Chicago Annenberg Challenge in Spotlight

[Nonno]

Education Week: Chicago Annenberg Challenge in Spotlight

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, chaired from 1995 to 1999 by Barack Obama, is being portrayed by some critics of the Democratic presidential nominee as an attempt to push radicalism on schools.

In fact, the project undertaken in Chicago as part of a high-profile national initiative reflected mainstream thinking among education reformers. The Annenberg Foundation’s $49.2 million grant in the city focused on three priorities: encouraging collaboration among teachers and better professional development; reducing the isolation between schools and between schools and their communities; and reducing school size to improve learning.

The other eight urban projects that received money from the foundation under the Annenberg Challenge initiative launched in 1993 by the philanthropist Walter H. Annenberg pursued similar aims.
And the creation of small schools has continued as a reform strategy nationwide, most recently with major funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The proposal that won Chicago the grant, which the Annenberg Foundation required be matched two-to-one by local donations, was written by William C. Ayers and Anne C. Hallett. Mr. Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has become a prime target for Mr. Obama’s critics, who point to Mr. Ayers’ membership in the radical Weather Underground in the 1960s and 1970s and assert that the Illinois senator has been keeping company with an unrepentant domestic terrorist.

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican vice presidential nominee, gave the charge new visibility this month when she alluded to Mr. Ayers in accusing Sen. Obama of “palling around with terrorists.”

[This_person]

Originally Posted by Nonno

Education Week: Chicago Annenberg Challenge in Spotlight

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, chaired from 1995 to 1999 by Barack Obama, is being portrayed by some critics of the Democratic presidential nominee as an attempt to push radicalism on schools.

In fact, the project undertaken in Chicago as part of a high-profile national initiative reflected mainstream thinking among education reformers. They were actually very nice to puppies, and never pushed anyone's head under the water at the local swimming pool.

And?

[Nonno]

Originally Posted by This_person

And?

Looks to me as they are calling BS to a lot of the crap that you folks are so up in arms about.

[This_person]

Originally Posted by Nonno

Looks to me as they are calling BS to a lot of the crap that you folks are so up in arms about.

Where?

[chernmax (Premo)]

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

Link: Inside the Obama Ayers Chicago Annenberg Challenge Records : NO QUARTER

[Lenny]

Bill Ayers and which he led with Barack Obama from 1995 until 2001

...Obama barely knew Bill Ayers because:

(1) their kids went to school together (despite the fact Ayers' kids are 20-25 years older than the hybrid's kids)
(2) they served on some board together (for a short, one or two meeting tenure)
(3) the hybrid only stopped by one evening for a single drink at a party Ayers was giving for really, really rich people (THE ONE doesn't even remember whose birthday they were celebrating)

[aps45819 (Premo)]

Originally Posted by Nonno

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, chaired from 1995 to 1999 by Barack Obama, is being portrayed by some critics of the Democratic presidential nominee as an attempt to push radicalism on schools.

In fact, the project undertaken in Chicago as part of a high-profile national initiative reflected mainstream thinking among education reformers.

You're saying that "education reformers" are all radical anti-American, anti-capitalism

[Lenny]

Originally Posted by aps45819

You're saying that "education reformers" are all radical anti-American, anti-capitalism

....and wrong.