Unless, unlike in my neighborhood, people in Barack Obama's neighborhood are always wandering around looking for neighbors to help them spend $100 million.
Stanley Kurtz has spent days poring through the files and offered his initial thoughts today in the Wall Street Journal, and expanded on them at The National Review.
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 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... 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.
This, combined with Obama's communist mentor, his other terrorist friends, and his radical church affiliation of 20 years, ought to eliminate Obama from any consideration for the presidency all by itself. But oddly enough, nobody in the mainstream media is reporting it. Oh, and don't forget ACORN, the standard bearer for voter fraud in America.
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.
Shocking - the Obama/Ayers partnership didn't improve education, at least not in the areas most parents find important. But it did wonders in teaching radicalism.
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.
Kurtz expands on this in the NRO piece.
As CAC board chair, Obama was essentially authorizing the funding of Ayers’s own educational projects, and the projects of Ayers’s radical allies. And especially in CAC’s first year, Ayers was largely in charge of the process. One of CAC’s own evaluations notes that during 1995, CAC was a “Founder-Led Foundation.” That is, Ayers was not merely an ex officio board member that year, but as the key founder and guiding spirit of CAC, he was effectively running the show.
This is consistent with what I found in the documents, which, for example, show Ayers not only speaking for the Collaborative before the board, but speaking in place of absent board members when they couldn’t be present to make a report. In general, in 1995, Ayers seems to be deeply involved in the work of every important body and committee at CAC. Of the three CAC founders, Ayers, Anne Hallett, an urban school advocate, and Warren Chapman, a state school reformer, only two, Ayers and Hallett, were Collaborative co-chairs and ex officio members of the board. And in a letter, Hallett describes herself as “joined at the hip” with Ayers. Clearly Ayers was the senior partner of the pair, given his prominence as an author, and as a national spokesman for educators consciously committed to politicizing their classrooms. Ayers is not only an activist, but a sort of father-figure to radical educators, authoring not only books of his own, but editing collections of like-minded authors, and putting together coalitions of educators, as he did at CAC.
But wait there's more. Now we get to the kickback stage of the foundation.
This brings us to the ethical concerns that led to a restructuring of the relationship between the CAC board and the Collaborative after 1995. The Obama camp points to this shift as if it quiets questions about the Obama-Ayers relationship. In fact, the post-1995 restructuring of CAC more urgently raises such questions. Precisely because Collaborative members like Ayers were themselves up for CAC grants, stronger barriers had to be created between the board and the Collaborative. So after 1995, Ayers appears to have lost his ex officio status on the board, and the Collaborative lost its theretofore prominent role in advising the board on grant applications...
The Obama camp denies CAC’s radicalism by pointing to the fact that this foundation was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend, Walter Annenberg. Moderates and Republicans often support Annenberg activities, it’s true. Yet the story of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and conservative donors finding their funds “captured” by far more liberal, often radical, beneficiaries. CAC’s story is a classic of the genre. Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of Saul Alinsky. Walter Annenberg’s personal politics don’t change that one iota.
The fact that Ayers and other tenured radicals hold power at our universities is in no way negated by the presence of Republican appointees on university boards of trustees. Ayers’s radicalism is undeniable. He remains unapologetic for his bombings of the 1960s. Even now, he refuses to rule out violence as a resort. His education writings are deeply politicized and filled with exhortations to “resist” America’s racist and oppressive social system. In 2006 — along with his wife and fellow former-terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones — Ayers released, Sing A Battle Song, a collection of intensely radical writings from the Weather Underground. Ayers makes it clear in that book that, while he is embarrassed by some of the Weather Underground’s rhetoric, he still adheres to the same ideas. Beyond its strictly historical interest, Ayers and his co-editors make a point of hoping that their old writings would be “of use to new generations of militant activists and organizers.” By directing CAC funds to groups like ACORN and the Developing Communities Project of the Gamaliel Foundation, Ayers was supporting just such militant activists and organizers.
The Obama campaign notes that during the CAC years, achievement test scores improved markedly in the Chicago public schools. That’s true, but deeply misleading. The real source of improvement was the leadership of accountability-oriented Chicago Public School (CPS) CEO, Paul Vallas, who began to reform CPS in 1995, the year of CAC’s founding. Vallas established clear standards, began high-stakes testing, ended social promotion, forced thousands of students to attend summer school to advance a grade, and put failing schools on probation. That’s what pushed up Chicago test scores. CAC’s own final evaluation carefully compared students at schools with Annenberg projects and schools without. According to CAC’s own report: “There were no statistically significant differences in student achievement between Annenberg schools and demographically similar non-Annenberg schools. This indicates that there was no Annenberg effect on achievement.” It also indicates that Annenberg failed, not because it’s altogether impossible to improve urban schools, but because CAC’s heavily politicized community-organizer partners weren’t any good at doing so.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most important executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a largely a failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons for that failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama. Above all, by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist history aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly legitimate issue in this campaign.
Is 2008 really the Year that Journalism Died in America? Or will the mainstream media finally actually cover this significant story? I'm not holding my breath.
Bottom line: Barack Obama's radical politics were bad for kids in Chicago, were bad for the state of Illinois, were bad for the Soviet Union, and would be bad for America.
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