RealClearEd Today 06/16/2014: College Costs -- Covered by Starbucks?
Good morning, it’s Monday June 16. This morning at RealClearEducation we have news, commentary, analysis, and reports from the top of the education world. Starbucks is announcing today a new initiative that could cover full college tuition costs for its employees through a unique partnership with Arizona State University. The program won't require workers to stay in the company after graduation. And on Friday, National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel released a fiery video blasting education reformers, saying that he is "angry at corporate interests that... see public schools as a billion dollar enterprise and our children as commodities to be profited from..."
Below are just a couple of highlights of all the material you will find on the main part of our site this morning. As always there is additional content organized by key issue areas on our sidebars. And we update all through the day.
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Katherine Graham was born on this date in 1917. The pioneering newspaper owner was no stranger to Washington. She was educated at the Madeira School on Virginia’s Potomac bank and spent a lot of her youth in and around the city. When her father left The Washington Post to take the presidency of the World Bank he named her husband Philip Graham publisher. After Philip Graham’s death in 1963 Katherine Graham began functioning in that role and it was made official in 1969.
This put Graham at the center of pivotal episodes including the decision to publish The Pentagon Papers and The Washington Post’s investigation of the Watergate break-in, which ultimately brought down the Nixon presidency (on Saturday the Arlington County Board in Virginia approved a plan that will result in the destruction of the parking garage where Post reporter Bob Woodward would meet with “Deep Throat,” FBI agent Mark Felt). Her position also made her a role model – she was the first woman to lead a Fortune 500 company.
As The Los Angeles Times noted after her death in 2001, “Until she took up the reins at the Post, Graham had embodied everything the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s was rebelling against. By the time she died, she had become almost everything that movement hoped to achieve.”
Today the Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, of Amazon.com fame. It’s a sign of the times in a challenging media business. When the Graham family sold the paper to Bezos it elicited mixed views from the media community – and especially those that had cut their professional teeth at the paper. But sometimes leadership is about stepping aside when someone else might be able take things in a new and promising direction. The publisher at the time of the sale, Don Graham, said he didn’t just want to see the paper survive, which it would have under his family’s watch, he wanted to see it thrive.
A sentiment to consider as the education sector wrestles with new challenges and generational change.
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