So the other day, I wrote about my frustration that the federal government will not keep funding the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science Education. And Tom Hoffman took that frustration one step further.

Now, ENC officials are free to do whatever they want with their organization, I don’t care. What I do care about is 1) the software written with my tax dollars and 2) the data collected using my tax dollars. I don’t know what kind of idiotic arrangement the DOE made with the ENC on behalf of me and the rest of the taxpaying citizens of the US, but in my book, paying someone to write software and collect data and giving them ownership of the software and data is either stupid or corrupt.

I’d argue for stupid, not corrupt on this one. The government clearly didn’t think about it that well. From the lens of the government, this is a program that they don’t want to fund anymore, so they are going to stop. What happens to the program afterwards isn’t their concern.

There’s an interesting question here, what happens to science programs, research programs, etc… when the government stops funding them? While I agree with Tom, that the information that the government funded should be made available, isn’t it also true that much of the shift from university research to for-profit research companies in the bio-tech and other industries has come from similar data and software migration? Heck, I wonder if the Mozilla people back in 1992 had any government funding before they went and started Netscape.

This one is an easier test-case because a) no one is going to get rich off of the ENC and b) the ENC really does provide a crucial service to teachers that doesn’t need a subscription service. Tom is, of course, right. The ENC data could be made public. It could go up on a Wiki or any other number of tools. We would lose the continuation of the wonderful work the Ohio State folks have done with state standards, but we’d still have an excellent resource.

But hey, I’m still cheesed off that the government won’t fund the project.