[Rhodes22-list] Politics and Education

Brad Haslett flybrad at gmail.com
Tue Sep 23 08:07:05 EDT 2008


You may recall, Mr. Kurtz had some difficulty getting the University
of Illinois-Chicago to release the archives of the Chicago Annenberg
Challenge (CAC).  This is his first analysis after waiting a week for
the records to be released.  There's nothing new here for anyone who's
been paying attention.  Now you now why The One doesn't tout his great
executive experience and soon you will understand why he doesn't brag
about his accomplishments in the field of education. The CAC was a
colossal flop unless you think "educational reparation payments" over
teaching math and science is a good idea.

Brad

-----------------------------------

    * SEPTEMBER 23, 2008

Obama and Ayers
Pushed Radicalism
On Schools
By STANLEY KURTZ

    * Article

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Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never
written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to
1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg
Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group
poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers
and radical education activists.
[Obama and Ayers] AP

Bill Ayers.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather
Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts
bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his
actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was
launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.

The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last
April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my
neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a
regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr.
Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are
housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois
at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve
Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education
initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama
was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal
matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the
"Collaborative," which shaped education policy.

The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual
reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley
archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes,
and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The
Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to
advance the CAC agenda.

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer
fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation?
In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement
saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to
the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham
(presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show
that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a
working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr.
Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been
appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which
called for infusing students and their parents with a radical
political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor
of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical
alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's
ghetto.

In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal
and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community
organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and
oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small
'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's,
"Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of
funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with
"external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from
groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead
CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers,
such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or
Acorn).

Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn,
and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early
campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village
Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political
consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional
education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the
effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school
students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.

CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" among
parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf
of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr.
Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit
parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board
member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by
community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political
threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth
out Mr. Weber's objections.

The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of
the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served
on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with
him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board
meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative
before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board
at meetings of the Collaborative.

The Obama campaign notes that Mr. Ayers attended only six board
meetings, and stresses that the Collaborative lost its "operational
role" at CAC after the first year. Yet the Collaborative was demoted
to a strictly advisory role largely because of ethical concerns, since
the projects of Collaborative members were receiving grants. CAC's own
evaluators noted that project accountability was hampered by the
board's reluctance to break away from grant decisions made in 1995. So
even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered
to the grant program he had put in place.

Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with
public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you
understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke
resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that
he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board
sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides
of the same coin.

Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily
funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific
political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war,
and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as
"sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training
programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his
"Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against
America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social
transformation.

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming
"guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association;
it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending
moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That
is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years
ago.

Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.



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