Inside the Obama Ayers Chicago Annenberg Challenge Records
By Steve Diamond on August 21, 2008 at 9:22 AM in Annenberg Chicago Challenge, Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, William Ayers, Woods Fund
Here is a second group of records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (”CAC”), the education reform project founded by Bill Ayers and which he led with Barack Obama from 1995 until 2001. The Challenge spent some $160 million in the Chicago Public School system during that time period with the explicit goal of improving educational outcomes for students. The Challenge failed in that attempt.
These documents were provided to me by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. They include the original grant application submitted by Bill Ayers and Anne Hallett to Brown which hosted the national Annenberg Challenge.
In addition these documents include the program reports and annual and semi-annual reports prepared on a regular basis by the Executive Director of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Ken Rolling. Rolling had been recruited to head the CAC from a position at the Woods Fund where he had been active in support for the controversial 1988 reform of Chicago schools. Obama’s Developing Communities Project received more than $27,000 from the Woods Fund during that period.
I have posted the documents in the precise form that they were provided to me. There are some missing pages. Within the annual reports are included financial statements and minutes of the Board of Directors, which was chaired by Obama.
My analysis of the history of the CAC can be found here. The key to understanding the CAC is its political context. The CAC was established to shore up support for the Local School Councils established in 1988. The LSCs were a new power center set up to watchdog teachers, principals and school administrators. While Ayers celebrates it as a form of battling “bureaucracies” and as a democratic reform, in fact it has disturbing authoritarian overtones and was the source of resistance by union teachers and professional administrators and was not actively supported by major black organizations like Operation Push.
One example of the political firestorm that the CAC helped fuel was its effort to spend millions of dollars through a Leadership Development Initiative to recruit and train candidates for the LSCs. This proposal from the CAC Collaborative, co-chaired by Bill Ayers, was sent to the Board of Directors, chaired by Barack Obama, where it ran into objections from Arnold Weber, former President of Northwestern University and a representative from the business community.
At about this same time, Mayor Daley was leading the charge to gut the entire LSC structure that Ayers, Obama, Mike Klonsky* and others had fought to create and build. The CAC was seen by Ayers as a way to protect and sustain the LSCs against the attempt to re-centralize power over the troubled schools in the hands of the Mayor.
Obama led the effort on behalf of the CAC board to reach an accomodation with the Ayers-led CAC Collaborative to shape the Leadership Development Initiative. After Obama’s intervention, Weber’s objections ceased (as far as I can tell from the records I have been provided) and the proposal went forward.
*Mike Klonsky was a former SDS comrade of Ayers and later helped found a maoist party in the United States, travelling to meet with Chinese leaders in 1977 for their endorsement of his effort here. Klonsky’s Small Schools Workshop received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CAC headed by Obama and Ayers.
The Documents
The Original CAC Grant Proposal submitted by Ayers and Hallett
CAC Second 1996 Program Report
……………..
From my blog, Global Labor and Politics.
I am a lawyer, a law professor and a political scientist on the faculty of Santa Clara University School of Law in Santa Clara, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. I teach courses on the global capital markets, the international economy, corporate governance and international labor and human rights. Prior to joining the faculty I was in private legal practice in New York and in Palo Alto. I also have an extensive background in the labor movement and advise a wide range of unions, workers and institutional investors on financial and legal issues. This website is an independent project and hence is my responsibility and it is not affiliated in any other way with the law school or Santa Clara University. You can email me off line comments at sjfd2001@yahoo.com
(Release: November 13)
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I read on the ticker tape coming across the screen last nite,on Cnn or Fox, that the records would be released on Tuesday….
The grant documents are exactly what one expects from progressive eduhacks.
Reform is nothing more than inventing additional offices, goals, titles, and committees.
Nothing more than talk and paper.
50 million dollars for planning the implementation of nothing.
Either these idiots know nothing about student achievement, or they refuse to do what will work—namely, buying effective curriculum materials and training teachers to use them.
This of course is what Bush was trying to do with Reading First.
And his effort to produce on-the-ground, direct reform of instruction is exactly why the progressive eduhacks hate Reading First.
If Reading First had been shown to work, and if this success had been accepted (and data from states and districts show that it does work; but of course the progressive education establishment doesn’t care about data), the implication would have been that ed schools and districts have been incompetent for decades, because all that was ever needed for kids to learn was good materials and good instruction.
The Annenberg grant was a huge fraud, pure and simple.
It had no efffect on achievement because it did nothing but plan how to plan and then shuffle offices around.
Ayers and his ilk are charlatans, willing to sacrifice kids on the altar of vanity and power.
[...] just being investigated, it’s known that money was funnelled to Ayers’ friend, radical Mike Klonsky, a founding member of the Maoist Party of the United States. 5. Minister Louis Farrakhan. Obama is [...]
[...] just being investigated, it’s known that money was funnelled to Ayers’ friend, radical Mike Klonsky, a founding member of the Maoist Party of the United States. 5. Minister Louis Farrakhan. Obama is [...]
How ironic that a Moaist criminal process would have had Ayers brains splattered by a firing squad for doing what he did. Communist karma would have served the pig right.
[...] Diamond, Inside the Obama Ayers Chicago Annenberg Challenge Records, NoQuarterUSA, August 21, [...]
Obama pushed radical indoctrination in Chicago
So much for Obama’s mendacious denials that Ayers is, “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and “…not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” The facts seem to indicate that Obama exchanged over $100 million dollars in leftis…
Follow the money. Who benefited, how and why.
Did some of these organizations just spring up to cash a check and then fold or were they established organizations that continue to exist to this day?
Did any of the recipients have pre-existing relationships with Ayers or Obama prior to receiving funding? For example, we know Mike Klonsky was a fellow SDS radical.
It would be helpful to identify specific “mainstream” applications which were turned down and compare those to applications which were approved.
[...] and Ayers. The Documents The Original CAC Grant Proposal submitted by Ayers and Hallett Link: Inside the Obama Ayers Chicago Annenberg Challenge Records : NO QUARTER __________________ I believe the BEST social program is a [...]
[...] as chairman of the board. Together they doled out $150 million for education-related projects [6] from 1995 to 1999. The money went to dozens of activists who are very skilled at pointing to the conditions of life [...]
I find it interesting that Annenberg himself was tied to the US Depart. of Ed. under the Reagan Admin. All of the reports indicate how CAC are going to raise money for some of the few “networks” ( aka schools; socialist love semantics) where some progress was being made. Nowhere in those reports did I see gains in learning and knowledge…ya know why? Because the teachers are caught up in trying to implement the teaching strategy rather than teaching content and basic skills to students…no wonder they ran the program out of town. Obama jumped shio when he saw the first signs of failure. I have a feeling this will be the framework for his educational plan in the U.S.; God help us all. Educational leaders get swayed and seduced with grant funds easily…but guess who got hurt in the long run, teachers and students…I hope the kids learned something.
Teacher from GA.
[...] as chairman of the board. Together they doled out $150 million for education-related projects [6] from 1995 to 1999. The money went to dozens of activists who are very skilled at pointing to the conditions of life [...]