The subject of Obama’s connection to William Ayers through an
educational foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Connection (CAC) has begun to enter the mainstream media...
The unreported fact of this episode is that Obama as Board Chairman, and Ayers as Collaborative Co-Chair, worked hand-in-hand in the
process of reviewing and approving grant proposals that came to the CAC....
Whatever his past,
Ayers is now a respected member of the Chicago intelligentsia, and still a member of the Woods Fund Board. The president of the Woods Fund, Deborah Harrington, said
he had been selected for the board because of his solid academic credentials and “passion for social justice...”
First, Ayers remains a radical left Marxist/Maoist just as he was in his days in the Weather Underground, and before that the Students for Democratic Society.
Second, Ayers now preaches revolution through propaganda and indoctrination which is to be taught in the form of primary and secondary school education. That’s what the CAC was all about, and that’s what the Obama campaign is so desperate to hide.
The mission of the Collaborative was to save a pet project of Ayers in the Chicago school system called the “Local School Councils.” This was the battleground for a fight for control of the Chicago school system in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ayers favored decentralizing control of the school system through the creation of elected “Local School Councils” to oversee the bureaucracy of individual schools or groups of schools. These LSCs would have authority over both the school administration and the teaching staff.
The LSCs were created by a law passed by the Illinois legislature in 1988. Ayers was an advocate of the LSCs in the fight for the legislation. When the Illinois legislature later gave control over the Chicago school system to the office of the Chicago Mayor, that threatened the LSCs by re-centralizing the power over the schools in the local government rather than the LSCs. Ayers created the CAC as a foundation to empower the LSCs — to give the money and to help them pursue educational initiatives pushed at the grass roots level.
While this might seem noble, what Ayers was really after was a mechanism to control curriculum of individual schools. Ayers has praised the re-education programs of communists in places like Nicaragua and Venezuela, which have been imposed through the public education systems in those countries. Ayers went so far as to proclaim in a speech in Venezuela in 2007 that he and Chavez shared a belief that “education is the motor-force of revolution.”
Much of Diamond’s reporting on this topic is about the framework of the CAC, Ayers and Obama’s roles connected thereto, and how the CAC worked. What is missing — and what presumably Kurtz would find in the documents now being withheld from him — is the far left educational subject matter that Ayers proposed to push through the primary and secondary schools if he could gain control of the individual school curriculums through the LSCs — control which he sought to achieve by working with LSC’s through the Collaborative to help them gain such control.
Baltimore mayor signs bill banning...
Yesterday, 08:16 PM in Best/Worst of DU/Discussionist