Secretary of Education Arne Duncan invited the Pentagon into Chicago's schools....

Fast Times at Recruitment High: Arne Duncan and the Militarization of Chicago's Schools

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan invited the Pentagon into Chicago's schools. Will he promote military schools nationwide?
by Andy Kroll

When Arne Duncan stepped down as the head of the Chicago Public Schools to become the secretary of education in January, the school district he left behind had little to brag about. While Duncan served as its chief executive officer, CPS received mostly average or below average rankings in "The Nation's Report Card," a Department of Education assessment of the country's largest urban school districts. Its high school graduation rates lingered at around 50 percent, well short of the national average of 70 percent. And since 2004, CPS has failed as a district to meet No Child Left Behind's "adequate yearly progress" standards. In one area, however, Chicago's schools stood out: In large part to Duncan's efforts, they were—and remain—the most militarized in America.

Nearly 10,500 of Chicago's 203,000 sixth- through twelfth-graders participate in some kind of military program on campus, from joining the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps to enrolling in Pentagon-sponsored JROTC academies. As the district's CEO (and previously as deputy chief of staff to his predecessor, Paul Vallas), Duncan oversaw the controversial move to bring full-fledged military academies to the Windy City. The district's first, the Chicago Military Academy at Bronzeville, opened in 1999, and three more followed during Duncan's tenure. Today, Chicago has six military high schools run by a branch of the armed services. Six smaller military academies share buildings with existing high schools. Nearly three dozen JROTC programs exist in regular high schools, where students attend a daily JROTC class and wear uniforms to school one day a week. And at the middle school level, there is a JROTC program for sixth, seventh- and eighth-graders.

Chicago may have the nation's biggest JROTC program, but it is no longer an anomaly. Due to increases in federal funding for JROTC programs, the military's presence in public schools is greater than ever before. More than a dozen academies partly funded by the Department of Defense have sprouted up from Philadelphia to Oakland, and the National Defense Authorization Act of 2009 passed last year will increase the number of JROTC units nationwide from 3,400 to 3,700 by 2020, at a cost of $170 million. (Peacework magazine obtained a list of schools that have requested JROTC programs.) The Marines are in discussions to open new JROTC academies in Atlanta, Las Vegas, and New Orleans, helping to expand a program that critics contend has blurred the line between education and recruitment.

Now that Duncan is the nation's top education official, anti-recruitment activists worry that he will use his position to promote the expansion of JROTC and military academies as solutions for cash-strapped or underperforming school districts. "We see he has been promoting military academies," says Darlene Gramigna, program director for the American Friends Service Committee's Truth in Recruitment Program. "Around the country, that's what going on—Arne Duncan believes in these military academies."


http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/08/fast-times-recruitment-high?t=1251764074

I thought from the start he was a big mistake. He gives off the vibe he is a private school booster at the expense of public schools. Any one know his educational background?

He's never taught and he never attended public schools. He has no eduction-related training. His degree is in sociology.

His mom ran a tutoring service in Chicago. ( I kid you not.) That apparently was enough to qualify for a poltical appt. by the Daley organization as schools chancellor in Chicago.

He performed miracles in Chicago. Miracles, I tell ya. The schools were just great after he reformed them. He's got the data to prove it, too.

Senator and Mrs. Obama chose to send their kids to private school, nonetheless.

Schmidt is also the editor of "Substance," a Chicago online public education newspaper.

The quote is from an email he sent to the ARN (Assessment Reform Network) list last December, which was then posted on "Schools Matter," an education blog.

<snip>

To portray Arne Duncan as anything other than a privatizer, union buster, and corporate stooge is to simply lie.

Randi Weingarten knows that there is open rebellion within the Chicago Teachers Union because Randi's local president, Marilyn Stewart, has allowed the union to go bankrupt (by corrupt spending on herself and her staff, rivalling that of the former leaders of the Washington, D.C. union) and become disgraced by collaboration with Arne Duncan. Last February, when Duncan moved to close a half dozen schools (on various pretexts, most to slip them to charter schools as part of Chicago's privatization juggernaut) and fire all the teachers at a half dozen others in a reconstitution move called (this year) "turnaround", more than 5,000 parents, teachers, students and community leaders protested as a series of community meetings and at several meetings of the Chicago Board of Education. Despite the fact that Marilyn Stewart had sold out the union's members at all the schools that were on what teachers called Arne Duncan's "hit list," the union tried to continue its collaboration with Duncan (and his master, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley).

All of this has been reported, month after month, in the pages of Substance.

The material is available in great detail in our back issues (available both in print and PDF) at our new Website, www.substancenews.net.

More:

http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/2008/12/arne-duncan-privatizer-union-buster-and.html

Not a good choice IMO.

The choices of Rahm and Arne just blew my mind.

:(

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/staying-alive-an-issue-in-chicago-public-schools/2007/08/13/1186857425539.html

It also has children being shot every day (not in school, but in their neighborhoods, innocent victims of gang violence). Maybe this explains the willingness to have the military academy type schools and programs: a kind of discipline and training many of these kids need to organize their chaotic lives. I have great reservations about recruiting impoverished kids into the military system for cannon fodder, but I can also see that there might be some benefits to these kids, too.

i don't like it either, but it is an alternative to the thug life. and it gives the kids who are going to end up there anyway a leg up. they don't have to join at the bottom of the totem pole.

people who point to the stats of cps, and then point that finger at arne are seriously confused. the city schools are in better shape than they have been in my lifetime.
arne did a good job. which is why so many of the teachers hate him.

it should be abolished and the bldg. turned into an apts.

but that is not the world we find ourselves in.

Now it looks like this admin will bring in the education-corporate complex.

Oh, yeah. This is what I voted for. (Is the sarcasm smilie needed?)

it states that the military schools are in predominantly minority neighborhoods. well, they might be 50%+1, but in point of fact rickover navel acadamy is in a very intergrated area, with a large high income population. bronzeville is somewhat the same. the immediate area is predominantly black. but it is not far from president obama's home in hyde park, also one of the most integrated areas of the city.
and arne is not the first. for a very, very long time, the only limited enrollment high school was lane tech. it started life as a feeder for the army corps of engineers. it is in a predominantly white area. it maintains a strong rotc program.

in a system as cash strapped as chicago's, it was an offer that couldn't be resisted. and nobody but nobody is forced to go to these schools.