–Arlene Inouye


As a third generation Japanese American, I didn’t have much of a connection to Japan. It seemed much too expensive for a visit, and like others of my generation, my life was in America. However, in my late forties I applied for a Fulbright Scholarship for a month in Japan along with a team of 12 educators from throughout the United States. It was an opportunity for me to discover my cultural heritage and understand my life experience as a Japanese American woman. One of the moments that impacted me the most was standing on ground zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, imagining the 175,000 children and adults killed in an instant from the atomic bomb. I also had an “ah-hah” moment after seeing photographs of the young boys in Japan who were sent to war -- they looked nothing like the images that were depicted in America. Going to Japan put in context the experience of my family, which was forcibly incarcerated in the camps at Manzanar during World War II, and it gave me an understanding of who I am and where I’ve come from.

Five years later I began the Coalition for Alternatives to Militarism in our Schools (CAMS). I was employed as a Speech and Language Specialist at Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles and saw first-hand how military recruiters work in the inner-city schools. I felt compelled to take action and began an organized effort reaching out to nonprofit organizations, school communities and the teachers’ union, UTLA.

CAMS developed a multi-tiered approach to addressing militarism in the schools, including an Adopt-a-School Project at 50 high schools in the Los Angeles area. We also organized at the district level by monitoring and passing district policies that addressed student privacy, the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery), equal access and JROTC. Through UTLA, a progressive union, we brought information and education around militarism through resolutions, workshops, conferences, dialogue and organizing strategies. We later became one of the founding organizations of the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY).

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From Draft NOtices, October—December 2009

–Rick Jahnkow


The San Diego Unified School District has frozen the military’s access to student lists this fall while it takes steps to address parent and student complaints over the way the district is handling releases of data to recruiters.

The controversy arose when students who belong to the Education Not Arms Coalition (ENAC) began receiving enrollment forms for the 2009-2010 school year that were already partially filled out by computer. The form includes this question for parents: “Is it okay to release your child’s information to military recruiters?” Boxes are then provided to check either “yes” or “no.” Students receiving these forms noticed that, in most cases, the “yes” box was already checked.

After documenting 28 instances of forms pre-marked to release student information to recruiters, ENAC sent a letter to the school district asking that no student information be released to the military until letters could be sent to every secondary students’ home asking if they wanted to opt out of the release. Because the original enrollment form was only circulated in English, ENAC asked that the letters be translated into other languages. Also, ENAC asked that the form be modified in the future to clearly state that students and parents must check the “no” box if they do not wish information to be given to recruiters.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires schools receiving federal funds to release the names, addresses and phone numbers of secondary students to the military, unless they have opted out of the release. The law does not, however, authorize schools to decide for parents and students whether or not they will opt out, which is what San Diego Unified was doing with the pre-marked enrollment forms.

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Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS

When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view. This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:

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