Senators Hilary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry have introduced the New National Defense Education Act of 2006, Senate Bill 3502. This bill is modeled after the original National Defense Education Act, which Congress passed in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launching of Sputnik.
As with the earlier act, the new act’s intention is to make U.S. education better serve the ruling class by accelerating the
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Certainly, the goal of providing students with access to science, math and modern language curricula taught by qualified teachers is worthy. The greatest obstacle to this goal is the apartheid-like U.S. education system in which schools serving working class students have drastically lower funding, inadequate facilities and high teacher turnover.
Senate Bill 3502 purports to address these problems through such mechanisms as incentives to recruit teachers in high-need subjects—such as science, math and language learning—grants to K-12 schools, more college scholarships, and job training and by creating new, more rigorous “standards” for content areas. These standards are supposed to be the basis for the various high-stakes state tests that students must pass for grade promotion and high school graduation.
Tucked into the text of the bill is section 115: “Prekindergarten through grade 16 student preparedness council grants.” This section grants money to states for the creation of “preparedness councils.”
Members of the councils would include the state’s governor, various high-ranking state school officials, representatives of the armed forces and the “business community,” as well as two school teachers. Optional members would include civil rights and community organizations and other people involved in education.
The main task of the councils would be the preparation of a massive longitudinal database tracking students from nursery school to post-secondary experiences like college, work or the military. Each student in the database would be identified with race, gender and income information, and the database would include school courses taken, grades, standardized test scores and “post-secondary outcomes.”
The bill does include some language about protecting the privacy of students in the database. It notes that the government must “ensure that the use of any available data does not allow for the public identification of the individual student’s personally identifiable information.” This presumably means that the complete database with actual names would not be available to the general public.
However, the information would be stored somewhere and be available to the U.S. military, the “business community” and other members of the government serving on the “preparedness councils.”
What will they do with the information?
The bill has the potential to wipe out the very few protections from military recruiters granted to students and families under “No Child Left Behind.”
Under NCLB, schools must make student information available to military recruiters or lose federal funding. But parents may “opt-out” by filling out a form and requesting that their child’s information be kept from recruiters. In recent years, many communities have struggled for school districts to make opting out easier and more well-known as an option.
Would the databases mentioned in SB 3502 provide the military with another way to gain information about students for recruiting purposes? In short, yes.
Inclusion in one of these databases would mean that personal information would be viewed and analyzed by representatives of the military and the capitalist class. Despite some appealing parts of the bill like “teacher loan forgiveness,” college scholarships and grants for science education in high-poverty schools, the main thrust of SB 3502 is to ensure an adequate supply of trained young people for the military and the 21st century workforce.
The Democrats behind the bill are dutifully serving the capitalist class to which they belong. The interests of students and workers are not shared by imperialists who seek to control markets and the world economy for greater profits.
