No Child Left Behind Act Gave Military Recruiters Kids' Data

by Mike Smith · 2009-09-01 08:45:00 UTC
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Mother Jones reports on the Pentagon's frightening and underhanded methods to mount a "virtual invasion into the lives of young Americans" in order to recruit them to the US Army. Even when kids don't give recruiters their phone number, when a recruiter calls, he's got information about ethnicity, shopping habits, college plans and sometimes an idea of which video-games they play.

It's not all so underhanded, but it does gets worse. David Vitter (R-La.) is to blame for slipping a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act to give recruiters high school kids' contact details. Schools that don't agree lose funding. David Goodman explains in the Mother Jones piece that "this little-known regulation effectively transformed President George W. Bush's signature education bill into the most aggressive military recruitment tool since the draft." Scary stuff.

[Photo credit: soldiersmediacenter]

Mike Smith is associate editor at Change.org.
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