GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

John Merrow has been collecting advice for President Obama on education. The latest additions are real audio from students, including this Texas high school senior, who says schools should focus on tests that prepare students for college, not standardized state tests:

“It would be a whole lot more useful to students if they would focus on tests like SAT’s and ACT’s, more college-oriented things, rather than an end of year test that’s not used by colleges or even hardly looked at by colleges.”

Malika Evans, an Urban Academy senior here in New York City, wants Obama to end military recruitment in high schools:

“It gets harassing, they keep calling…School is for education and education only, and students should be worried about going to college after going to school.”

At Vanguard High School in Manhattan, two students ask for better environments for gay and lesbian students:

“There is a lot of high schools that don’t approve of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and queers….In school, it should be a safe place, it should be like a second home. Nobody should be put down because of their sexuality.”

The city and civil libertarians have been fighting over the Department of Education’s recent decision to hand the military a single database of every high school student’s contact information. The central division is over the students’ ability to opt out: While the DOE says they are making it possible for families to choose not to be recruited, the libertarians charge that the single letter sent home this year, which offered parents the chance to opt out, is not enough.

So far this has been a tense, unresolved stalemate. But, short of ending military recruitment (which would require a change of federal law), there might be a simple solution!

Leslie Kielson of United For Peace and Justice New York suggests that the city include the opt-out option not in the extra letter but in a form that schools already take very seriously: the emergency contact card that is given out at the start of every school year. Kielson points out that many school handouts never make it home to parents. The exception, she says, is the emergency contact card, which schools are aggressive about collecting.

DOE spokesperson Marge Feinberg told me that the department will review the suggestion.

In 1971, with the United States fighting in Vietnam, the New York State Senate voted to allow high school ROTC military training programs during school hours, over opposition from those who felt the military had no place in the schools.

“The soldier who obeys his superior officer without question except in the most extreme circumstances is essentially different from the citizen who prizes his freedom to think dangerous thoughts and to challenge even legally sanctioned authority,” wrote Irwin Stark of the American Civil Liberties Union in a 1979 New York Times column, arguing for the continued separation of the military from the public schools.

Junior ROTC programs are now a fairly common but still controversial program in schools across the country. More controversial right now is military recruitment in public schools — and the NY Civil Liberties Union, students, and lawmakers object to a new DOE policy of providing military recruiters access to students’ contact information on a centralized, rather than school-by-school, basis.