Twenty-seven percent of New Jersey’s 17-to-20 year old high
school grads applying to enter the military
flunked the Armed
Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the test potential
recruits must take for successful enlistment. Essentially, one out
of every four Garden State residents — including 34 percent of
young black and Latino recruits — couldn’t answer such basic
questions as “If three plus X equals six, what is the value of X?”
and “If 4 people can run 8 machines, how many machines can 2 people
run?”
This isn’t just a New Jersey problem. Twenty-three percent
of the nation’s recent high school grads couldn’t pass the ASVAB,
flunking out of military service. The problem runs across all races
and ethnicities, with one out of every five white young adults and
two out of every five young black adults failing the test. Among
those who did pass, many didn’t score high enough on the exam to
get into skilled military positions such as those in surveillance.
Just 34 percent scored high enough to join Delta Force or any of
the other elite special forces. The ones who managed to score high
enough to get in, but fall into the low range, are more-likely to
leave the service before completing their tour than those with high
scores.
Much of the discussion about America’s abysmal public
schools has focused on how decades of declining literacy and
academic performance weigh heavily on the nation’s global
competiveness (and on the
wallets of taxpayers burdened by decades of near-unchecked
spending increases and unfunded
teachers pensions).
But increasingly, the nation’s educational crisis also
weighs heavily on national security and defense. Military leaders
have learned all too well from their own analysis of dropouts and
General Education Development (GED) recipients that poorly-educated
kids make terrible soldiers — especially in an age in which math
and science skills are as important in operating military
electronics as they are in high-skilled white- and blue-collar
jobs.
For young men and women, especially those from the
economic poor, the low quality of education also bars them from
entering what has long been a gateway into the middle class and a
training ground for life in the civil workforce. This, in turn,
further strains the nation’s long-term economic prospects as
low-skilled grads (along with the 1.3 million kids who drop out of
high school every year) land in prison, on welfare, or engaged in
some less-than-legal pursuits. This will further fuel the growth of
welfare
subsidies and bailouts that are draining the nation’s long-term
economic prospects.
The best solution for this national defense and economic
problem in the long run is the one part of President Barack Obama’s
agenda that actually has bipartisan support even in a
less-than-friendly Congress: The array of charter school expansion
and school reform efforts — including the Race to the Top
initiative — that have gained traction in statehouses across the
country. The school reform movement may now be able to count the
Pentagon as one of its stalwart allies.
SAVE FOR THE PRESENCE OF Junior ROTC members on high
school campuses, their counterparts at universities, and service
academies such as West Point and Annapolis, few think about the
presence of the military in education. But the Pentagon has had a
far greater interest in elementary and secondary education than
most realize.
Through the Department of Defense Education Activity, the
Pentagon operates what would be the nation’s 35th-largest K-12
school district, educating 85,714 students on its bases throughout
the world. Looking to make it easier for the children of military
families living off-campus to transfer from one school to another
with few hiccups, it is helping to standardize school transcripts
by working with nonprofits to get states to adopt an interstate
compact.
The military has played a distinct role in the expansion
of federal education policy. In the midst of the Second World War
in 1942, the War Department teamed up with the American Council of
Education to start the GED program as a way for high school
dropouts leaving military service to attend college (and eventually
take advantage of the G.I. Bill). This spurred the post-World War
II college boom that has made the U.S. the world leader in higher
education.
During the Cold War, the armed forces also helped play a
part in the expansion of federal education policy thanks to the
National Defense Education Act of 1958, which led to the creation
of the Pell Grant program and the first major increase in federal
education spending since the launch of the National School Lunch
Program a decade earlier. The law, in turn, helped lead to the
passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the federal
law now known as the No Child Left Behind Act.
But within the last two decades — and especially after
the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq — the Pentagon has
found itself in the same boat as private-sector employers in
working around the deficiencies of American public education. Its
response has been to launch a series of efforts which have only had
mixed success.
Since 1993, the National Guard has operated the Youth
ChalleNGe program, which puts high school juniors and seniors
through a 22-week period of military training and school lessons.
While the Brookings Institution touted the program as a success in
a
study released last year, Youth ChalleNGe’s 46 percent
graduation rate for participants is still well below the nation’s
abysmal four-year graduation rate of 69 percent; the
attrition rates of the program’s graduates also lag depending
on which armed service participants choose to enter.
Over the past five years, the Pentagon has even been
forced to lower its own academic standards (including a requirement
than 90 percent of troops had to be high school graduates) in order
to meet higher recruiting quotas resulting from the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan; the percentage of high school grads recruited into
the Army, for example, declined from 84 percent in 2004 to 74
percent in 2008. Starting in 2005, the Pentagon launched GED Plus,
a program in which dropouts could obtain GED certificates while
enlisting. While the Army halted its GED recruiting last year, GED
enlistment efforts continue throughout the rest of the
military.
But even the military’s own studies show that the GED —
once called the “Good Enough Diploma” by comedian Chris Rock — is
anything but. Forty percent of GED recipients left the service
before completing their two-year enlistment, according to a 1996
U.S. Department of Defense study; that’s double
the attrition rate for high school and college grads. This is why
the Pentagon stopped classifying GED recipients as high school
graduates during the 1970s — and why Congress capped the number of
GED recipients that could be enlisted 30 years ago.
TROOP WITHDRAWALS FROM IRAQ, along with the sluggish
economy, has helped the military recruit fewer dropouts and GED
recipients. But it hasn’t helped the military in avoiding the high
costs of poorly-educated high school grads. Aspiring servicemen
with low qualifying scores on the ASVAB are more likely to wash out
because they lack strong basic skills and work aptitude. It is one
of the reasons why the military loses as many as a third of
enlisted soldiers before they complete their two-year tour, costing
taxpayers as much as $45,000 per recruit.
The problems for low-skilled high school students — be it
they flunk or sneak in — is the same: Abysmal reading and math
instruction in schools that begins in kindergarten and
manifests its damage by high school. Twenty-seven percent of
American high school seniors — including 33 percent of young men
who would be potential enlistees — read Below Basic proficiency on
the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal
exam of academic skills.
The potential harm to the nation’s military readiness —
especially the lack of high-quality recruits who can be brought
into the Marines or Army to serve in wartime — can’t be
understated. The economic damage is also astounding. Since World
War II, the military has proven to be a way for kids from poor
families — including young blacks and Latinos — to make their way
into the middle class; 51 percent of all military recruits came
from households earning less than $51,127 a year, just below the
median household income, according to a 2008 Heritage Foundation
study. But these families attend the very dropout factories and
academic failure mills that are fueling the nation’s education
crisis. As a result, they are shut out of the military and out of
high skilled blue- and white-collar work — and will land in the
ranks of the long-term unemployed.
The long-term
solutions lie with such efforts as expanding school choice,
passing so-called Parent Trigger laws that allow families to
restructure schools, and overhauling the costly and ineffective
system of near-lifetime employment and seniority-based pay that
have long protected low-quality teachers at the expense of students
and taxpayers alike. The Pentagon has helped fund military schools
in districts in cities such as Oakland and Chicago. It may take
making education a national security issue to spur further
reform.
