The Obama campaign raised some eyebrows the other day by suggesting that Obama didn’t know who Bill Ayers was, and David Axelrod clarified a bit today, Carrie Budoff Brown reports. He said Obama didn’t know about Ayers’ background when he attended a meet-and-greet at his house in advance of his first state Senate race, but he learned afterward.
Read More...Forget he was terrorist for a moment. Bill Ayers’ Annenberg Challenge provided Barack Obama with sole executive experience before heading his own presidential campaign and his most extensive venture into educational reform. Sol Stern tells us something about Ayers as a school reformer:
Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. . . For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to ... Read More...
Children who kill are called “super predators,” “people with no conscience,” “feral pre-social beings”—and “adults.”
William Ayers, author of A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court (Beacon Press, 1997), says “We should call a child a child. A 13-year-old who picks up a gun isn’t suddenly an adult. We have to ask other questions: How did he get the gun? Where did it come from?”
Ayers, who spent a year observing the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago, is one of four panelists who will speak on juvenile justice at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20, in the C-Shop. The panel, which marks the 100th anniversary of the juvenile justice system in the United States, is part of the Community Service Center’s monthly discussion series on issues affecting the city of Chicago. The event is free and open to the public.
Ayers will be joined by ... 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.
Read More...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.
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.
Read More...On the eve of today’s 221st anniversary of the U.S. Constitution’s adoption, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told conservative lawyers in Chicago that the University of Chicago Law School — where he used to teach — has lost its edge and gone liberal.
Back in the days when Scalia — the court’s most vocal supporter of adhering to the text of the constitution — used to teach at the school, which was then more associated with conservative economist Milton Friedman. The courses had more rigor and the school had a more conservative ethos, Scalia told 500 members of the conservative Federalist Society of lawyers at the Union League Club Tuesday.
Read More...Sarah Palin’s views make me fear that the Republican party has finally lost its mind.
As for sex, the hypocrisy of her outing her pregnant daughter in front of millions of people, hard on the heels of her concealing her own pregnancy (her faith in abstinence applying, apparently, only to non-Palins), is nicely balanced by her hypocrisy in gushing with loving support of her teenage daughter after using a line-item veto to cut funding for a transitional home for teenage mothers in Alaska.
Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party’s cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not ... Read More...
Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) wants more money for Chicago Public Schools and points out that New Trier High School District 203 spends more money per pupil than Chicago. Here are a few observations:
1. CPS today spends more money per pupil than most school districts in Illinois. According to the Illinois State Board of Education, in 2007 the average Illinois school district spent about $9,900 per pupil while CPS spent about $11,000. In fact, among unit school districts, those that include both elementary and high schools, CPS was in the top 5 percent in terms of its operating expenditures per pupil.
Read More...Criticism of teacher unions for obstructing parental choice in K-12 education is rarely, if ever, heard at a Democratic National Convention, where large numbers of delegates are activists in teacher unions.
This year was different—well, almost.
At an August 24 pre-convention seminar in Denver, a group of high-ranking Democrats came out strongly for charter schools, which are independently managed public schools that families and teachers are free to choose. And they laid the wood to the teacher unions – notably the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—for trying to sabotage the charter movement.
A liberal magazine, The American Prospect, described one of the Democratic leaders, Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, as having celebrity status at the DNC “as a young African American leader said to have the ear of [Democratic presidential nominee] Barack Obama.” In an August 25 article, The Prospect quoted Booker as telling the ... Read More...
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...
Somewhere in the afterlife, Walter Annenberg must be shaking his head and wondering what in the world is going on in Chicago. First, the Sun-Times and the Tribune gave up precious inches of their dwindling news space to report that the University of Illinois at Chicago was refusing — and then later agreed — to release documents detailing Sen. Barack Obama’s role in a nonprofit education project “started” by William Ayers, a founder in the 1960s of the radical Weatherman group, which embraced violence as an anti-war tactic.
The project in question was the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a pairing of nonprofit organizations and schools funded by the late publishing magnate and mainstream Chicago foundations. Ayers had been one of the authors of Chicago’s proposal to get a slice of Annenberg’s $500 million multi-city school reform grant, and Obama was the project’s first board chairman.
Read More...Do Democratic presidential campaign committees think we are all stupid or do they suffer from some sort of group delusion?
This time around they are trying to take a man whose entire career has linked him with far-left anti-American characters, political agendas focused on redistribution of wealth, and racial spoils and pawn him off on us as a man who transcends race and partisanship.
As the façade’s cracks begin to show through — largely outside the focus of the major media — the Obama camp is behaving badly and thereby telegraphing that the charges involving Obama’s role in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) are not only true, but both unanswerable and exceedingly damaging to the campaign’s make-believe narrative about their candidate.
Read More...Click the above link to download the 10 page document, “Illinois 21st Century School Reform Initiative”.
We believe in the philosphy of Ron Edmonds who said “We can, whenever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interst to us. we already know more than we need to do that. Whether or not we do it must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven’t so far.”
What drives this effort is the well-documented fact that too many students are failing to learn, failing to compete academically, and failing to complete their education in Illinois. That failure is compounded by the reality that youth of today will be confronted with a world-information economy that demands better than we’ve produced in the past-and therefore makes the prospects for those who fall short of success even gloomier than we now face.
To not fix these problems ... Read More...
It doesn’t help the Obama campaign that William Ayers is back in the news. Ayers, you’ll recall, was the Weather Underground terrorist in the late 1960s and ‘70s whose radical group set bombs at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol. During the April 16 Democratic debate, Barack Obama explained his past association with Ayers by saying he was just a guy “in my neighborhood,” meaning the University of Chicago enclave known as Hyde Park. But is that end of it? This is, after all, Chicago we’re talking about; where political patronage and nepotism are the only ways one moves up the power ladder.
Decades after his radical youth, Ayers was one of the original grantees of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform organization in the 1990s, and was co-chairman of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one the two operational arms of the CAC. Obama, then not yet a state ... Read More...
A Democratic state senator and a former Republican candidate for governor on Monday proposed a pilot program aimed at proving that better funding and more resources would translate into better students at low-performing schools.
Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) told the Chicago Tribune editorial board that he would drop plans to have Chicago students boycott the first day of schools Sept. 2 if Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Senate President Emil Jones and House Speaker Michael Madigan would publicly back the proposals.
Meeks is threatening to bus Chicago students to the New Trier School District Sept. 2 and then sit in the lobbies of downtown businesses in following days to dramatize state funding inequities between wealthy and poor districts.
Meeks and Ron Gidwitz, a former Republican governor candidate and former head of the State Board of Education, said their plan would set up four clusters of schools—two in Chicago, one in the suburbs ... Read More...
Barack Obama and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers have worked closely together on education reform since 1995, and possibly since 1987. Obama has obfuscated and minimized this association in his public statements and on his website. Why the cover-up? We don’t know, since we aren’t sure what is being concealed.
It’s becoming known as the Annenberg Challenge cover-up and it’s become big news since the McCain campaign highlighted it in a press release late Wednesday.
In the past few days, Stanley Kurtz of the National Review has been trying to get access to the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an education reform group co-founded by Bill Ayers in 1995 and chaired by Barack Obama from 1995 to 1999. After originally giving Mr. Kurtz permission, the library then told him that he could not proceed because they did not have proper authorization from the donor of the archives. They would ... 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?
Read More...Wowie! The UIC library is unsealing the records in its special collections!
The records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an organization that Obama chaired and that Ayers co-founded, will be made available to the public Tuesday, UIC said in a statement.
The U. says it “now has legal authority to allow public access to the material,” apparently without specifying this, per AP. It “had fulfilled the terms of the gift” in 2002 of the records, says Sun-Times. Again sans specification.
Read More...In protest of Chicago’s failing school system, Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) is staging a field trip of sorts. He’s urging kids from his legislative district to skip the first day of school, board buses, travel to Winnetka, and attempt to enroll in New Trier High School.
One can understand why Meeks would want better educational options for Chicago kids. But on his way to Winnetka, the senator might want to take a look out the window where there are already many Chicago public schools—charter schools—that are performing on par with top-notch suburban and downstate schools. One such school, Chicago International Charter School, graduates its students 86 percent of the time—comparing quite favorably with public schools Downstate and suburban Chicago, which have an average graduation rate of 84 percent. Overall, charter public schools in Chicago graduate 77 percent of their students, compared with a citywide average of 51 percent.
Why aren’t ... Read More...
Barack Obama’s record as leader of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) has come under scrutiny by, among others Steve Diamond, Tom Maguire, Stanley Kurtz and our own Tom Lifson . The CAC was a group formed in 1995 by former Weather Underground terrorist and current educational radical theorist Bill Ayers and Barack Obama, then an attorney at a politically connected law firm-Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland.
Barack Obama was the founding chairman of the board and led the organization for 4 years. During his tenure, the CAC received $50 million dollars from the Annenberg Foundation and tens of millions of matching funds from local private and public dollars. This money was supposed to be spent improving the schools of Chicago. However, studies from the CAC itself, and confirmed by an analysis from the well-regarded Thomas B. Fordham Institute, show that the effort directed by Barack Obama led ... Read More...
First the librarians told Kurtz yes, come look. But by the time Kurtz landed in Chicago, the librarians changed their minds. The donor of the documents hadn’t cleared his research. Perhaps they’ll let him look at the documents on Nov. 5.
The relationship between the ambi