Stanley Kurtz On Obama, Ayers, And Education Policy

Barack Obama said in an early debate that Bill Ayers was just a guy in his neighborhood that he didn't exchange ideas with but that now appears to be a blatant lie. Obama once bragged about his work on the board of the Chicago Annenburg Challenge when was running for Senate but now he and his cronies in the MSM have been doing everything in their power to bury it. Stanley Kurtz gained access to the archived records of the CAC and finds substantial linkage between the two and radical efforts to reform the Chicago school system. They spent 150 million to not teach kids reading writing and arithmatic but how to be little socialist grievance mongers agitating to overthrow their oppressive overlords.

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.

I really don't care what Ayers and his wife did forty years ago as radical terrorist bombers but I concerned about what he is attempting to do today through the indoctrination of children in public schools. Obama and Ayers have dicussed at length education and punishment of juvenile offenders in various forums one even sponsored by Michelle Obama. Bill Ayers is now a Professor of Education meaning he teaches future teachers and currently is VP of a board that writes curriculum agenda for public schools across America as this article in City Journal points out. That should scare the bejeebers out of all parents of school age children and just imagine what kind of education policies Obama would push if he were to become president.

Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.

AERA already does a great deal to advance the social-justice teaching agenda in the nation’s schools and has established a Social Justice Division with its own executive director. With Bill Ayers now part of the organization’s national leadership, you can be sure that it will encourage even more funding and support for research on how teachers can promote left-wing ideology in the nation’s classrooms—and correspondingly less support for research on such mundane subjects as the best methods for teaching underprivileged children to read

If you have noticed a steep decline in our public schools and have become concerned about what your kids are learning or not learning you can thank Bill Ayers for that. I wonder what the parents of all those kids in Chicago's failing inner city schools think, probably that its the system keeping them down. When actually it is the schools failing to teach the kids how to read, write, do math, or the critical thinking skills to master science or history. They instead teach political correctness and liberal grievance mongering about class, race, and how America is evil and oppresive.

Thanks to the efforts of Stanley Kurtz, Tom Maguire, Sol Stern, and Steve Diamond who have all written on and researched extensively the connections between Bill Ayers and Barack Obama the story is finally getting told, thank God for the New Media or we may never have found out. Do go to Tom's site where he has extensive links posted for much more information.

It is up to us in the new media to spread this since the MSM won't because they basically agree with Ayers and Obama since they came from the same elite institutions that push this crap they call education. We cannot let Obama and by extension Ayers and his ilk get their hands on the levers of power in America, its time to stand up and be counted.