Posted 9:39 AM by Susan Darst Williams

AHA! FORMER CHICAGO SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT VALLAS
CONFIRMS THAT THE OBAMA-AYERS ED PROJECT BOMBED

Paul Vallas, now the superintendent of "recovery" schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, was the chief ed guy in Chicago when Bill Ayers wrote the grant to establish the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Barack Obama ended up as board chairman, presiding over the distribution of the eventual $150 million or so that was supposed to help inner-city Chicago kids learn better.

In a Monday story in the New York Post, though, Vallas confirmed that the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was a complete failure that did nothing for kids. Read the story here:

www.nypost.com/seven/10202008/news/politics/f_for_baracks_school_fix_134391.htm

Read the final report of the Challenge, too, which I posted last Friday. It concludes on p. 1 of the executive summary that the project had "little impact on student outcomes." THAT'S the best face they could put on it?!?

http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/downloads/p62.pdf

For an eye-opening look at how radical Ayers' education philosophies really are, spend some time on the following blog as well. Author: Steve Diamond. Don't know him, but his research looks good.

It details how the millions in the Challenge in Chicago were sidetracked away from schools, and into community activist groups such as ACORN and others. The goal was to build political capital and favors for Obama, instead of doing what was necessary to improve the students' reading, writing and arithmetic skills:

http://globallabor.blogspot.com

Apparently, Obama funded Ayers' Small Schools Workshop project, whose main goal was to strip elected school boards of any semblance of power in Chicago, and instead set up "site-based management councils."

These are eerily like the "soviets" that ran the former Soviet Union -- little collectives where groupthink and "consensus" overruled professional practice and intelligent decisionmaking.

In Chicago, the distressed inner-city schools were run by "councils" that had a majority of inner-city parents. They thus could outmuscle principals and teachers on every issue. Indeed, reportedly almost all white principals wound up fired in inner-city Chicago, because of these "mini-soviets" that the Ayers plan set up. Elected school boards, and longtime professional educators, were pushed out of the loop. And the schools got even WORSE.

That's what Ayers means by "community empowerment." Not a dollar of it went for instruction and educational improvement. The power shifted to the rabble, whose favor was bought with someone else's money.

It was educational communism in action. And Chicago's inner-city schools are doing even worse today than they did before.

Ohhhh! THAT'S where we get the expression "The Little RED Schoolhouse"!!!

Again, we salute University of Nebraska Regent Randy Ferlic for blowing the whistle on the invitation from N.U.'s College of Education and Human Sciences to Ayers to come and speak at the 100th anniversary celebration next month. Hope everybody else wakes up about the Obama connections to Ayers and others like him, before Election Day.

Labels: Ayers, Ayers Barack Obama N.U. College of Education queer studies, Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Vallas

Posted 6:10 PM by Susan Darst Williams

OBAMA-AYERS-ACORN SYSTEM
OF 'RADICALIZING' EDUCATION

Ooh. Here's a good backgrounder to read if you want to know what is meant by "radicalizing" education in America.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama is in the thick of things with his associate, unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, recently ix-nayed from giving a speech at the University of Nebraska College of Education, thank goodness.

Ayers as grantwriter and Obama as board chairman "radicalized" schools in Chicago using the $150 million of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (the original $49.2 million grant that Ayers got was a 2:1 challenge match, enlarging the overall take). It was supposed to help disadvantaged kids do better in school. Instead, the money was sprinkled around to individuals and groups -- including to Ayers for "teacher training" -- who would then come under Obama's spell as a "community organizer."

This is how radical ideas get pushed on teachers and students, such as "military budgets snatch food from the mouths of poor children," and "homelessness is the fault of corporate America."

This is how we get charts in math textbooks and on standardized tests that supposedly are about how to read a bar chart, but look closer: they show a slanted take on income distribution in America, with an eye toward fomenting political pressure to force a "fairer" distribution of material and human resources -- i.e., stirring up class warfare with a direct goal of instilling communism, through school curricula and activities.

If Obama is elected, this is what schools from coast to coast will be doing.

Read this and share it, please:

www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_ed_school.html

Labels: Ayers, Barack Obama, radicalizing education, University of Nebraska

Posted 4:34 PM by Susan Darst Williams

ANOTHER PIECE OF PROOF
THAT THE AYERS/OBAMA PROJECT
WAS AN EDUCATIONAL BOMB

Here's an Investor's Business Daily article that reiterates how bad the Bill Ayers / Barack Obama Chicago Annenberg Challenge was.

The same publication described Ayers' office door at his teachers' college in Illinois, with pictures of cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, Che Guevera, and Malcolm X. Nice group of role models for children there. Sheesh.

But the utter failure of the $49.2 million Annenberg Challenge in inner-city Chicago schools is an even better reason to exclude Bill Ayers from speaking at the University of Nebraska College of Education than his past as a traitorous, murderous terrorist:

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=308875824685359

Labels: Ayers, Barack Obama, Chicago Annenberg Challenge, University of Nebraska

Posted 11:00 AM by Susan Darst Williams

HAS UNL'S EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
LOST OUR TRUST?

Over the weekend on this blog, I pointed out that the final report of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge is online and states that it did nothing -- NOTHING! -- to help low-income Chicago kids read, write and figure, after $49.2 million in extra cash donated from the estate of the late Walter Annenberg.

You'll recall that, former Weatherman murderous terrorist and now education professor Bill Ayers, and Presidential candidate Barack Obama, were both intricately involved in that project. Ayers wrote the grant, and Obama was the chairman of the board gaining political capital aplenty as all those millions were steered to community groups, and vanished in the cesspool of gutter politics. What a boondoggle.

Someone has since pointed out that the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was a 2:1 match. That means donations from others -- more than likely, conservative Republicans, since they're by far the most generous demographic group in the nation -- added to the $49.2 million. So the actual waste of money was closer to $150 million, for no help to student academic outcomes. That's colossal!

It just makes the decision by the University of Nebraska's College of Education to give Ayers the bully pulpit at its upcoming 100th anniversary celebration look even worse.

Look: the final report of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was dated August 2003. That was PLENTY of time for the UNL education professors to find out that Ayers' radical schtick was and is a cynical disappointment in the classroom, and doesn't do a thing to help kids. I mean, it took me about 3 minutes to find it online.

Why didn't they KNOW that? Or maybe they don't CARE?

So they're either incompetent, or uncaring. Nice.

You put that with the dismal fact that Nebraska has one of the widest racial achievement gaps in the nation, and that N.U. trained most of our teachers who apparently don't know how to lift low-income kids up and over, with solid academics. That's not the fault of the teachers themselves: that's the fault of whoever supposedly trained them.

I have to say it: N.U. Teachers' College has lost our trust.

They like radical? Let's give them radical:

Let's abolish the N.U. College of Education entirely. Let our future teachers major in content areas, such as math, science and English. Let schools hire them on merit, and train them in pedagogy -- the art of teaching. That way, they'll be shielded from all this ineffective, radical philosophy such as Ayers spouts, and will know how to stick to their knittin' . . . and TEACH.

It would make our future teachers the best in the nation, bar none.

It would help our kids like nothin' before.

It would be . . . the bomb!

Labels: Ayers, Barack Obama, N.U. College of Education

Posted 11:35 PM by Susan Darst Williams

GO BIG ED BLOG BACK FULL STRENGTH!

WHY DID UNL TRY TO GIVE A MAD BOMBER THE PULPIT,
INSTEAD OF A REAL EDUCATOR FROM CHICAGO?

So glad the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is backing out of its boneheaded plan to host mad bomber Bill Ayers to come speak to educators. That move really exposes the utter lack of common sense in our teachers' colleges today. Sheesh Louishe.

Might be different if Ayers actually had ever done anything GOOD for education. But he hasn't. The verdict is in: his worldview is atrociously anti-American, his "reforms" are Marxist hogwash, and that $50 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge that he and Barack Obama cooked up that was supposed to help Chicago's inner-city poor was instead a colossal waste of money, according to the project's own final report.

Here it is, and note the line where it admits that "the Challenge had little impact on student outcomes" in the executive summary:

http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/downloads/p62.pdf


The $50 million went down a rathole of political "capital" that was being built for Obama, according to Ayers' cynical design. Instead of kids learning to read, write and figure, "social justice" groups such as ACORN, now mixed up in that horrible voter fraud mess, got the money, and the collectivist "site-based management councils" set up in the schools frittered it away.

Then many of those who got enriched at the children's expense returned the favor to Obama with political help, contributions and muscle power as he launched his formal political career. And Ayers, who learned from Saul Alinsky (and his book, Rules for Radicals), set it all up.

Yeah, here are Ayers' 3 R's: radicalism, revolution and riots.

I'll tell you a Chicago educator who SHOULD be invited to speak at UNL, and to educators across the land: Marva Collins (www.marvacollins.com). Remember? She started a private school for the poorest of the poor out of her house in inner-city Chicago, Westside Prep. She accepted literally pennies per week from the parents, whatever they could pay.

She taught them the 3 R's, with firm but kind discipline and respect thrown in for good measure. She taught them the classics of western civilization; observers I've talked to have been amazed at the young inncer-city children reciting lines from Shakespeare, Plato and Homer without any problem handling the complex vocabulary. Now, THAT'S how you build a child's self-esteem: by teaching him or her to be COMPETENT!

Years after Marva Collins got started, 60 Minutes followed up on her first 33 graduates. Demographically speaking, quite a few of them "should" have been dead, in prison, on welfare, in gangs, and so forth, based on the tough neighborhood from which they began life. But all 33 were employed and doing well! Some of her grads went on to Harvard, Yale, Stanford . . . and not a mad bomber in the bunch.

Now, THAT'S a miracle, and THAT'S what our educators need to be hearing about.

De-politicizing teachers' colleges and public schools, and giving disadvantaged children basic academics again, the way our schools USED to before Ayers and his ilk seized control of our teachers' colleges, is what we really need to do. It would be . . . THE BOMB!

Labels: Ayers, education, Marva Collins, UNL