Plenty of constituencies out there take issue with the education law known as the No Child Left Behind Act, due for reauthorization this year. Democrats want to increase funding to carry out the law while scaling back some of its emphasis on test performance; some Republicans want to permit the states to opt out of the law’s requirements butthen continue to collect federal education funding.

But lately a new front has opened up in the dispute over the law’s future: Democratic Rep. Michael M. Honda of California wants to repeal a little-known provision that grants U.S. military recruiters ready access to the personal information of high school students. The language was the handiwork of Republican David Vitter of Louisiana, who’s now a senator but was in the House when the law was written in 2001. At that time, the Pentagon was complaining that many public schools were denying their recruiters access to students.

Honda, a former high school principal, says he’s received plenty of complaints from bewildered students and parents in his Santa Clara County district, who say they’ve received phone calls, letters and even home visits from recruiters. So his bill would bar schools from turning over contact information except when they “have previously received the explicit, written consent of parents.”

Last month, a pair of high school film students from Lawrence, Kan., one of whom had been approached by recruiters armed with his personal data, took to Capitol Hill to screen a movie they made about the issue, called “No Child Left Unrecruited.”

The National Parent Teacher Association is also lending its support to Honda’s bill. But both the group and the congressman maintain that the measure isn’t intending to politicize military recruiting efforts, it’s only trying to preserve student privacy.

Indeed, Honda says several House colleagues who are more critical of military recruiting (he won’t name names) wanted the bill to be a more sweeping condemnation of high school recruiting tactics, but he rejected their appeals. “This is not to say that recruitment itself is bad, or that all recruiters are unprofessional,” he says.

Vitter, meanwhile, seems determined to stand firm behind the language of his original provision. He did not respond to requests for comment, but he told the New Orleans Times-Picayune earlier this year that he drafted the provision to permit children whose parents already support military recruiting to acquire information they might miss out on if they were required to fill out an opt-in form for a recruitment session and neglected to follow through.