Sen. Barack Obama vows to “change the world.” For starters, he’s made an “historic commitment to education” for “every American child” that begins “from the moment they’re born to the day they graduate college.”
What are some of Obama’s extraordinary education plans? Embedding positive behavior in students and developing a data system to monitor them.
Let’s first look at Obama’s education track record. It’s his exalted 7-year stint to reform Chicago schools as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) with “distinguished scholar” and unrepentant terrorist William Ayers that according to CAC’s records showed no academic achievement.
So far, Obama shows no sign of distress or contrition over CAC’s alarming outcome; nor has he explained why CAC funneled over U.S. $100 million to radical organizations in line with Ayer’s political ideology, including “to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by [Obama’s former pastor] Reverend Wright.” (National Review)
This ideological alliance was fomented during Ayer’s Weatherman days where cop killers were hailed as freedom fighters and radical cohorts were encouraged to recruit students, “bring the revolution home” and “kill your parents.”
Read more at the Canadian Free Press.
No accountability...throw money at the problem. Sounds like more of the same thing that has made American public education, sadly, a joke. 100 million dollars and no growth in achievement, unless you count imparting and spreading a Marxist, radical agenda....Do we want our children to learn the promise and greatness of America, personal responsibility and self reliance, or do we want them to be mindless sheep cogs in the radical Obama regime?
Let's review what Obama channeled money to when he was working with unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers:
Not only did Barack Obama savor Wright’s sermons, Obama gave legitimacy — and a whole lot of money — to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Reverend Wright. And guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same bitterly anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting a decade ago. All this is revealed by a bit of digging, combined with a careful study of documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the education foundation Obama and Ayers jointly led in the late 1990s.
For one thing, we have evidence that in 1995, the same year Obama assumed control of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he publicly rejected “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation,” a stance that clearly resonates with both Wright and Carruthers. (See “No Liberation.”)
And as noted, Wright had invited Carruthers, Hilliard, and like-minded thinkers to address his Trinity congregants. Wright likes to tick off his connections to these prominent Afrocentrists in sermons, and Obama would surely have heard of them. Reading over SSAVC’s Annenberg proposals, Obama could hardly be ignorant of what they were about. And if by some chance Obama overlooked Hilliard’s or Carruthers’s names, SSAVC’s proposals are filled with references to “rites of passage” and “Ptahhotep,” dead giveaways for the anti-American and separatist ideological concoction favored by SSAVC.
We know that Obama did read the proposals. Annenberg documents show him commenting on proposal quality. And especially after 1995, when concerns over self-dealing and conflicts of interest forced the Ayers-headed “Collaborative” to distance itself from monetary issues, all funding decisions fell to Obama and the board. Significantly, there was dissent within the board. One business leader and experienced grant-smith characterized the quality of most Annenberg proposals as “awful.” (See “The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: The First Three Years,” p. 19.) Yet Obama and his very small and divided board kept the money flowing to ideologically extremist groups like the South Shore African Village Collaborative, instead of organizations focused on traditional educational achievement.
As if the content of SSAVC documents wasn’t warning enough, their proposals consistently misspelled “rites of passage” as “rights of passage,” hardly an encouraging sign from a group meant to improve children’s reading skills. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge’s own evaluators acknowledged that Annenberg-aided schools showed no improvement in achievement scores. Evaluators attributed that failure, in part, to the fact that many of Annenberg’s “external partners” had little educational expertise. A group that puts its efforts into Kwanzaa celebrations and half-baked history certainly fits that bill, and goes a long way toward explaining how Ayers and Obama managed to waste upwards of $150 million without improving student achievement.However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that, from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright. The Wright affair was no fluke. It’s time for McCain to say so.
This is not the change in education we need.
