Army Secretary makes education a priority

EAGLE BASE, Tuzla, Bosnia-Army Secretary Louis Caldera was having a hectic day. On a trip to inspect U.S. peacekeepers in the Balkans, he was in Kosovo for breakfast, in Macedonia midmorning, and in Bosnia later that day for a working lunch with the top American officers. Next, he had to catch a helicopter for the strategic city of Brcko. But before he went, there was one last thing at Eagle Base he just had to see.

It was not a weapon. It was not a headquarters. It was a school.

"We have about 20 soldiers [in my unit]," said Sgt. 1st Class Willie M. Williams while talking with a keenly interested Caldera in the base Education Center. "A quarter of them have almost finished an associate's degree since they've been here."

So far this year, nearly 2,000 soldiers in Bosnia (and neighboring Hungary) have enrolled in University of Maryland courses alone, civilian Education Services Officer Paul Lovello told Caldera. The university, which has one of the largest continuing education programs in the country, has faculty teaching college courses on base here. Another 1,000 troops are taking classes over the Internet by using computer centers available at every base camp. And more is on the way: Caldera has kicked off a six-year, $600 million program to give every soldier a laptop and subsidized enrollment through a new program called "Army University Access Online."

The connection between military service and higher education dates from the original GI Bill of the 1940s. But with the armed services struggling to attract high-tech, highly skilled recruits, Caldera wants to take that link to a higher level. "I want soldiers who serve in the Army to walk away with more than just the pride of having served," Caldera said in a pre-trip interview. "I want them to walk away with marketable skills and with the education that they need to be successful."

A West Point graduate and former Army captain, Caldera, 44, describes himself as "a passionate believer in education.... That's personal because I was someone who grew up in a poor, immigrant, Spanish-speaking family [and] I had two brothers who didn't finish high school," said Caldera. "Today they've done some college work, but I've seen how much they have struggled throughout their lives because they didn't get the same kind of educational start."

Caldera began his political career by running for a seat on a community college board ("I lost"). After winning a seat in the California Legislature, he spent five years pushing education bills-including a charter-school bill that cost him the endorsement of the state teachers' union. In Washington, he landed first at the agency that runs AmeriCorps; then he was appointed Army Secretary, a civilian office far removed from the making of traditional educational policy-and from most military policy, for that matter.

The office of Army Secretary is a bureaucratic vestigial fin; it was stripped of full Cabinet rank and most of its power 50 years ago when President Truman combined the Army and the Navy into one Defense Department. Since then, Army Secretaries have not been much in the public eye. And in recent years, "the Army clearly has been used as a dumping ground for minority appointees," said Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant-colonel-turned-author. But, Peters said, "with Caldera, we got lucky."

And luck was what the Army needed. "Coming into this job [in 1998]," Caldera recalled, "the biggest short-term challenge that was facing the Army was our recruiting." Even more than the other services, the Army was struggling to fill its ranks-and falling thousands of soldiers short. This year, all of the services are expected to meet their recruiting goals, but most are doing so by sheer effort. "The Army's been more innovative," said former Reagan defense official Lawrence J. Korb. "They've had to be."

Since the updated "Montgomery GI Bill" benefit was enacted in 1984, a major incentive for people to join the volunteer Army is the government's promise to help pay for a recruit's college education. Almost every base offers continuing education classes. But with record-high civilian employment and college attendance draining the pool of potential recruits, Caldera and Army experts decided it was time to experiment.

One idea was a "College First" program, which reverses the GI Bill process by having recruits earn a two-year college degree before enlisting. (See NJ, 8/21/99, p. 2422.) As of midyear, fewer than 200 soldiers had signed up. An Army official attributes the low number to the modest stipend-just $150 a month-offered for college; that stipend may increase next year.

A more promising and higher-profile program that targets high school dropouts is "GED Plus." The program pays people while they earn their General Educational Development certificate (accepted widely as an equivalent to a high school diploma), in return for their enlistment.

GED Plus is a real turnaround from past policy. Since the draft ended, the military has refused to recruit most high school dropouts and has strictly limited the number of GED recruits, who are not even offered college cash. All dropouts, the argument went, were proven quitters who were unlikely to last in military life. But Hispanics, who are historically patriotic and eager to enlist, were under-represented in the military because of their high dropout rates. Hispanic leaders, and some academics, argue that the "quitter" model did not fit an ethnic group whose dropouts often had to work to support impoverished families.

So GED Plus uses a battery of aptitude and motivational tests in an attempt to separate the high-potential dropouts from the misfits. Whether it really works won't be known until enough recruits have completed their training and initial assignments. The program is eight months into a three-year test with 17 of the Army's 41 recruiting units-including one in Caldera's political home base, Los Angeles. As of the end of June, 2,240 new recruits had signed up, but at this early stage most had their GEDs already. Only 283 are actually dropouts receiving Army aid to get their GED. And the percentage of Hispanic recruits has yet to increase.

Nevertheless, Hispanic Democrats are lauding Caldera for what they see as his reopening a traditional doorway to opportunity. "It was the military that helped me really educate myself," said retired Rep. Esteban Torres, a California Democrat. "The military opened up a great window of opportunity for me, as a Mexican-American kid from the barrio."

The significance of Caldera's GED program does not end with Hispanics. Despite all the federal programs that target the high school dropout rate, few focus on giving today's dropouts a second chance. "I don't know if there's a lot out there for getting these kids back in school after they've dropped out," said one education staffer on Capitol Hill. "If you're trying to reach a kid at 16, you're just entirely too late-that's the mind-set now."

It's a mind-set Caldera rejects. "I think it's a mistake to write off a person at the age of 18," he said with real heat. "Everybody has the ability to learn. I've seen illiterate senior citizens learn to read and write and begin to use computers."

So how do high school dropouts do in the ranks? "I don't see them having a problem at all," said Sgt. 1st Class Gordon Nero, an Army career counselor at Fort Campbell, Ky. "I came in, I had a GED [myself]. My first sergeant let me go to school at night to get my high school diploma, [and] I've been on a mission ever since," Nero said. "I recently received my own bachelor's degree."

Such continuing education classes are a major part of military life. The military pays at least 75 percent of troops' tuition-up to 100 percent for Balkan peacekeepers-and instructors from civilian colleges and universities offer courses on most bases and Navy ships.

But soldiers must balance night school with night patrols. "I haven't taken any of the college courses, because of the schedule I'm following," said Spc. Victor Kimbrough, a Texas National Guard soldier stationed at Eagle Base in Bosnia. "They've got a great facility, and they teach lots of courses," he sighed, but his long shifts as a perimeter guard keep him on duty when classes are meeting.

And soldiers who can start a class may not be able to complete it if they must spend too long away from the base. In the middle of a history course, "I had to go to Checkpoint 75, working with the Russians," said Pvt. 1st Class William S. Lindquist, a peacekeeper in Vitina, Kosovo. "I went out there for 15 days, and I had to drop the course."

Even back in the United States, most soldiers must move to a new state every two to four years. "Every base has a different school, and that's where I ran into problems," Nero said. "It's hard to establish residency and get a degree at one school."

To escape these constraints of time and place, some soldiers take self-paced courses over the Internet. But that potentially global means of instruction has real troubles of its own.

For some students, it's simply the wrong medium. "I didn't like it at all," said Spc. Frank Hinnant, who works at a civil affairs unit at Eagle Base. "I'd rather have something physical that I can sit down and read instead of sitting in front of the computer for hours."

And old-style Army bureaucracy can interfere with new-economy education. Consider Lauren Hall, a staffer at the advocacy group National Military Family Association, whose husband is an Army soldier overseas. "He's taking an Internet class with a university that has [an office] here at Fort Myer, Virginia, but they don't have it over in Korea," she said. "So I am doing the registering for him over here, but he has to fill out his tuition assistance form over there [and] fax it over here." In all the shuffle, she said, the Korean command has threatened to stop paying for the course.

Caldera says he wants to make the continuing education programs simpler and more convenient for soldiers. So on Aug. 11, the Army called for proposals from the computer industry and academe on how to set up its new "Army University Access Online." Under the plan, a single Web site, eArmyU.com, would provide a one-stop-shopping gateway for soldiers to sign up for and take Internet classes. This would allow them to take courses on their own schedule from anywhere on Earth-theoretically even while in the field on exercises-as long as time and the availability of phone lines permit.

The winning contractor would also issue every soldier a laptop computer and the necessary software. They would arrange for a guidance counselor, too. The aim is to impose common standards for Internet course offerings, Caldera emphasized, while still "giving soldiers a great deal of choice about what educational provider they sign up with, so they can find the right program for them."

The Army is budgeting $600 million over the next six years for the new program, and "that will buy you a lot of interest from the private sector," said David Buyer, a software-industry expert and executive director of the congressionally appointed Web-Based Education Commission. The potential boost to a rapidly growing but still-infant field is enormous, Buyer said. "The potential of the Army program is that it will legitimize the whole notion of learning through the Web."

Although the Internet can let troops take courses on their own time, it cannot make more hours in the day for soldiers who must drill, conduct field exercises, and keep the peace in countries all over the world. "I'm operating on maybe five hours of sleep a day," said Sgt. 1st Class Rodney Greene, a tank trooper at Fort Hood, Texas, who takes four classes per semester. "I may not go to bed until 12:30 a.m., then I have to get up at 5:30 a.m. and go to [physical training]."

Caldera acknowledged that the biggest challenge for soldiers is finding that time. But, he said, "the Army uniformed leadership-officer and NCO-supports making time available for soldiers to work on their education."

The goal is to reshape both the reality and the image of the Army. "We are repositioning the Army in the minds of young people, from the low-tech service to the high-tech service," Caldera said. "Even if they are a ground-pounding infantry grunt, they are still going to get a laptop, access to the Internet, and signed up for school."

High-tech higher education, plus a pitch to the fastest-growing minority in the U.S. population: Caldera's education agenda has a potential appeal far beyond the Army. Asked about his plans, Caldera laughed and declined to answer on the record, but his admirers among Hispanic Democrats happily answer for him. "Within the Latino community, there are many people who are very proud of him," said Henry Cisneros, a former Clinton Housing and Urban Development Secretary, who now heads the Spanish-language network Univision. "There are business leaders here in Los Angeles who hope that he will one day be mayor." But, Cisneros added, "if Vice President Gore were to be elected, he [Caldera] could clearly be a candidate for higher offices in the Cabinet ... but frankly, the world is his oyster."

For now, though, Caldera seems content where he is. On the plane back from Bosnia, he told National Journal that his whirlwind visits to the troops make him hark back, not to his days on the campaign trail, but to his time as an Army officer taking care of his troops. "You're responsible for their well-being," he said. "That's what makes it a great job. You're the only Secretary they've got. And you're working on things that make a difference in their lives."