NASA's Final Frontier: Finding the great Black Scientist

We all know what NASA's current mission, with Muslim outreach now the primary goal of that once vaunted organization.

Houston, 1969: How did these white guys ever succeed without Black people?

The next few days will see some long-awaited entries finally "go up" at SBPDL, but a quick thought on a story that came to our attention yesterday. NASA is attempting to address the "critical" shortage of Black people within the ranks of science and engineering fields, at a time when many high schools are doing away with honors programs and gifted classes because of a shortage of Black people in their ranks. With fewer Black students taking AP exams (and fewer garnering a three or above), one is left wondering where NASA will locate potential Black astrobiologists.

Curbing excellence seems to be a ploy to remove all remnants of white people excelling where Black people constantly fail. Perhaps if science labs are removed from high schools (as in Berkeley), the stunning athletic achievements of Black people will somehow progress our levels of scientific knowledge.

Instead of investing money in the "gifted" segments of society, we are intent on de-investing from those programs and redistributing that money to areas of consistent failure:

NASA has selected the United Negro College Fund Special Programs Corp. of Falls Church, Va., to administer a $1 million career development and educational program designed to address the critical shortage of U.S. minority students in science and engineering fields.

The NASA Astrobiology Institute's (NAI) Minority Institution Research Support (MIRS) program in Moffett Field, Calif., is providing the funding for the four-year effort. The program will provide opportunities for up to four faculty members and eight students from minority-serving institutions to partner with astrobiology investigators. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and the future of life on Earth and the potential for life elsewhere.

"Providing new education opportunities for minority students will both enrich lives and answer a critical need for proficiency in science and engineering," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "But just as importantly, the program is an investment to cultivate imaginative thinking about the field of astrobiology."

The United Negro College Fund Special Programs Corp. will use its extensive database of 14,000 registrants to develop an online community to provide webinars, virtual training and videoconferences, and provide outreach and recruitment for program participants. The program's objective is to engage more teachers from under-represented schools in astrobiology research and increase the number of students pursuing careers in astrobiology.

"Our nation's underserved populations are a tremendous resource on which we must draw, not just for science, but for everything we do," said Carl Pilcher, director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute. "We are extremely pleased that the NAI MIRS program will continue contributing under the leadership of such a strong and experienced partner."

Founded in 1998, NAI is a partnership between NASA, 14 U.S. teams of universities and other organizations, and seven international consortia. NAI's goals are to promote, conduct, and lead interdisciplinary astrobiology research, train a new generation of astrobiology researchers, and share the excitement of the field.

One of the first rules of SBPDL is that any organization that fails to have significant numbers of Black people  (or vocational fields) is operating at crisis level. Only with the introduction of large numbers of Black people can offset this horrible situation, for the efficiency of an organization and its status as a progressive, tolerant company (or vocation) is at stake.

So how many Black astrobiologists are there?:

During the Astrobiology Science Conference held at NASA Ames in April 2002, less than 1% of the 800 attendees were African-American.  To increase the visibility and participation of underrepresented scientists, The Minority Institution Astrobiology Collaboratory (MIAC) was formed.

A sane society would have no problem asking why that might be, but an insane society merely inquires as to how a greater representation of Black people will be possible (hint, lowering standards to becoming an astrobiologist).

One institution that has allocated money for NASA (and is a predominately Black university) is Alabama A&M. A top producer of Black people with advanced doctorates, Alabama A&M is also home to growing controversy that involves NASA, tens of millions of dollars and a chief compliance officer who used to be a janitor:

According to high ranking officials at Alabama A&M University, the FBI has started asking questions about recent events at the Research Institute.

That's the flagship scientific research program, an 11-year-old separate corporate entity that employs A&M professors to handle millions in private and government research contracts on behalf of NASA, the Defense Department and numerous companies, such as Boeing.

"Yes, some senior administrators have been informed of a potential situation with the Research Institute," said university spokesperson Wendy Kobler on Thursday when asked about the FBI investigation. "Of late, there have been no follow up conversations about the ongoing inquiry into the Research Institute."

According to the former institute attorney, Annary Cheatham, after a summer of more than five firings and forceouts, there's just about no one left at the institute with a background in science or with the necessary security clearance.

The institute's small governing board, which includes former A&M trustee Shefton Riggins and current A&M trustee Tom Bell, on June 14 held a private meeting and fired the man who had helped found the institute, physicist and longtime director Dr. Daryush Ila.

They hired Dr. Tommy Coleman, who has a background in plant and soil science. In July, the board removed Coleman and put in director Deidra Willis-Gopher, a former teacher.

Kevin Matthews, a former Madison County janitor, became the new chief compliance officer. And Cheatham, who was brought in as general counsel for the institute on July 20 and let go 15 days later, said the bylaws were rewritten to place Matthews on the Institute board with Riggins and Bell, meaning Matthews is, in part, supervising himself.

Yes, the chief compliance officer that oversaw millions in grants was a former janitor.

Like all government agencies, NASA exceeds its employment of Black people (correlated to the percentage of the overall US population) by 49 percent.  This isn't enough, as NASA lags in diversity:

In a year of firsts, the nomination of an African-American to lead NASA hasn't grabbed national front-page headlines used for a black president moving into the White House, or for the selection of a Hispanic justice for the U.S. Supreme Court.


Yet, if former astronaut Charles Bolden is confirmed as the next NASA administrator, he will take over an agency still struggling to match the racial diversity found in the nation's population, much less the federal work force in general.

Part of the reason is because minorities are underrepresented in the science- and math-related professions from which NASA draws, said space policy expert Howard McCurdy.

But that doesn't excuse NASA, he said.

"The federal government has viewed itself as having a special responsibility to be a model employer, to go beyond what the occupational distribution allows," said McCurdy, a public affairs professor at American University in Washington, D.C.

"I don't sense that NASA moves much beyond what the occupational categories provide them. They are much more comfortable with technical challenges than with social ones."

When it comes to racial parity, NASA falls short in all but one ethnic group, Asian-Americans. At Kennedy Space Center, the situation is a little different.

Blacks, who make up 12.8 percent of the U.S. population, represent 11.3 percent of NASA's employees. They make up 17.9 percent of the federal work force. At KSC, blacks make up 7.6 percent of the work force, compared with 10 percent of Brevard County's population.

Hispanics represent 5.9 percent of all NASA employees, although they make up 7.9 percent of the federal labor force and 15.1 percent of the nation's population. Ten percent of KSC's work force is made up of Hispanics, compared with 6.9 percent of Brevard's population

Asian-Americans, who make up 4.6 percent of the national population, represent 6.3 percent of NASA's work force. That's nearly double the 3.4 percent they represent of all government employees. At KSC, 4.2 percent of the work force is made up of Asian-Americans, compared with 2.1 percent of Brevard's population."

We once went to the moon. We can't go back now, not because mankind is getting dumber, but because mankind is having to curb excellence so that Black people won't be left out. Honors classes, military entrance exams, AP exams, the SAT, LSAT, MCAT and ACT, the Wonderlic and any other test that requires a No. 2 pencil must go, because they deny Black people the opportunity to bless many vocations with wondrous variety and diversity. 

American innovation has been handicapped by the failures of Black people and to compensate for this continued poor academic showing (and thus high rate of barber shop employees), all companies or organizations - both public and private - must lower standards.

To understand why America made it to the moon in 1969 is to understand where America would be ranked in the PISA scores internationally were the white score not saddled with those of an underachieving racial group. 

The contributions of Black people can not go unnoticed: where would the world be without the Super Soaker or this nifty invention to hold sagging pants up?

We can only look at modern Huntsville to see where mankind is heading, thanks to Antoine Dodson.

Those of us looking at the year 2010 coming to close realize the world of Harrison Bergeron is upon us.

#72. Athlete-Students Graduating from College

As SBPDL celebrates the 2009 College Football season's imminent arrival, we must pause to remember why we are doing this.

College football - and the National Football League - hold adult men in perpetual captivity during fall weekends and this vice leaves them incapable of performing any other activity during this time period.

Grown men head back to their alma maters to watch 18-22-year-olds play football on Saturday's and then on Sunday, they watch individuals who have the innate capacity to fail the Wonderlic Test in glorious fashion play an occasional football in between commercials.

College football is big business, as one conference (The SEC) has just signed a television contract worth $205 million through 2025. College football is a massive business that allows many schools to survive and flourish, and causes other conferences to fold up if they can't negotiate to keep their product on television.

Were it not for college football, Black people - especially males - would not be attending historically white colleges:

"Data show that Black male students often feel isolated, marginalized and invisible on predominantly White campuses. Dr. Mac Stewart, the chief diversity officer and vice provost for minority affairs at OSU, says that was the reality officials at the university discovered with the Black men on campus. “We had to do something to address this issue,” he says. “We first started with a focus group of Black male students. They made some suggestions.”

Black athletes, especially college football players at the 120 FBS schools, are some of the most notable people on their campus, so only if coaches could find a way to get more Black people on their teams, then perhaps Black people wouldn't feel marginalized.

Looking at The University of Georgia is an interesting case study in examining the reality of Black people's inability to get into schools, unless they possess the all important life skill of running with the football:

"Since the late 1990s, Black student enrollment at the University of Georgia, the state’s flagship university, has hovered between 5 percent and 6 percent, despite promises by the university’s administration to improve the school’s pursuit of Black students. In 1998, Blacks constituted 6.2 percent of the university’s enrollment. After significant dips in 2001 and 2003, the university rebounded, increasing its Black enrollment to nearly 6.8 percent in 2007. But the number of Black men remained disproportionately low.

"The numbers took a dramatic turn in 2008, however. In the fall of that year, 104 Black males enrolled at the university, an 18 percent jump from fall 2007."

If, in 2008 only 104 Black people enrolled at UGA, that means that nearly 25 percent of that class were from the football team, as the 2008 recruiting class for the Bulldog football team (not including walk-ons) were largely Black people.

While in school, these Black people help their nearly all-white institutions of higher learning defeat other Black people attending all-white institutions of higher learning.

But what doesn't happen, unlike the few white people who play football for these cash making cows, is that the Black athlete-students do not graduate, whereas the white student-athletes graduate:

"Georgia Tech’s football players had the nation’s best average SAT score, 1028 of a possible 1600, and best average high school GPA, 3.39 of a possible 4.0 in the core curriculum. But Tech’s football players still scored 315 SAT points lower on average than their classmates.

At the University of Georgia, the average football SAT was 949, which is 239 points behind the average for an undergraduate student at Georgia — and 79 points behind Tech’s football average. The Bulldogs’ average high school GPA was 2.77, or 45th out of 53 teams for which football GPAs were available. Their SAT average ranked them 22nd."

More to the point, is this story, which also discuss the lack of Black head coaches, as it points out the graduation rates of Black people at major college football schools:

"...report released Monday by The Institute for Diversity & Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. It shows that the gap between the graduation success rates for white and African-American football student-athletes has increased from 14 percent in the 2007 report to 17 percent in the new study, although the grad rates for African-American football student-athletes has increased. While the 2008 numbers show that 76 percent of white football student-athletes graduated, only 59 percent of African-American football student-athletes graduated. The Institute arrived at its findings by reviewing data collected by the NCAA from member schools over a six-year period, using the freshman classes that entered college from 1998 through 2001."

So, were it not for college football, Black people would barely be attending historically white colleges at all (here is a list of the top 25 football programs in 2004 and also the Black ratio of athletes to general students. Note the graduation rates for some of the schools white players... they look a little off):

Top 25                          Black Football          White Football
                  Players Graduation %    Players Graduation %

1 UNIV. OF S. CAL.                        61%                     60%
2 LOUISIANA STATE U.                      34%                     56%
3 UNIV. OF OKLA.                          28%                     41%
4 UNIV. OF MICHIGAN                       36%                     58%
5 UTEXAS-AUSTIN                           33%                     45%
6 UTENN-KNOXVILLE                         26%                     78%
7 OHIO STATE UNIV.                        28%                     58%
8 KANSAS STATE UNIV.                      52%                     64%
9 FLORIDA STATE UNIV.                     43%                     65%
10 UNIV. OF MIAMI                          47%                     57%
11 UNIV. OF GEORGIA                        51%                     86%
12 PURDUE UNIV.                            53%                     63%
13 UNIV. OF IOWA                           45%                     62%
14 MIAMI UNIV. (OHIO)                      25%                     70%
15 WASH. STATE UNIV.                       47%                     71%
16 UNIV. OF MISS.                          52%                     53%
17 UNIV. OF FLA.                           44%                     38%
18 BOISE STATE UNIV.                       57%                     47%
19 TEXAS CHRISTIAN U.                      50%                     61%
20 W.VIRGINIA UNIV.                        36%                     58%
21 OKLAHOMA STATE                          32%                     52%
22 UNEB.-LINCOLN                           41%                     69%
23 UMD-COLLEGE PARK                        38%                     71%
24 UMINN-TWIN CITIES                       31%                     58%
25 UNIV. OF UTAH                           42%                     ***

                  Fall 2002-03 FT Enrollment

Top 25                        Black    Black Student
                  Student %       Athletes %

1 UNIV. OF S. CAL.            6.5%            34.0%
2 LOUISIANA STATE U.          9.3%            33.2%
3 UNIV. OF OKLA.              6.3%            27.2%
4 UNIV. OF MICHIGAN           8.1%            16.8%
5 UTEXAS-AUSTIN               3.6%            24.9%
6 UTENN-KNOXVILLE             7.1%            28.7%
7 OHIO STATE UNIV.            8.1%            16.3%
8 KANSAS STATE UNIV.          2.6%            21.8%
9 FLORIDA STATE UNIV.        12.2%            34.5%
10 UNIV. OF MIAMI              9.3%            36.2%
11 UNIV. OF GEORGIA            5.1%            31.4%
12 PURDUE UNIV.                3.2%            18.8%
13 UNIV. OF IOWA               2.3%            13.7%
14 MIAMI UNIV. (OHIO)          3.6%            15.0%
15 WASH. STATE UNIV.           3.1%            22.1%
16 UNIV. OF MISS.             13.0%            40.6%
17 UNIV. OF FLA.               8.6%            30.0%
18 BOISE STATE UNIV.           1.2%            14.2%
19 TEXAS CHRISTIAN U.          4.8%            33.0%
20 W.VIRGINIA UNIV.            4.3%            25.1%
21 OKLAHOMA STATE              3.3%            20.1%
22 UNEB.-LINCOLN               2.0%            13.9%
23 UMD-COLLEGE PARK           12.1%            19.6%
24 UMINN-TWIN CITIES           4.0%            15.6%
25 UNIV. OF UTAH               0.8%             9.1%
One Black writer wrote an interesting article where he pointed out this:

"On Saturday, Kansas coach Bill Self answered questions about junior Tyrone Appleton returning to Gary, Ind., for the funeral of a friend who was murdered. Appleton missed Saturday’s practice but will be back for today’s game against Dayton. Rick Telander, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, asked Self if as a society we’ve come to expect young athletes to deal with the murder of friends and family members.

“It happens far too often,” Self said. “Of course once is way too much. Last year we had two individuals (Darnell Jackson and Rodrick Stewart) who had family members that were murdered in drive-bys the same week.”

Now, let’s take a moment to be bone honest. I don’t have to identify the race of Appleton, Jackson and Stewart. Whenever there is a story about athletes and murder, it’s relatively safe to assume they’re black. Peyton Manning’s boyz from the ’hood are unlikely to be gunned down."

Stuff Black People Don't Like includes their athlete-students graduating from college, for, when you look at the data, the main reason Black males are even in college is for the enjoyment of the white alumni. Were it not college football, Black males wouldn't be major colleges anywhere. As it is, Black males are still barely in colleges anywhere.

#75. Lack of Black Head Coaches in College Football

Bear Bryant, whom many consider to be the finest football coach in history, will also be the man that Black people in the future "Black World" canonize as being the patron saint of making Southern football accommodating to Black people, and in large part, the nation.

It was 1972, and the University of Alabama's vaunted football program was struggling to win games with its all-white team, as other university's were employing Black people in great numbers on both sides of the ball. Having gone 12-11 in 1969 and 1970, Bryant decided what Alabama needed to lift themselves from barely above .500 was Black people:

"Before the start of the 1970 season, Bryant decided to take the initiative. At a January coaches meeting, he ran into his friend John McKay, the head coach of the University of Southern California Trojans, one of college football's most celebrated integrated teams. ... The Trojans would play in Birmingham to open the 1970 season, and Alabama would return the favor in Los Angeles the following autumn. Bryant must have known that his talent-deficient Tide team was no match for Southern Cal, and that proved to be the case. USC's two great black running backs, Sam "the Bam" Cunningham, who scored three touchdowns that afternoon, and Clarence Davis, who had been born in Birmingham, ran all over Alabama for a crushing 42-21 victory.

The one-sidedness of the defeat shocked many Alabamians... Cunningham, and proceeded to take him into the Alabama locker room, where he announced, "Gentlemen, this is what a football player looks like."

Bryant did go to the USC locker room to congratulate Cunningham, but the rest is fiction: The Alabama players didn't need to be told that the Tide had to integrate. Sam Cunningham, in Bear Bryant's words, "did more to integrate Alabama in one afternoon than Martin Luther King had in years."

Black people now comprise the majority of every Southeastern Conference (SEC) football team a mere 40 years later. Only lowly Vanderbilt dares trot out a majority white team, as the academic standards of the school leave Black people out of the admissions running in most cases, except for those who might be able to score a 22 on the Wonderlic Test.

Bear Bryant was so successful at integrating college football that now, 45.9 percent of Football Bowl Subdivision (DIA) athletes are Black people, even though Black people are only 14 percent of the population that is between the ages of 18-22 in the United States.

Almost all of the FBS schools that field majority Black football teams are comprised of nearly all-white student bodies. Black people don't mind this though, as the adulation of white people is one of their favorite things in life and with many future disingenuous white liberals being the bulk of those students bodies, its good practice for the future.

And yet, despite the multi-billion dollars that these athletes - many of them Black people - bring to their university's, there is a paucity of Black head coaches attempting to maintain order on campuses nationwide.

Right now, Black people are the head coaches of only seven of the 120 FBS college football programs:

DeWayne Walker, Ron English, Mike Locksley (New Mexico State, Eastern Michigan and New Mexico) join Turner Gill, Randy Shannon, Mike Haywood (Buffalo, Miami, Fl., Miami, Ohio) and Kevin Sumlin of Houston are the only Black head coaches in college football:

"In major-college football history, exactly two marquee jobs have gone to black coaches: Oklahoma hired John Blake in 1996, and Notre Dame hired Tyrone Willingham in 2002. Each was given three seasons before being booted."

Willingham, once the Token Black of head coaches, didn't fare well at Notre Dame and did even worse at Washington, taking that once powerful program into the lands only diversity could lead them, 0-12 in 2008 and a pathetic 11-37 in four seasons.

Mississippi State was the first SEC school to hire a Black head coach in Sylvester Croom, who was described as the Jackie Robinson of head coaching for breaking the color barrier in the deep south. His first season in 2004 saw him go 3-8 and he finished his career at MSU with a record of 21-38.

Why do we lump these men as failures together, when white coaches aren't held to the same monolithic standard? Because Black people that are coaches have the Black Coaches Association (renamed Black Coaches and Administrators), a place where Black people can lobby for more losing coaches to saddle the ranks of major college football with attempts at creating a racial balance quickly, as their mission is to:

• To address significant issues pertaining to the participation and employment of ethnic minorities in sport in general and intercollegiate athletics in particular.
• To assist ethnic minorities aspiring to have a career in athletics through educational and professional development programming and scholarships.
• To provide youth and diverse communities the opportunity to interact positively with the BCA as a corporate citizen and community builder through a variety of alliances

As SBPDL has shown, sports is only field where Black people surpass all other races - except incarceration rates - and show Black people in a positive light, given them access to complete entertainment domination and the adulation of white people everywhere.

Stuff Black People Don't Like will show in the coming week, as we prepare for the 2009 season, that Black people do not like their college athletes to graduate from college; they hate it when the lights to out on their careers; lack of Black mascots; Tim Tebow; White Running Backs; following team rules; and the media over-hyping Myron Rolle (because all Black people are capable of his intellectual acumen!).

However, for now Stuff Black People Don't Like includes the lack of Black Head Coaches in College Football's FBS division, for in the age of Mein Obama, only when a Black person is in control of all 120 FBS teams will the Black Coaches and Administrators organization be happy.

Black head coaches have failed at schools from Michigan State, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Washington, Mississippi State, UCLA, to Kansas State and a few others. White head coaches have failed at these schools as well, but they don't form groups to protect their interests. Perhaps that is why in the end, they will fail. To Black people, everything is about race. To white people, everything is about winning, regardless if white people lose in the end.

#82. Naval Academy Academic Standards

Previously, on SBPDL, we learned that Black people do not like Real American Heroes. The real United States military and the elite soldiers that comprise the Navy Seals, Air Force Special Forces, Rangers and Delta Force are overwhelmingly white, as are 97 percent of the pilots who fly for our armed forces.

Unlike the G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra movie, which tried to show a majority of the elite fighters as Black people, reality is stunningly and convincingly white. Black people don't like this, and in the age of Mein Obama needed a fictitious film like G.I. Joe to bolster their fragile egos.

Black people also don't like Pre-Obama America at all, for it is an era (1776 - 2009) that is dead and represented evil white supremacy and Black subjection. White people may have created and sustained a civilization that ultimately sent a man to the moon, but Black people will gladly take the reigns of that society now and will attempt to pull a Zimbabwe in America (or Clayton or Jefferson County).

Now, Black people are attempting to become Real American Heroes, albeit in a new light. Standards will have to be lowered dramatically to make it happen, but Black people are coming to the Naval Academy in droves this upcoming semester, because diversity is the fundamental goal of the Post-Obama America and the lowering of Pre-Obama America standards is the only way to ensure it becomes a reality:

"The Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead announced in Annapolis recently that "diversity is the number one priority" at the Naval Academy.

The Naval Academy superintendent, Vice Adm. Jeffrey Fowler, echoed him. Everyone understands that "diversity" here means nonwhite skins.

Fowler insisted recently that we needed to have Annapolis graduates who "looked like" the Fleet, where enlisted people are about 42 percent nonwhite, largely African American and Hispanic."

In an article in the Washington Post, a member of the admissions board stated that the only way to increase Black people presence at the school was to drastically lower standards for admittance:

"Fleming says the increase in minority enrollment at the academy has brought in students with lower grades and SAT scores who need more remedial classes and are less capable of the scholarship for which the academy is known.

"First of all, we're dumbing down the Naval Academy," Fleming said in an interview. "Second of all, we're dumbing down the officer corps."

Fleming asserts, correctly, that Black people are treated differently in their application process and get in with lower scores and:

"Once at Annapolis, “diverse” midshipmen are over-represented in our pre-college classes, in lower-track courses, in mandatory tutoring programs and less challenging majors. Many struggle to master basic concepts. (I teach some of these courses.)"

Much like the Wonderlic Test, Black people find the Naval Academy Standards as applied to white people to difficult to master and thus, must resort to fuzzy math to ensure greater representation of their people at a formerly important institution of higher learning.

Now, the notion of creating fictitious Real American Heroes in film has seeped into the Naval Academies admissions, as the school has lowered the flag of quality applicants and rigorous, difficult scholastics to introduce diversity and Post-Obama America to our nations future Navy officer classes.

The only way Pre-Obama America could be destroyed is to lower standards to include the people who support Mein Obama with 97 percent approval and who voted him by a margin of 96 percent-to-One percent in the 2008 Presidential Election.

The words of one of the highest ranking officers in the Navy need to remembered forever, as we enter Post-Obama America, for the standards of Real American Heroes no longer matter, and to ensure diversity and Black people's rightful place in the new Black world, we must lower standards completely:

"The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. Gary Roughead released a podcast on the importance of diversity and the Navy's diversity initiatives Feb. 27.

"In the military and in the Navy, it's important that we are a diverse organization because we have to represent what I call the face of America," said Roughead. "As our population changes and the percentages of majority-minority changes and that's always taking place we have to reflect that same demographic in our Navy and that's why it's important, but at the end of the day, it really makes a huge difference because we're stronger because of the different perspectives and ideas that people bring to bear."

Stuff Black People Don't Like includes Naval Academy Academic Standards, for the only way to include a high percentage of Black people in one of Post-Obama America's greatest academic institutions, Pre-Obama America Academic standards had to be tossed out.

The Chinese, Russian, British and other nations only allow the smartest and most intelligent people in their nations to be officers and defend their nation. In Post-Obama America, Real American Heroes have to be made up... in movies and through lowering of the standards at our elite military schools.