Obama and Ayers Collaborated to Radicalize Students Using the Annenberg Center?

by ~ The Rebel ~ Posted 2012/01/16 06:33:33

Related Topics: Relationship, Student, Single, Teacher, Weather, Money, School, Terrorist, Investment, Author, Richard Nixon, Chicago, President, Bill Clinton, State, Relationships

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Bankrolled by the billionaire publishing mogul Walter H. Annenberg and his charitable foundation, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) was a five-year school-reform effort created ostensibly to improve public schools in Chicago and elsewhere across the United States. Mr. Annenberg seeded this initiative with $500 million.

On December 17, 1993, President Bill Clinton hosted a White House ceremony at which he announced Annenberg’s undertaking, calling it “the largest single gift ever made to American public education.”

A Republican who had cultivated close relationships with former presidents Richard Nixon (under whom he served as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain) and Ronald Reagan, Annenberg urged political leaders to “promote widespread … support for resolute and sustained public investment” in the public-school system.

While Walter Annenberg provided the money that allowed CAC to function, William Ayers, the former Weather Underground terrorist, was, as author Stanley Kurtz puts it, the founder of CAC as well as “its guiding spirit.” In 1987 Ayers had launched a new career as a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, where CAC was headquartered.

Under Ayers’ stewardship, CAC scarcely focused at all on measures aimed at improving student performance in traditional curricular studies, but rather was guided by Ayers’ belief – as outlined in his book Teaching Toward Freedom – that the primary duty of educators was to “teach against [the] oppression” that allegedly pervaded American society, and to thereby encourage revolution and social transformation. Toward that end, Ayers’ teacher-training programs, which were funded by CAC, were designed to serve as “sites of resistance” against an oppressive social system.

~ The Rebel ~ 2012/01/16 06:34:23

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CAC’s grant-making decisions generally were consistent with Ayers’ educational philosophy, which aimed to infuse students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which emphasized social activism far more than academic achievement and test scores. Grant proposals from groups that focused on academics typically were turned down. Rather than fund schools directly, CAC generally required them to affiliate with “external partners” — one particular favorite was the community organization ACORN — which actually received the grant money and, in turn, implemented in the schools whatever ideologically-driven programs they wished to institute.

CAC was also a major funder of the so-called “small schools” movement, a William Ayers creation whereby individual schools committed themselves to the promotion of specific political themes and pushed students to “confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.” The American Thinker notes that because CAC focused so much more on the radicalization, rather than on the education, of students, it “failed to produce any measurable academic gains, according to [its] own final report.”

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