RealClearEd Today 04/07/2014: Trouble for Cuomo?

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Good morning. It's Monday April 7. At RealClearEducation this morning we have top news, commentary, analysis, and reports from around the education world. This weekend, New York Staet United Teachers voted out nine-year incumbent president Richard Iannuzzi. Capital New York has a take on implications for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. President Obama is expected to announce today 24 federal grants worth $107 million for partnerships among education agencies, universities and companies to help students toward career-readiness, and NCAA President Mark Emmert on Sunday blasted the recent ruling that Northwestern's student athletes could unionize -- calling such an organization a "grossly inappropriate solution" to the NCAA's needed change. As we do each weekday we'll update the site throughout the day - our main page as well as sidebars that focus on specific parts of the sector in depth.

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This week will see continued focus on the new Common Core assessments as field tests continue in various states. Meanwhile, some states debate whether they want to continue to use the new standards in their schools at all. The volume on that issue may increase in New York. NYSUT's election over the weekend promises a more strident line on the Common Core among other reform efforts.

On this date in 1947, Henry Ford died at 83. Born just a few weeks after Gettysburg, Ford transformed industry in ways still felt today. Originally a farmer on his family's farm, that life wasn't for him. Ford found his way to the Edison Illuminating Company as an engineer. Soon thereafter he began to develop engines and self-propelled vehicles - Edison encouraged his interest. Reflecting on that legacy Ford said, "Edison, to a greater extent than has ever been recognized, is the father of American industrial methods" in 1928.

Ford wasn't the inventor of the automobile (the Germans are credited with that in 1886), but he made it affordable, and in the process made a fortune. By the mid-1920s, his net worth was estimated at more than $1.2 billion, around $200 billion in today's dollars. And he was an active philanthropist in multiple ways during his life, though it was his son, Edsal, who initially launched the foundation that carries his family name. Today it is one of the nation's largest and works on issues including education.

But Ford's legacy is not without complications; in particular he financed and was involved in the publication of anti-Semitic texts. That's worth remembering as activists, some funded by the Ford Foundation, run around decrying this and that because of who funded it. The point isn't that Ford Foundation money is tainted. Rather it's that philanthropic and corporate legacies are complicated and our shrill education debate rarely allows for that kind of complexity. Things have even reached the absurd point where groups are launched to demand transparency while failing to be transparent about their own funding.

It seems two obvious principles would go a long way here. First, disclosure of funding sources should be expected in the education world - and the education media might do more to point out all the instances where funding is being laundered. Second, with that context in mind, intelligent people must judge things on the facts presented. It's a lot less important whether the Gates Foundation, the American Federation of Teachers, or the Koch Brothers paid for something than whether the underlying analysis has merit. The almost McCarthy-like fervor to attack ideas not on substance but on funding provenance is choking off sensible public dialogue in the education world. It could hardly hurt the field to try a more serious approach to consuming information.

"Most people think that faith means believing something; oftener it means trying something, giving it a chance to prove itself" - Henry Ford

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