Like radicalism, only with a pleasing candy coating! Me, I’d call them “Alinsky Wafers,” but then, I’m all about giving credit where it’s due. And let’s face it, this Messiah business is starting to look like a real pressure filled job. From Stanley Kurtz:
From 1995 to 1999, [Barack Obama] 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 was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. […] 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. […]
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 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.
[…]
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.
[…]
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.
All a very fancy way of saying that Ayers, with the help of his front man, Obama, was using grant money to turn schools into propaganda factories for Howard Zinn’s version of American History — without any concern whatever to improvement in test scores or the like, which pedestrian concerns Mr Ayers likely looked at as bourgeois adherence to a failed system that wasn’t addressing the real issues: that of changing the American political system by way of churning out activist soldiers to agitate for change based on racial and class grievances that are, thanks to the failures of the education system Mr Ayers presumed to steer, self-fulfilling.
Concludes Kurtz:
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.
Even were we (just for the sake of argument) to bracket the radical political agenda at the heart of the programs approved for grant money, we are left with a few very sterile and important facts: in what Kurtz notes is Obama’s “most important executive experience” (his other being having a hand in his campaign), $150 million dollars in funds were doled out to leftist social activism groups, “external parties” who then poured that money into “educational” programs born of leftist dogma and intended to produce activists inculcated in a particular ideology — one that preaches the blessings of “social justice” (identity politics, judicial activism) and economic egalitarianism (socialism).
As an “educational program” — if one accepts the common idea of what one expects from education — the CAC was a miserable failure: there was no demonstrable improvement in educational results.
Still, from another perspective, perhaps the CAC was a remarkable success — training, as it must have, the next generation of “community organizers,” race pimps, class warriors, and apologists for all manner of attacks on the US from within and from abroad.
Let’s hope so. Because it would be a real shame to have to admit that $150 million can’t even buy you a solid and well-organized campaign of leftist political propaganda these days.
I blame the education system.
But, creationists!
It is racist to even discuss this. Just sayin’ …
Ayers is franchising this I think:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20823129/
But Obama was like… eight years old ‘n’ shit…
You, Kurtz and Chris Rock should all move to the back of the bus. How dare you question His Wisdom?
dre,
Ayers and Chavez have Paulo Freire to thank. The original Marxist educator. I’ve read that Ayers studied “South American” methods and models his education classes on those methods. Freire was the father of those methods.
Come on, you guys. You know none of this makes Obama dangerous. I mean, it’s not like he’s raised a killbot to go murder brown people for Jeebus!
Why Che-Che can’t read.
Still, from another perspective, perhaps the CAC was a remarkable success  training, as it must have, the next generation of “community organizers,†race pimps, class warriors, and apologists for all manner of attacks on the US from within and from abroad.
And there, friends, is the core of it. Ayers could give a fuck if Johnnie knows how to read, he just wants Johnnie to be able to deconstruct texts properly so Johnnie knows it’s all about power and exploitation and burnin’ the fucker down is the answer.
Well, I can’t wait for cynn to show up and explain how this information favorably redounds to Mr. Obama.
He’s a cookie cutter caricature of a campus commie who hit it big, then reached beyond the cookie jar. His existence prior to the 2004 convention was race pimpery defined. The only notch he didn’t punch on his way up the food chain was teaching a women’s studies class. Good thing for him “black” beats “female” eight days a week in all 57 states.
You couldn’t fit our legacy media Obamapologist/flacks into the biggest tanks in any two Sea Worlds.
Just think of it as Obama’s own War on Science.
If the students took to the radical activism as they take to regular education, then it was a monumental failure.
nothing-burger. with cheese. enjoy!
No way Mikey, this is much easier. The teacher supplies both the problem and the solutions. I just had a summer writing course at a local university who’s mission is to improve social justice (www.roosevelt.edu) and wow. My prof, while good at the critiques and helping me understand the deficiencies in my writing, was a total Marxist (which was OK, since I knew that going in and could insulate myself appropriately). A veritable intellectual cousin to Ayers. (And yes, an essay by Freire was the first thing we read. Sort of set the tone for the rest of the semester.)
“Still, from another perspective, perhaps the CAC was a remarkable success  training, as it must have, the next generation of “community organizers,†race pimps, class warriors, and apologists for all manner of attacks on the US from within and from abroad.”
It’s like a cancer.
Shorter david: NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG! OH, LOOK! IT’S A BIG SHINY HUNK OF RACISM!!!!
I simply don’t remember an election in which one side was so very interested in distracting me from sizable chunks of their candidate’s professional history. Sarah Palin? Per diems! Rape kits! Library Books!
And to think that a couple of months ago I truly didn’t care who won this election.
Messrs Ayers and Obama would be very at home, educationally speaking, over here in British Columbia, I’m sorry to say.
It is expected that students will:
demonstrate understanding of
concepts and terminology of
social justice, including
− anthropocentrism
− equity and equality
− ethics
− diversity
− dignity and worth
− hegemony
− human rights
− oppression
− peace
Crawford, you should know better than to dangle that kind of bait before our addled troll. I denounce you!
Sarah Palin is demonized as a religious radical, and it is further implicated that this is manifested in her governance. The facts clearly show that Ms. Palin is able to separate her personal religious beliefs from the duties of political life.
O! is celebrated as a community organizer. The facts clearly show that the personal is the political and in this case led to perverting the public school system into factories of indoctrination.
Teach a child to think right and he’ll vote
right<br left forever.I’ll bet Michelle was proud of that.
CHANGE! you can count on!
O?
I confess that I cared — just, until August 29, not enough to take part in deciding it.
Oh such a nice little charter school:
Paulo Freire School
After all, it’s not what you know about science, it’s how you coat it in layers of shit to gull the proles.
What’s the problem, mgl? The course was “ministry approved” after all. Perhaps you are in need of some re-education. Please report to your local gulag and don’t bother bringing sunscreen.
Oceania was *always* at war with Eurasia…
It can’t.
But if you’re nominally in charge of that money, it can buy you $150 million worth of people who think they owe you — which would be a good leg-up for some no-name nobody from out of town whose patron wants him to be his puppet Mayor someday.
That’s what Ayers would say. So maybe — just maybe — it’s not so.
Denounce all you want. I still want to know why O! hates math and science education.
“just a guy who lives in my neighborhood”
Can you imagine how B.O. and Ayers will rib each other about that if B.O. wins? Dude, they’re building memories here.
“Zaphod, he’s just this guy, you know?”
Rob, ’cause you got to get the dogma in first. Then you can teach ‘science’ that is not supported by something like actual evidence, ’cause you don’t need no stinkin’ evidence for stuff that meets the dogma. Capische?
Oh look, psycho the All-American nigger-poker is here to do God’s stirrin’ work!
You don’t make sense. Ayers teaches English. A heroic embrace!
Ayers wants little sycophants like nishfong who can’t tell the difference between opinions that are evolving and those that are revolving.
Include thor in 31.
I think Obama should talk about Ayres and use the word “collegial.” You know something like, “We had a collegial relationship.” They should smile and Ayres should smoke a pipe. Bernadette could bake snickerdoodles and chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies and hand them out wearing her “Real Women Bake Cookies and Nitro” apron she got from William.
Nothing to see or hear, move along. And do it with “collegiality.”
Ayers teaches English.
He teaches education, bright boy.
I hope Jeff caught his flight. And I hope he takes pictures.
It occurred to me that the leaders of the sixties boomer left were college students from middle class and upper class households, not from the inner city. The challenge provided plenty of funding for these groups, but I don’t know whether it would be effective in making any new leaders or even reliable foot soldiers. To be effective it would require, at the base, that the students pay attention to the instructors. If regular education has been a failure in this environment, what guarantee that this worked? As an experiment using someone else’s money it was worthwhile for Ayers. As a project to produce results – I would like to know that (and I guess we will have to wait a few more years to find out). The papers would be interesting to see – if the reported results can be trusted to be accurate and honest.
I would note that the Soviets didn’t have too much success producing the New Soviet Man, and they had the entire apparatus of the state at their hands and seventy years.
Just some thoughts.
Ayers is in the college of education, university of illinois at chicago.
See here: http://education.uic.edu/forfaculty/
#14 Clint:
You are a motivated student. That is a different thing to work with than at the primary and secondary level. I am not saying it wasn’t worth Ayers’ time to do this, just that the environment may not have been conducive to success for him, like it isn’t conducive to any educator.
Anyone else ever notice that the folks who are eager to call all of us racists are the ones that resort to the “n-word” quickest?
These guys who study education: do they ever learn anything useful to the rest of us?
#21 dre:
It is lovely; and it cuts both ways.
Ayers isn’t an educator; he is an instructor, a trainer. There is a big difference between the two.
#26 Rob Crawford:
The Soviet Navy would like to know why dialectical materialism hated its submarines.
2+2=5. The Party said so. Now get into that can and take it on patrol.
(Reality is a harsh taskmaster).
Don’t you have some small bunnies to impale or something, thor?
Mikey, I would think that as long as the student, regardless of motivation level, absorbs uncritically (especially uncritically!) the work put forth, the result would be as desired –
A child who’s worldview is formed during young years as that of a malicious oppressor and then reinforced throughout the years. When that child is ready to go out into the world, he is sensitive to oppression/racism and willing to call out any and all perceived slights. I would think the motivated student who challenges it is the danger to the system.
Thor needs to polish his pom poms. They’re made from recycled beer, doncha know!
I still want to know why O! hates math and science education.
So today I’m in this waiting room and I pick up a recent Scientific American, and there’s one of those itty-bitty articles in front that talks about some physicist who claimed that when he induced bubbles in water using a sonic wave, that when the bubbles collapsed quickly, they caused a flash of light.
It’s nuclear fusion, he claims.
But then the article goes on to say that the dude has been fined and punished for scientific malpractice, because no one else could reproduce his results, and he refused to share his data and methodologies with his peers.
So it would be kinda cool if they’d apply that standard to, oh, I don’t know. Other alleged scientists who also won’t share their data and methodology.
BECAUSE OF THE NARRATIVE.
#44 Clint:
I think you do have something there.
I was just falling into strategy analysis mode. Again.
Wait, isn’t psycho a black man? Not that it matters. I simply wonder for thor’s benefit.
Sick and tired of Baracky. He’s just not all that, not anymore. More and more he just reminds me of Gordon from Sesame Street. Just sort of that guy on tv that’s not Maria, but I know all my letters and I can count really high and I’m ready to watch big boy tv now.
Baracky & Joey are the new Abbot & Costello
That is my understanding gleaned from his writings.
I don’t think psycho is black I think he’s of the hood though. Scary smart too. Like those hood people in the movies what play chess and become world champion and then go back and live in a tenement where no one knows who they are and get really particular about who they talk to but then they are befriended by a good kid but what is on the wrong path and they learn to love again. It’s a story of hope, mostly.
[…] Read this: O!bama Doodles! […]
“All a very fancy way of saying that Ayers, with the help of his front man, Obama, was using grant money to turn schools into propaganda factories for Howard Zinn’s version of American History  without any concern whatever to improvement in test scores or the like,”
Can we say that these are the American Left’s version of the Wahhabi madrassas? They seem to have a similar focus, different idea to inculcate, but the ends aimed for seem quite similar.
Another difference is when Ayers’ type sets off a bomb, they’re not wearing it.
“Another difference is when Ayers’ type sets off a bomb, they’re not wearing it.”
The Saudi Princes don’t “strap-on” either, they just have more money and time so they have gotten a better result. All the Left have so far are those anti-globalization types and giant puppets, so far. Imagine the Obama Dept. of Education run by Ayers. Sweet dreams.
Thor:
Boring, tired, and offensive–the troll trifecta.
Cowboy: You forgot “totally wrong” giving him four-of-a-kind.
[…] blogging about this: Protein Wisdom’s O!bama Doodles! and HotAir’s The Obama-Ayers connection: Chicago Annenberg […]
Uh, but Palin is short, and has ugly hair.
Typical response when I talked to some Dem friends about this story today-
Them: “Yeah, but hey- Joe Biden! He’s got experience!”
Me: “Seriously?”
Them:”…sigh….yeah, I know…he’s better than the adulterer though, right?”
Me: “He had a law degree too!”
I love Chicago, I hate her schools – I have made sure I live well away from them. Seeing things like this post make me ever so glad of that.
My children are actually learning to read, write, etc.
I’d like to propose that all future references to Ayers include the helpful illustration.