Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Education Reform

Stanley Kurtz, writing for National Review Online, has written a detailed and well researched article on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the education foundation led by Obama and William Ayers in the late 1990s. It should be required reading. Mr. Kurtz had to overcome denials and challenges for his right to see the documents of the Foundation (after receiving permission, he was denied permission, etc.) and this article is part of his findings.

He attempts to make clear the connection between Rev. Wright, Ayers, and Obama as well as to study exactly what kind of education reform the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was funding.

In short:

• Winter 1996 - Coalition for Improved Education in [Chicago's] South Shore (CIESS) receives $200,000 grant from Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The group teaches Afrocentric "rites of passage...designed to provide African American youth with the cultural information and values they would need to counter the potentially detrimental effects of a Eurocentrically oriented society." It asserts that American socialization has "proven to be dysfunctional and genocidal to the African American community."

• One of the presentors at a CIESS conference was Jacob Carruthers. Carruthers wrote a book entitled Intellectual Warfare in which he takes as his mission the need to "dismantle the European intellectual campaign to commit historicide against African peoples."

• According to Chicago Annenberg Challenge records, Carruthers's training session was a huge hit. It "received rave reviews, and has prepared the way for the curriculum readiness survey...". These teacher training workshops were funded by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
  

• Carruthers and other prominent thinkers from his Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations spoke often at Trinity United Church of Christ, Wright's church where Obama was a member.
  

• Asa Hilliard was another Afrocentric speaker funded by Annenberg; Hilliard had accepted an appointment to Wright's new elementary school where Wright said, "We need to educate our children to the reality of white supremacy." Wright's own educational philosophy, then, is "mirrored at the Annengberg-funded SSAVC, which sought out Hilliard's and Carruthers's counsel to construct its curriculum.

• Bill Ayers worked with Obama to fund these groups. Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dorn have book coming out next year entitled Race Course Against White Supremacy.
  

• In 1995, the same year "Obama assumed control of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he publicly rejected 'the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation'"

• If Obama read the Annenberg proposals of SSAVC he could not be ignorant of what they were about.

• In 1995 all funding decisions fell to Obama and the board; he would have read the proposals. He voted to keep funding these endeavors.
  

It should also be noted that the Chicago Anneberg Challenge's own evaluators acknowledged that Annenberg-aided schools showed no improvement in achievement scores.

So what's the point of all this? Why even bring it up? Because this is the man who half of the country wants to put in charge of education reform. Is this the kind of education reform we want? Is this what's best for American children? Radical education of ANY kind? Of course that's not what's in his platform! But what kind of judgment does this man display here?