With the enactment of No Child Left Behind and the prevalence of accountability testing, the nation's public schools have been faulted for concentrating too much on basic skills. If so, this hasn't shown up in the quality of would-be military recruits.

A five-year study by an education advocacy group of 350,000 applicants who took the Army's entrance exam found that nearly one-fourth of them, all high school graduates ages 17-24, failed.

The test, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, measures basic math, science and reading skills. The results are even more worrisome when you consider that 75 percent of those who applied to join the military didn't even qualify to take the test because they are physically