Teacher from GA.

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.

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…

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.