Amerikan Military: All Your Children Are Belong To Us

[Bill Stewart]

At 09:20 AM 11/07/2002 -0800, our local weapon of mass destruction forwarded:
>Sharon Shea-Keneally, principal of Mount Anthony Union High School in
>Bennington, Vermont, was shocked when she received a
>letter in May from military recruiters demanding a list of all her
>students, including names,
>                    .....
>                    But when Shea-Keneally insisted on an
>                    explanation, she was in for an even bigger
>                    surprise: The recruiters cited the No Child Left
>                    Behind Act, President Bush's sweeping new
>                    education law passed earlier this year. There,
>                    buried deep within the law's 670 pages, is a
>                    provision requiring public secondary schools to
>                    provide military recruiters not only with access
>                    to facilities, but also with contact information for
>                    every student -- or face a cutoff of all federal
>                    aid.
><snip>
>http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2002/45/ma_153_01.html

George HW Bush said he'd be the Education President,
and he certainly was an education.
You just have to parse his statements carefully.

The new Bush isn't as good at grammar, so sometimes he's harder to parse,
but as he says "fool me once, shame on you, um, fool me um,,
can't get fooled again".   He isn't really the same as the old boss,
because the old boss was competent as well as evil...

More seriously, though, it's another example of the difference between
data protected by technology and data protected by laws.
The old Buckley Amendment had some really hard-core protection for
student records, though it probably had holes in it for things like
military recruiting, and the military certainly did use any approach it could
to keep track of potential draftees and potential recruits.
But that's all gone now - it wasn't Constitutionally set in stone,
and most of it probably wasn't directly driven by court orders,
so the legislature can bounce it any time they want,
even if they don't realize what they're signing.