Well, it was partly Mr Ayers’, too, so let’s “spread the wealth” of praise a bit, shall we? From the NY Post:
Chicago’s former schools chief has flunked the education foundation headed by Barack Obama and founded by 1960s terrorist Bill Ayers – saying it failed to monitor projects and funded school “reform” groups that campaigned against boosting academic standards.
“There was a total lack of accountability. If you went back and asked, you’d be hard-pressed to find out how the money was spent,” said Paul Vallas, the city’s school superintendent when Obama chaired the Chicago Annenberg Foundation from 1995 to 1999.
Annenberg spent $49.5 million, mostly on grants to 211 public schools that partnered with community-based groups. But despite collecting millions, those schools performed no better than other public schools, a study found.
Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois and an ex-Weather Underground bomber, wrote the grant that won the Windy City funding from the national Annenberg Challenge. He was a key adviser to the Chicago Annenberg board.
While much debate has centered on Obama’s relationship with Ayers, there’s been virtually no discussion about how the Annenberg schools performed.
“Very little of the money found its way directly into the classroom,” Vallas said.
Most frustrating, Vallas said, was that Annenberg under Obama and Ayers funded groups that fought his mission, under Mayor Richard Daley, to impose uniform standards and stricter accountability in low-performing schools.
Well, it was their money, Mr Vallas. Are you sure you groveled enough? Couched your desire for uniform standards and stricter accountability in the language of person-is-the-political activism and coded radicalist jargon?
For instance, why not turn “stricter accountability” into “a desire to rein in Establishment excesses”? Why not reframe “uniform standards” as “the democratization and egalitarianism of a system too often built on classist and racist iniquities”?
No, sorry, Mr Vallas. It’s all well and good to complain now. But politics is a contact sport. And if you can’t learn to finesse a euphemism, whose fault is that?
You failed your educational philosophy, Mr Vallas — not Mr Ayers or Mr Obama. Because in a world where there are no objective standards — with logic and Enlightenment models of epistemology, based around the fallacy of proof and the tyranny of fact, just one increasingly discredited educational paradigm among a host of competing paradigms, some of which view education as mere preparation for political activism with the end already decided — relying on the “fairness” or “objectivity” of one’s “political opponents” (the personal is, after all, the political, and personal beliefs that bespeak an engagement with Enlightenment philosophy marks one as a political enemy to the progressive cause) is a strategic blunder, one worthy of banishment from polite society.
HOW DARE YOU BLAME AYERS AND OBAMA FOR YOUR OWN FAILURES, MR VALLAS! Remember: MIGHT MAKES RIGHT, your bourgeois toady.
Obama defended the foundation’s performance, saying it dispensed its funds to help struggling programs and train teachers.
I’m sure it did.
Whether or not those “struggling programs” were worthy of educational dollars, or in what specific form of pedagogy those teachers are being trained — well, those are the kind of nitpicky questions that get in the way of the onward march of progress.
(h/t Bob Reed)
Viva la revolucion!
Sounds like the MSM has to vet this Vallas character pronto, a la Joe the faux Plumber.
At a salary of $50,000 per year, that foundation could have purchased 3000 new teachers for the City.
are you kidding? you can’t put a price tag on what teachers do!
Baracky has an a lot condescending view of what education involves I think. This is because his parents never wanted him so he turned to his teachers and his drugs for affirmation. It worked for him, so wants the same thing for your kids just more purposey. He’s got after school chores for them all lined up already. Socialist dickhead.
So, outside of getting elected, Obama’s pretty much sucked at everything he’s done after graduating Harvard.
I never understood why McCain never brought this up when talking about Obama and Ayres at the debate. Screw the ACORN stuff, this is far more damaging. When Obama made his point about “we need to increase education spending blahblahblah” McCain could’ve just said “well, Senator, when you and your terrorist friend were running the Annenburg Challenge, the one you weren’t just “on the board” of but CHAIRMAN OF THE FUCKING BOARD, you pissed away $50 million in hopes of fixing the education system in Chicago and you failed miserably. We are no supposed to believe that if you get the keys to the whole country you’ll do better? Why?”
Makes me sick I tellsya.
So, Obama’s SOLE point of executive experience, and it’s a MISERABLE FALILURE?
Wow.
(as is my typing ability, it seems)
education is not about teaching kids to think, but to produce ‘good citizens’, which is what they’ll tell you to your face.
They met their goals – they dispensed a lot of money to friends and groups in return for support for their political and educational objectives.
How else do you keep your political friends as friends? You can’t buy those kind of friends, you have to rent them. How else do you keep your agitators agitating if they don’t have spending cash? Not every agitator can have mumsy and daddy bankrolling them or a trust fund – they would otherwise have to – gasp – find jobs, and that just eats into the agitation-time.
So they were successful at what they actually set out to do.
I’d have been impressed if that $100-plus-mil had managed to teach a couple of hundred kids how to solve a quadratic equation, balance a chemical reaction, correctly pinpoint the dates and locations of major wars or understand King Lear. But, alas, our education establishment seems uninterested in such pedestrian minutae these days.
So they were successful at what they actually set out to do.
I think there is great wisdom in this statement.
This is the real reason for the relevance O!s association with Ayers. Each time his name is brought up it should be in the context of this failed attempt to further mainstream Ayers desire to use the school system as an agent of la revolution instead of learning institutions.
In addition to highlighting O!s poor managment skills, bad judgment, and tolerance for dumbing down the system in the name of, you know, fairness, it also points a great big finger at his presumed acceptance of Ayers astounding notion that instilling a value system in our youth, i.e. social justice, should take precedence over actual education!
As Stanley Kurtz has pointed out, CAC turned down groups that were focused on improving reading and math scores in favor of those charter schools and neighboorhood associations that concentrated on Afrocentrism and economic and social justice…
Not to mention that they played politics with an issue that should have engendered equal concern from all facets of the Chicago populace; namely to impose uniform standards and stricter accountability in low-performing schools.
Of course, to many members of the “The South Shore African Village Collaborative”, I’m certain that holding their kids to some kind of mainstream standards was simply biased, and disregarded their, you know, culture…
Silly me, I didn’t know that there were any African villages on the south shore of Chicago…
I denounce myself as a….RAAAAAAAAACIST
Vallas will be crucified
Upside down.
I’d wonder what the graduates of the South Shore African Village Collaborative project are doing today… and maybe why Obama’s kids didn’t go there if it was all that great if I didn’t want the depths of my life plumbed.
Techie and Bob Reed:
Precisely. Ever since this stuff started coming out, I’ve been banging my head on my computer screen over the clumsey way the whole Ayers/Annenburg/executive experience thing has been mishandled by the McCain campaign. Same goes for the social-engineered mortgage crisis and its impact on the economy. Like facing a pitcher with the wrong end of the bat in their hands.
I couldn’t agree more!
Man, the way you guys are trashing Ayers, you’d never know he was a well respected professor of Education. WELL RESPECTED. And what are you guys? Keyboard
warriorsteachers.Yes, I’m calling out the Chicken
hawkeducator meme.my html-foo is weak right now. Sorry.
Lesson? Don’t listen to Rammstein’s “Fruer Frei” while commenting.
#14 Steve G.:
I preemptively denounce myself.
To answer your questions, I suggest you search the court records, and the Illinois Prison System.
I don’t know for sure, but my guess is to look there.
Mr. Ayers and his ilk are truly antiques – they just don’t know it yet.
#17 Carin:
Well, I was a substitute teacher for four and a half years, and my father was a teacher for about 36 years – and well respected by his colleagues and his students. Mr. Ayers has little to do with actual education, and more to do with indoctrination. I think it would be amusing to give him a junior high/middle school class assignment for a school year and see how he did.
A teacher comes out of college with a degree and a license, and then the real world hits them and they see the students as they actually are, not how the professors want them to be. Attack authority? Sir, you are authority – must be nice to call that when you aren’t in a class with 30 seventh graders.
And then dealing with parents and administrators – it would have to be recorded. Really.
Amusing? Not to the parents of these hypothetical kids, I should think. Not in the least.
In Re: The Tyranny of Fact.
Much like the Tyranny of Reality – it can be railed against so long as there is plenty of insulation between you and it. Otherwise it hurts when you hit either. Rail all you want, rail you like King Lear against the storm, if you got money you’re insulated. If not – then rail for all the good that does.
You know, when I think of this I keep thinking of inter-war British mysteries, or a P.G. Wodehouse novel, where there is the character that is born well but does not have the means of actualy living up to that level. Deep in debt, living in the right neighborhood (but barely), having a club subscription, trying to send his/her child to the correct prep school and then university. Always struggling, but never taking the common-sense step of cutting some things back to secure other things.
Of course, if you got daddy’s money (or marry an heiress) it doesn’t matter what you do or say.
#22 Sdferr:
Amusing for us when he has to deal with reality as it is. And if you have ever dealt with seventh graders in a classroom, then you would know what I mean.
I admit, my last teaching experience was 15 years ago, but I doubt seventh graders are any less squirrly than they were then, or when I was a seventh grader (and after seeing my nephews and now my neice, I am certain that the basic human adolescent unit has not changed much).
I think you are giving Professor Ayers more credit than Mr. Ayers would receive in all but the wealthiest suburbs. He would be treated as an old fossil, no matter how ‘hip’ he was way back when.*
*Ayers was hip forty years ago – and forty years from his hip days all the hep cats were wearing spats and doing the Charleston. To these kids he would be an antique, no matter how hard he tries to fake it.
oh, so you’re saying he would be a boring droning pedant who none of the kids would find interesting? Gotcha there, MikeyNTH. Surely I should have seen that in your first go at it, shouldn’t I?
But did I mention the parents pov?
COme on…we all know what Bill and him spent the money on
1. Semtex/C4
2. Blow
3. Hookers
4. More Blow
I applaud efforts to improve education in the South Shore.
There is a 2005 article in Catalyst that notes that very few wealthy or middle class families in the South Shore area send their children to the schools there.
It seems that pouring money into the black esteem movement in education didn’t realize any dividends, but you can hardly fault people for trying.
That said, by the accolades Obama gets from everyone in the media you’d guess that he turned that mess around and has some real success stories to trumpet….. ummmm?
OK.
Well then, maybe Ayers’ “searing account” book on the subject made a huge difference in how the kids are doing then….. ummmm?
I mean after all, Obama’s kids go to those schools, which are in their neighborhood now….. right? Oh. Private schools… nevermind.
Let’s be honest here.
Obama has been very good at campaigning for various offices.
Obama wrote a nice book about himself.
Obama can talk about himself (in the context of a campaign) for hours and it sounds damn good, he sounded great reading his own book about himself…
Somehow this is seen as qualifying him to be President, which means the GOP really must suck
#25 Sdferr:
When was the last time you dealt with seventh graders? No matter what mom and dad say?
The kid may keep out of trouble, may do enough to make the parents happy, but it is still a seventh grader…
And I am not being snarky – those are two honest questions.
Jesus.
*shakes head in amazement*
Look – maybe I am not getting this across.
Revolutionary agitation and action works until the revolution occurs. What happened to Robespierre? What revolution wants to have revolutionaries around after the revolution is winding up?
They will see the Red Widow, then the ditch. If it wasn’t so terrible, I would laugh. NO ONE learns from history because they are all special and the circumstances are always – always – different.
Shyeah, right.
Facts are a terrible thing. So is reality. Nice to have the insulation of money to cushion those blows.
MikeyNTH,
I think Sdferr understands your argument abiut Ayers being a yawner in the classroom, but the point he was trying to make about the kids parents were that they might object, a priori, to Ayers being their teacher in the first place; they might not like an unrepentant terrorist anywhere near their kids…
At least, I think that’s what he was getting at…
Best Wishes
When I was a PFC in 1985, Paul Vallas was my first Company Commander in the CSC 2/130th INF. He was an interesting man – we knew he was an important lawyer up in the Chicago area, but not HOW important he was. He used to pay $200 out of his own pocket so we could stay overnight at a camp in the area and practice point, area and route recon (I was in a Scout Platoon).
I watched his career with interest – I last saw him when he was a Major and I was a new Captain, he remembered me right away – which was pretty uncanny, as I was one of 125 in his unit, those several years earlier.
He was the first Democrat I voted for in the Governor’s primary. Considering the louts from both parties that we have had since, it is a shame he didn’t make it to the Governor’s Office.
With use of the S-word back in vogue, being the smug curmudgen I am I immediately question why we hadn’t used it for so long, what with government schools, paychecks, involuntary social insurance policies, and bad medicine.
But perhaps the only possible thing that would compete on the sheer lunacy scale of unconstitutionality with the holy terror that is the now totally artificial dependency economy — another stimulus giveaway, fellow Keynesians? — is the spectre of millions of idiots righteously abraiding state teachers for letting down their own children. And everything that follows in appointing such intellectual masters.
Good thing our esteemed media isn’t totally in the bag for a big-s Socialist for Prez.
Pull back the hammer, republic, and place the barrel gently against thy temple.
cant believe we spent a trillion dollars on pork, now thats a soft tyranny