By Victor Skinner
EAGnews.org
     
TALAHASSEE, Fla. – Many believe military service is a good option for high school graduates if they’re not prepared to attend college or move directly into careers.
 
But a significant percentage of students who want to serve their country upon graduation are learning it’s not an option at all. They have a public school education, and diplomas to prove it, but don’t possess the skills necessary to enlist.
 
Mary Laura, director of state policy for the Foundation for Excellence in Education, wrote in a recent blog: “The data is sobering: 30% of high school graduates fail the Armed Forces Qualification test. Why? Because they cannot pass the reading and math portions.
 
“Data from 2010 shows in Florida, where I live, 20.9% of high school graduates that took the test were unable to pass it, and 33.7% of the African-American high school students couldn’t pass. In Mississippi, where I grew up, 37.8% of the high school graduates didn’t pass, and half the African-Americans who took it failed.
 
“These are kids with high school diplomas! Not the ones who have dropped out, but the ones who actually met the requirements to graduate. And then they try to enlist in the armed forces only to find out their diplomas mean nothing. NOTHING,” Laura writes.
 
The data on students flunking the military qualification test comes from a 2010 report from Ed Trust that Laura believes should be a “clarion call” to the public.
 
“This shatters the comfortable myth that academically underprepared students will find in the military a second-chance pathway to success,” Kati Haycock writes in the Ed Trust report.
 
In our opinion, the data confirms what student testing has already shown: many American high school students, especially poor and minority students, graduate unprepared for life because of the woefully inadequate public education they received.
 
We believe teachers unions deserve a lot of the blame.
 
Not only have union bosses fought to limit school choice options for families with the aim of preserving their own self-interests, they’ve also consistently fought for policies that undermine student learning.
 
The unions use the collective bargaining process to secure unnecessary and expensive perks for members that have no impact on student learning, and divert funding from things that do. They also advocate for measures that limit teacher accountability, force many young, talented teachers to lose their jobs, and protect dangerous and predatory school employees.
 
The union seniority system and iron-clad teacher tenure protections are perhaps the two biggest fundamental problems in public education.
 
Laura’s blog provides another example of how the union agenda is creating serious issues that reverberate far beyond public school hallways to other critical areas like our national security.