Chicago Daily Observer

It is also a bit of a canard for Obama to maintain that Ayers and Dohrn were engaged in terrorism only when he was 8 years old. In fact, their violent tactics began when he was 8 and continued until at least 1980, when he was already 19 and active politically at Occidental College in the anti-apartheid movement. Occidental was a member at the time of Campuses United Against Apartheid, which I was also a member of as an activist in Berkeley. And believe me everyone knew who the Weather Underground and SDS was. In 1981, in fact, an offshoot of Weather Underground took part in a murderous bank robbery where two police officers and one bank security guard were killed. Bernardine Dohrn was suspected of assisting those involved by obtaining false drivers’ licenses for them. She went to jail for six months rather than testify to a grand ... Read More...

Would Chicago area foundations like the MacArthur Foundation and the Pritzker Family Foundation, as well as major corporate and public donors, have provided $110 million in matching funds for such an agenda?

Could anyone have realistically expected such an agenda to have improved student outcomes?

Somehow I doubt it.

Rather, I think there was a more pressing purpose at the heart of the award and the support it engendered among certain elite institutions and individuals in Chicago. Ironically, while Kurtz wants to tar Obama with the red paint brush of the 60s “radical” Ayers, an understanding of the real purpose of the CAC indicates a much closer political alliance between Obama and Ayers.

The President of the University of Illinois, B. Joseph White, and the University Counsel of the University of Illinois, Thomas Bearrows, contacted Kenneth C. Rolling, the former Executive Director of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) and a professional colleague of Barack Obama for many years, prior to the release of CAC records to the public late last month and offered Rolling an opportunity to recommend to the University which records of the CAC held at the University’s Chicago campus (UIC) should be restricted from public access.

In response to Rollings’ detailed request to prevent public access to certain CAC records Bearrows replied “as promised, we will carefully consider the concerns that you identify…”

Perhaps the editors of the Sun Times should feel “a little silly” about inviting Ms. Lenz to pen an editorial defending a former terrorist without identifying her fully.

Ms. Lenz is associated with the Alliance for Excellent Education on whose board sits Obama education advisor Linda Darling-Hammond. And on Ms. Lenz’ board of directors at the Community Renewal Society is Warren Chapman, one of the founders of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and a former staff member of the Joyce Foundation on whose board served Barack Obama.

While Ms. Lenz brushes over the self-proclaimed “radical” nature of school reform in Chicago she also ignores the fact that a central goal of the Annenberg Challenge led by Ayers and Obama was to bolster flagging Local School Councils, a new power center in the schools set up in the wake of a teachers strike to watchdog teachers and principals.

And although in a ... Read More...

After oddly blocking access to a fully processed and publicly listed archive of records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), a $160 million school reform effort led by, among others, Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, from 1995 until the end of 2001, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has now agreed to once again allow public access to the records of the CAC.

But a careful review of the press release issued by UIC announcing the reversal of the shutdown leaves several important questions unanswered:

1) Were any of the materials tampered with or changed in any way after the University was contacted by Dr. Stanley Kurtz, a writer for the National Review, who was the individual whose request to review the CAC documents triggered the UIC shutdown?