South CarolinaPing
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Posted on 03/23/2011 8:24:25 PM PDT by 2nd amendment mama
High school senior Jared Dennis wants to join the U.S. Air Force. If you look at his credentials, he would appear to be someone any branch of the military would be happy to have. He has a 3.9 grade point average while taking courses like statistics and Japanese and he plays in a regional orchestra.
But when he went through the recruitment process with the Air Force, he was told he is a Tier 2 candidate because he attends an online virtual high school.
Less than 1 percent of the people the Air Force accepts can be Tier 2 candidates, which includes home-schooled students and those who earn a GED.
“It was heart-breaking, to say the least, that I put in all this time and effort looking at how I could get into the Air Force, not only for myself but to serve my nation. That’s one thing that I really want to do,” Dennis said.
He and his mother, Alice, met Wednesday with Congressman Joe Wilson, R-SC, and state superintendent Dr. Mick Zais, who’s a retired Army brigadier general.
Wilson serves as chairman of the House Armed Services personnel subcommittee, served 31 years in the National Guard and has four sons in the military. He told Dennis he’ll work to get the Department of Defense to change its policy.
“When I return next week to Washington, I’ll be working to put this in the National Defense Authorization Act,” Wilson said.
Tier 1 students are those who graduate from a traditional high school, while Tier 2 students are those with alternative credentials, like a home school diploma, a GED or a diploma from a correspondence, Internet or distance-learning program.
Tier 3 is for someone without any secondary school credential.
Non-Tier 1 applicants who are accepted are limited to no more than 10 percent in the Army, 5 percent in the Navy and Marine Corps and less than 1 percent in the Air Force.
Zais said, “The difficulty and rigor of the curriculum in our cyber schools exceeds that in many of our traditional schools. Seems to me this is probably just a policy in Washington that made sense 15 years ago when there was a lot of fly-by-night companies offering fake degrees.”
He points out that the state’s virtual charter schools have the same accreditation as brick-and-mortar schools and students take the same standardized tests.
Dennis is still hoping he’ll be able to join the Air Force. If he’s not allowed to enlist, he said he plans to go to college and join ROTC.
The better option anyway.
Funny you say that. There were two kids recycled in my AF tech school class. Both were active AF (opposed to Air Guard) and one had already been dropped from another AFSC for poor academics.
When our instructor found out the class was 90% prior service and/or National Guard he said “Well, this will be an easy group to teach”.
The 3 highest graduates were prior active Army. Of course two of them were already licensed journeymen electricians in the private sector.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to give tests to people wanting to enlist and taking those that score over a certain grade, regardless of where they were educated. In fact, IIRC, when I joined the Army in 1959, that is exactly what they did do. Gave us test, a simple one at first to determine if we were smart enough to join and then later more complicated ones, such as the OCS test(which I passed, BTW). It didn’t matter if you had a diploma or not, you still were tested and if you failed, out you went.
That would certainly make more sense!
More likely just a policy that was valid 20 years ago when modern homeschooling was in its infancy, and high school graduates who’d been homeschooled were as rare as the Hope Diamond. This is nothing more than a failure to adapt.
That’s because he hasn’t been collectively Socialized by the Leftist indoctrination system which makes him an infidel in their eyes.
Does anybody remember the USAF Project 10,000? 1966-7?
How did that work out? I really never heard.
Shoot, they pretty much walk on water. Only Loosers go to public skools.
He can have the highest aptitude but affirmative action takes precedence over aptitude, ability, skill, talent, awards, merits, and other desirable traits that an employer would be looking for to help make his company the most competitive.
A post-modern society is not allow one to be better/more competitive than others. Affirmative action helps to make everyone equal, and some more equal than others.
Just like the ancient Greeks, the Leftists of America now value poverty (of the spirit, the mind, the heart, and even more physical forms) as a virtue. The losers of life become more valued than the winners.
>> Just more pc crap
It’s probably a matter of the unconventional.
The kid could use some Congressional advocacy.
George Washington was home schooled. ;)
I tend to agree w/you. My favorite neighbor in the world was given the choice of incarceration vs. joining the army. (He ran moonshine back in the day.) He chose the Army and protected our country. He’s 82yo now and doesn’t understand why I owe him big time—ya gotta love our veterans!
I’d rather have this kid and get rid of 20 or 30 “cubicle commandos” over in the pentagon.
This is exactly the kind of brainless chit that you pay some apparatchik Colonel 100K per year to think up. Colonel Brainless is prolly planning his next vacation and buying some retirement property.
And his his fat paycheck is supplied by private sector taxpayers trying to figure out how to make their next
mortgage payment.
A smart enough kid can get by in pubskewl, but the socialism is to gag a maggot.
It's probably a policy that was established years ago for holders of GEDs, which have been around for many decades, and they just put home schooling and online schools in the same category without too much thought. And now both have become more significant.
Maybe a career enhancing whisper, “I am gay” would help get them to Tier 1?
Yep, my thoughts exactly. Not everything is a nefarious plot.
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