From THE WALL ST. JOURNAL (thanks to my cousin Darlene in NYC)
Here is the TRUTH about the Obama and Ayers connection:
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. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.
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 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.
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................You will want to read the rest.
Z: And, after you do, you'll see the total picture on just how hard the Obama campaign has lied and mischaracterized and hidden information that shows only this one part of the puzzle we're not seeing enough pieces of; the real Barry Barack Hussein Obama.For America's sake, I hope we get this information out. Is it so bad in and off itself? Sure. Is a cover-up of the truth worse than the truth? In my opinion, much worse, and much more curious.
z
18 comments:
My dear Z:
Did you really expect Barack Obama to announce his presidency with a caveat? “My name is Barack Obama, I am a Chicago politician, a liar, a crook, a racist, and I am confused about my religious beliefs. Please vote for me …”
Normally, we the people rely on the fourth estate as our primary source of information. In this case, however, the media is conspiring with Obama to mislead the American voter; and that makes your essay a most important one.
It is so important, should all of us agree to participate in a weekly blog burst until the first Tuesday of November?
I agree with Mustang. No help from the weinies in the press. I printed out the article this morning and found it interesting. I'll be posting on it. I encourage everyone to do the same.
I am hearing some material about the Obama-Ayers connection on the news (primarily FNC).
The connection is one of Obama's many Achilles heels. HERE is another and one which might make people pay even more attention:
Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson, the CEOs under whom the worst excesses took place in the late 1990s to mid-2000s, were both high-placed Democratic operatives and advisers to presidential candidate Barack Obama.
More at the above link.
Good point, MUSTANG! NO caveat, indeed!!
You start the blog burst and we're there!
Karen...LET'S ROLL!
AOW....trouble is the truth is ONLY on FNC. Also, Obama's denied that those two are on his team and Wikepedia took their names off of his team, too. The articles suddenly appeared without mentioning that, too. UNREAL.
another good find z...keep them coming
kw
Seems that Obama really is what the left accuses Rove of being, namely an evil genius.
shoprat. You're part of that.
The genius part!! Well said.
We really need more than a media investigation into Obama, we need an actual investigation into his finances and friends. There are a lot ofquestions hounding this man.
The New York Times
September 10, 2008
If Elected ...
Obama Looks to Lessons From Chicago in His National Education Plan
By SAM DILLON
CHICAGO — Senator Barack Obama learned how hard it can be to solve America’s public education problems when he headed a philanthropic drive here a decade ago that spent $150 million on Chicago’s troubled schools and barely made a dent.
Drawing on that experience, Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee for president, is campaigning on an ambitious plan that promises $18 billion a year in new federal spending on early childhood classes, teacher recruitment, performance pay and dozens of other initiatives.
In Dayton, Ohio, on Tuesday, Mr. Obama used his education proposals to draw a contrast with Senator John McCain, his Republican opponent, and to insist to voters that he, more than his rival, would change the way Washington works.
Were he to become president, Mr. Obama would retain the emphasis on the high standards and accountability of President Bush’s education law, No Child Left Behind. But he would rewrite the federal law to offer more help to high-need schools, especially by training thousands of new teachers to serve in them, his campaign said. He would also expand early childhood education, which he believes gets more bang for the buck than remedial classes for older students.
Mr. Obama added a new flourish to his stump speech, promising for the first time on Tuesday to double federal spending on public charter schools while holding those with poor records accountable.
But more than most campaign blueprints, Mr. Obama’s education plan reflects his own work with Chicago’s public schools, campaign staff members and people who have worked with him said in interviews. His plan signals that he is looking to apply those lessons nationwide.
“Barack has been very engaged, very inquisitive about the dynamics of how do you improve public schools,” said Scott Smith, a former publisher of The Chicago Tribune who has collaborated with Mr. Obama on education projects here for a decade.
One of the biggest lessons Mr. Obama drew from his experiences in Chicago, associates said, is that student achievement is highly dependent on teacher quality.
In the two decades since Mr. Obama arrived in Chicago, its public schools have undergone a sweeping turnaround, from an education wasteland to a district that, while still facing major challenges, is among the most improved in the nation. The city has closed many failing schools and reopened them with new staffs, making it an important laboratory for one of the country’s most vexing problems.
The city closed the failing Dodge Elementary School, for example, in 2002 and reopened it as an academy where candidates for advanced degrees in education work in classrooms under master teachers while studying at a local university. Mr. Obama visited the school in 2005, liked what he saw and now proposes to create 200 such teacher residency programs nationwide. The goal, he says, would be to turn out 30,000 teachers a year to work in the toughest schools.
Mr. Obama’s views have drawn heavily from a cast of experts who helped mold the Chicago experience. Strategies for overhauling failing schools have come from Arne Duncan, who as chief executive of the Chicago public schools led the turnaround efforts. The senator derived his views on early childhood education in part from the work of a Nobel Prize-winning economist based in Chicago.
The scope of Mr. Obama’s plan has impressed many educators, but not everyone.
Michael J. Petrilli, a former Education Department official under Mr. Bush, said Mr. Obama’s plan was more comprehensive than Mr. McCain’s.
“That’s because Obama is proposing what somebody called a Christmas tree of new programs,” Mr. Petrilli said. “McCain is suggesting a couple of new things, but doesn’t think Washington should spend more on education than we already are.”
Mr. Obama’s interest in education extends back to his work as a community organizer here in the mid-1980s. In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” he describes a school system plagued by textbook shortages and teacher strikes. He carried those experiences with him to Harvard Law School, where he took courses on school issues taught by Christopher Edley Jr.
“Barack became committed to the notion that progress in school reform can’t come through volunteerism and professional aspiration alone,” said Mr. Edley, now dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley. “It has to be undergirded with a legal and regulatory structure that rewards success and goes after failure.”
Mr. Obama immersed himself in education issues after his return to Chicago, where he began lecturing at the University of Chicago Law School and joined the boards of two education foundations.
Chicago received $49 million from a $500 million endowment by Walter H. Annenberg, the billionaire publisher, for school reform efforts nationwide, and the city added $98 million in matching funds for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a philanthropic campaign that financed enrichment projects at a third of the city’s 600 schools.
Mr. Obama was nominated to the Challenge board and was elected chairman in 1995, said Ken Rolling, executive director of the group, which operated through 2001. Mr. Obama continued to teach law during his five-year unpaid tenure as board chairman, and he was twice elected to the Illinois Senate.
Several board members, including two university presidents, far outranked Mr. Obama in education experience.
“Let me say the room had no shortage of egos, including my own,” said Stanley O. Ikenberry, a board member who at the time was president of the University of Illinois. “It was unusual: here you had a person trained in the law chairing a board on school reform.” Still, he said, Mr. Obama won his colleagues’ respect.
Supporters of Mr. McCain have been trying to taint Mr. Obama by highlighting his ties to William Ayers, a member of the violent Weather Underground in the 1960s, by pointing out that they worked on the Challenge project together. Mr. Ayers was indicted on conspiracy charges that were later thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct.
Mr. Obama has acknowledged that he is a friend of Mr. Ayers but has sought to minimize their interactions. Records show that Mr. Ayers, now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, helped write the Challenge proposal. The records also show that he and Mr. Obama worked on the Challenge project together and that they attended some of the same meetings.
The Challenge’s overall approach — supporting many diverse education projects rather than a coordinated school improvement strategy — had been established before Mr. Obama was named board chairman, and the board came under immediate pressure to approve grant proposals quickly.
“If you throw $10 on the table in Chicago, people are going to fight over it, and we had $50 million,” Mr. Rolling recalled.
Proposals poured in and the board eventually financed projects involving 210 schools. Some were imaginative: one, for example, connected schools with museums in the Chicago area so that students learned science from a paleontologist at the local dinosaur exhibit. But many were not.
“The project proposals by and large were awful,” one board member told an evaluation team in 1998.
Relations with school authorities were difficult. Just as the Challenge got under way, the Illinois Legislature gave Mayor Richard M. Daley control of the school district, and he began an improvement campaign based on high-stakes testing and other measures. Annenberg’s let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom approach often seemed at cross-purposes with that strategy.
Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, said the reading and math scores of the lowest-achieving students improved in the years when the Challenge was investing in the Chicago schools.
But a final report on the Challenge concluded that the huge effort had brought little change.
“The Challenge’s ‘bottom line’ was improving student achievement,” the report said. “Among the schools it supported, the Challenge had little impact on student outcomes.”
But the experience gave Mr. Obama an appreciation for the multiple problems facing urban schools, Mr. Rolling said. The city has been a pioneer ever since in exploring ways to recruit, train and support teachers.
This has been especially true since leadership of the city schools passed in 2001 to Mr. Duncan, a friend of and sounding board for Mr. Obama. The two also frequently play basketball.
Mr. Duncan accompanied Mr. Obama on his visit in 2005 to the Dodge school, now the Dodge Renaissance Academy, on the West Side of Chicago. After the school’s makeover, student scores rose significantly, and Mr. Obama wanted to know why.
The two men arrived with no entourage and sat down with the staff in a library. Mr. Obama asked about the best way to train teachers, according to those who participated. What would it take to keep qualified teachers from leaving the profession? Would merit pay help? “He wasn’t checking his Palm Pilot,” recalled Karla Kemp, a teacher.
Mr. Obama has brought a similar intensity to discussions of early childhood education, on which he proposes to spend $10 billion a year. A Chicago expert who has influenced his thinking on this is the Nobel laureate, James J. Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago. Mr. Obama’s plan cites Dr. Heckman in connection with research that found that for every dollar spent on prekindergarten education and the care of infants and their families, there is a $7 to $10 decrease in spending on special education, remedial education and prisons.
The two men have never met, even though they live so close to each other in the Kenwood neighborhood that they use the same dry cleaner and it occasionally sends Mr. Obama’s suit coats to Dr. Heckman’s home.
Last year, when Mr. Obama started his presidential campaign and began preparing his education plan, an assistant to Mr. Obama contacted Dr. Heckman and asked him to react to an early draft of the early childhood plan.
“I completely redrafted the section,” Dr. Heckman said. “Most striking about the campaign was that they listened to what I said.”
Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Dayton, Ohio
we have seen very few of these exposes on who obama is haven't we z?... hmmm does that mean the media is rooting for obama? nah can't be....
It is not an exposé of Obama. It is a feverish construct of assumptions, speculations, and innuendoes.
psi bond..I'm giggling.
I had to stop reading because "training THOUSANDS OF TEACHERS" is SO typical, isn't it!? It's hysterical! He's going to find THOUSANDS of kids who WANT to teach, or will it be compulsory!?
You can't make this stuff up!
ANd, PLEASE...these ARE the facts about ACORN, AYERS and OBAMA.
Honestly.......it's laughable.
BUt, I KNOW..the NYTIMES tells you different and YOU BELIEVE! SAY HALLELUJIAH! (LOL!)
"Mr. OBAMA WANTED TO KNOW WHYYYY!"
hhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!
Hmmm , direct from Wikipedia on CIC.
"A key accomplishment of the reform movement was the passage in 1988 of a new state law that established local school councils in every school in Chicago as a competing center of power relative to the teachers union and the Chicago school administration."
I'll leave it to you folks to complete reverse yourselves and tell me why you oppose that.
It's also noticed that the CIC hasn't been able to produce much change in student achievement. That has also been observed in Boston's measurement of charter school achievement. Nothing to get excited about.
So right now about all we have of serious interest is what's happening in the D.C. school system. Although if the problem is strictly unions I would ask why a country like Japan with incredibly powerful teachers unions routinely out preforms us.
Z, I am laughing at how few words out of context it takes to make you giggle and get sarcastic. He also wants to expand early childhood education, which he believes gets more bang for the buck than remedial classes for older students. You can’t make this up, as they say, it takes diligent research.
Rightwingers either say he has no programs or declare that the programs he has are laughable, believing they’ve made a profound observation.
It is reported in the Times so it can’t be true–––except if it can be read as negative to liberals, like a treacherous conspiracy involving liberal candidates or THOUSANDS of oedinary liberals who don’t have to be trained. For a rightwing extremist, a fact in the media is not a respectable fact unless it’s been shrewdly manipulated to suggest a blameworthy plot among liberals.
Z: "Mr. OBAMA WANTED TO KNOW WHYYYY!" hhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!
“After the school’s makeover, student scores rose significantly, and Mr. Obama wanted to know why.” I would say that was the response of someone genuinely interested in making things better–––not something to laugh at without restraint.
thanks for the 'whens' to laugh, and 'whens' to find something hilarious. What WOULD I do at my own blog without your policing?
And the most hilarious thing is your saying "just becuase it's in the NYTimes, you don't believe it" when that is EXACTLY what the Left set up about FOX cable channel months before it actually aired....when in FACT, they have FAR more leftists on that show than ANY CNN or MSNBC show dreamt of. the lies just NEVER end.
And, no, I have had absolutely no reason to believe in the NYTimes..not anymore, and neither do a large part of their subscription cancellers.
No. We have the evidence now about the Ayers connections, the real proof that had been hidden, and your spin isn't working!
Also, I should have mentioned how Obama has signed a bill about sex education for small children which is so NOT age appropriate by anybody's standards but Alan Colmes that it's frightening. I don't believe in teaching about safe sex to 6 yr olds, and find more deplorable the obfuscation of this situation than the actual bill.
thanks for the 'whens' to laugh, and 'whens' to find something hilarious. What WOULD I do at my own blog without your policing?
I wouldn’t dream of telling you when you personally can giggle or when to get all semi-quasi-sarcastic, as you love to do–––I’m not the sheriff here. I nurture no such domineering ambitions. If you wish to giggle literally at earnest people, please go ahead. If you wish to snip five or six words from their surrounding text, and do a spin with giggling on what, standing alone, they seem to mean detrimentally to liberals, please go ahead. But pardon me for thinking such hysterics hysterical.
And the most hilarious thing is your saying "just becuase it's in the NYTimes, you don't believe it" when that is EXACTLY what the Left set up about FOX cable channel months before it actually aired....when in FACT, they have FAR more leftists on that show than ANY CNN or MSNBC show dreamt of. the lies just NEVER end.
The hilarious thing is that you put into quotes words I did not say. Rightwingers have no trouble believing the New York Times and even quoting from it as gospel when it says things they are able to spin negatively against liberals. It is only when the Times says something that puts rightwingers in a negative light or is contrary to what they like to hear, that they claim bias. What’s also hilarious is to see rightwingers acting like moral relativists–––i.e., if liberals do it, then it’s OK for them to do. Even setting aside the instances when Britt Hume has snickered while reading stories about liberals (he even snickered tonight during an interview with Obama, in the middle of one of Obama’s responses), Fox is clearly the Republican’s network since Republican candidates can rely on it to put them on the air whenever there is a strategic need for airtime to get out their political message. They don’t have to be concerned, as liberals do, about getting shouted down, talked over, or obsessively cross-examined when their point, however cogent, is not what the rightwing host wants to hear. The lie that never ends is that Fox is fair and balanced.
And, no, I have had absolutely no reason to believe in the NYTimes..not anymore, and neither do a large part of their subscription cancellers.
Rightwingers see no reason to believe the New York Times until it reads like NewsMax or sounds like Fox. There is no practical reason anymore to subscribe to the Times. As people are increasingly discovering, everyone can read it online for free.
No. We have the evidence now about the Ayers connections, the real proof that had been hidden, and your spin isn't working!
You have feverish partisan speculations about how closely they worked together. You have no evidence that Obama and Ayers think alike on political matters. Just as there is no evidence that Ayers was a terrorist in his youth. Bombing government buildings and statues when no one is around is not terrorism, which means violence for political ends directed against civilians, like militant Muslim terrorists do in Iraq and Israel and in New York on 9/11.
Also, I should have mentioned how Obama has signed a bill about sex education for small children which is so NOT age appropriate by anybody's standards but Alan Colmes that it's frightening. I don't believe in teaching about safe sex to 6 yr olds, and find more deplorable the obfuscation of this situation than the actual bill.
The self-serving distortion in the rightwing spin on this Illinois state bill is deplorable. But, yes, for changing the subject, you should have mentioned all of the anti-Obama talking points in your previous post.
Despite the impression promoted by the McCain ad, it was not a bill that Obama sponsored. In fact, it was sponsored by a coalition of education and public health organizations, including the Illinois Parent Teacher Association, the Illinois State Medical Society, the Illinois Public Health Association and the Illinois Education Association.
It is not true that Obama “has signed a bill about sex education for small children which is so NOT age appropriate by anybody's standards.” Obama voted for the bill in committee, where it passed, but it never came to a full and final vote. The proposal called for “age and developmentally appropriate” sex education and also allowed parents the option of withdrawing their children from such classroom instruction if they felt that it clashed with their beliefs or values.
In referring to the sex-education bill, the McCain campaign is largely recycling old and discredited accusations made against Mr. Obama by Alan Keyes in their 2004 Senate race. At that time, Mr. Obama stated that he understood the main objective of the legislation, as it pertained to kindergarteners, to be to teach them how to defend themselves against sexual predators.
“I have a 6-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old daughter, and one of the things my wife and I talked to our daughter about is the possibility of somebody touching them inappropriately, and what that might mean,” Obama said in 2004. “And that was included specifically in the law, so that kindergarteners are able to exercise some possible protection against abuse, because I have family members as well as friends who suffered abuse at that age.”
It is a misstatement of the bill’s purpose, therefore, to maintain, as the McCain campaign ad does, that Mr. Obama favored conventional sex education as a policy for 5-year-olds. Under the Illinois proposal, “medically accurate” education about more complicated topics, including intercourse, contraception and homosexuality, would have been reserved for older students in higher grades.
The advertisement, then, also misrepresents what the bill meant by “comprehensive.” The instruction the bill required was comprehensive in that it called for a curriculum that went from kindergarten and through high school, not in the sense that kindergarteners would have been fully exposed to the entire gamut of sex-related issues.
The notion that Obama favors teaching kindergartners how to have safe sex is absurd. It is only slightly less absurd than the implied notion that Obama agrees with the William Ayers of forty years ago, who thought that bombing government buildings and statues was justified.
Absurd as well is the notion that rightwingers across the country actually care about this failed Illinois bill for any other reason than because they see it as opportunity they can seize upon to attack Obama.
All you have to do is take one LOOK at that face, and you KNOW you are in the presence of something that ought to be STAMPED OUT.
Anyone who would associate with such a creature HAS to evil.
FT
Obama and Osama both have friends that bombed the Pentagon!
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