Let's Accept Michelle's Invitation

Michelle Obama, not surprisingly, wants to turn the page on Jeremiah Wright and focus on the issues:

“Let’s not elect somebody who has been there and hasn’t done it,” Michelle Obama said in a fairly clear reference to Clinton. She said education was the issue that most concerns parents and her husband is the only one who can make changes there.

“It’s going to take us being, as a nation, deeply passionate and angry about the failing education for all kids,” she said. “When was the last time we heard some really solid questions for these candidates on education in a debate? You know all about the issues in our personal lives, but ... education is the thing we should be angry about.”

I completely agree, so let's talk about Barack and education reform.

An excellent launching point is this April 2, 2008 Slate piece by Alexander Russo, but eventually we will segue to Obama's relationship with unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers. 

The Obama/Ayers soundbite is this:  Obama and Ayers (a professor of education) worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge for several years in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to reform Chicago's public schools.  The extent of their relationship is not clear, since Obama has been opaque on this topic both in a televised debate and at his website.  However, Ayers was instrumental in founding the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Obama was the group's first chairman, so there is something being concealed there.

Let's start with Slate:

Chicago School Days
Obama's lackluster record on education.

...the story of Obama's involvement suggests that on similarly contentious fronts involving national education policy, like the No Child Left Behind Act, he might respond the same way—holding back when powerful interest groups collide, only to support the status quo of local control in the end. The candidate's Chicago record on education also raises questions about his much-vaunted ability to bring different sides together to find lasting solutions.

Obama's links to local school councils began more than 20 years ago, when they were first being created. His South Side community organizing group, the Developing Communities Project, supported the 1988 reform act that created the councils. A decade later, when Obama was a second-year state senator, he served on the board of several local education foundations that had supported the councils and chaired the board for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a $50 million philanthropic effort that supported local control.

...

Obama was uniquely well-placed to take the lead in mediating this battle. He had a relatively strong background in community and education issues. He was friends and pickup-basketball buddies with Arne Duncan, who was then in charge of magnet schools (and has since taken over Vallas' job). Obama also knew Vallas, who liked him. Then, as now, he was considered a politician who could unify people and resolve challenging conflicts...

After the outcome was clear, Barack finally ratified the emerging consensus:

In being so late to the debate, however, Obama didn't really have to stand up to anyone—not the groups he was affiliated with, not Vallas, not Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. He was just approving the final result. He remained loyal to his roots, but only when it was easy to do so...

...Based on Obama's actions in Chicago in 1999, it's hard to imagine him taking charge of the continuing debate over whether and how No Child Left Behind should be renewed. Forced to take a side, Obama's record suggests that, ultimately, he would be sympathetic to local autonomy. But there's not much evidence to show that he would be able to help mend deep and abiding schisms between testing hawks and local-control advocates. And without strong and unifying national leadership, our troubled public-education system stands little chance of making the dramatic improvements that it needs.

Well, well.  Please note the reference to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, because thereby hangs a tale.

In a White House ceremony in December 1993, philanthropist Walter Annenberg announced the Annenberg Challenge, putting $500 million towards efforts to reform public education.

Bill Ayers and two others formed and led a "Working Group" that produced Chicago's grant application; in 1995 Chicago was awarded $49.2 million, creating the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund ("CACF") in a well-publicized civic event.

The first chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund was Barack Obama.  This is disclosed on Obama's Senate forms and he is mentioned in a history of the CACF [link, p. 54 of the text].  The board was responsible for hiring an Executive Director, Ken Rolling, who should have been involved on a daily basis (and does anyone know anything about Mr. Rolling?).

The "Working Group" mentioned above morphed into the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, co-chaired by Bill Ayers and one of his two co-founders of the Working Group.  The Collaborative then worked closely with the CACF for several years.  Ayers' role is noted in this history and at his own website on his resume.

A sidebar - my guess is that this link between Ayers and Obama has gone unreported because of the name game; despite a close working relationship, the Collaborative and the CACF don't leap off the page as being obviously associated, although the Ayers resume is clear enough - "The Annenberg Challenge" appears in parentheses right next to "Chicago School Reform Collaborative".

So, what was the nature of the Ayers/Obama relationship back in simpler times?  Obama was asked about Ayers in the Philadelphia debate and described him as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago...".  It was left to Hillary to mention the widely publicized link between Obama and Ayers, both of whom once  overlapped on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago.

Obama's website then produced a Freudian's delight - a "Fact Check" (echoing the famous Annenberg  FactCheck.org) purporting to explain the Obama/Ayers relationship but omitting any mention of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund.

A bit later, Obama was asked about Ayers during his Fox news interview and gave an answer that should have left reporters scratching their heads and doing some research: - Obama described an overlapping board membership with Ayers that couldn't be the Woods Fund of Chicago:

Now, Mr. Ayres [Ayers] is a 60 plus year old individual who lives in my neighborhood, who did something that I deplore 40 years ago when I was six or seven years old. By the time I met him, he was a professor of education at the University of Illinois.

We served on a board together that had Republicans, bankers, lawyers, focused on education, who worked for Mayor Daley. Mayor Daley, the same Mayor Daley probably who when he was a state attorney prosecuted Mr. Ayres’s wife for those activities, I (INAUDIBLE) the point is that to somehow suggest that in any way I endorse his deplorable acts 40 years ago, because I serve on a board with him.

The Woods Fund of Chicago focused on poverty and did not work for the mayor; the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund focused on education, but did not work for the mayor.  A successor group, the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Schools Education Fund, worked for the mayor and focused on education, but Bill Ayers was not a member (his father, Thomas Ayers, and his brother, John Ayers, overlapped with Obama).

So what does it mean?  Well, it is not going to be possible to evaluate this Obama/Ayers link until Obama is a bit more forthcoming about it, so having him or his campaign provide some basic facts would be an excellent starting point for some enterprising reporter.

One might well ask - how would Obama characterize his involvement with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund?  This story says he was involved; this one, also by Alexander Russo of the later Slate piece, says Obama was a non-player in Chicago school reform.]

How closely did Obama work with the fund's executive director, Ken Rolling (and what does Mr. Rolling have to say about this)?

What did Obama know of Bill Ayers' involvement (which the rest of us now know to be extensive)?

Eventually, the CACF was viewed as a failure (the final report says it had "little impact") - what did Obama learn from that?

Finally, there is a question of shared values; setting aside Ayers' bomb-tossing proclivities of the 70's, he has a very hard left approach to education; for example, he explained to Hugo Chavez and a Venezuelan audience that public education was a way to promote the revolution [and lots more here from Ed Lasky].  How much of this did Obama know then?  Or is this just another situation, as with Jeremiah Wright, where Obama simply didn't know anything about the fellow with whom he was associating?

In some ways, Obama's experience is analogous to Hillary's failed health care initiative of the mid 90's - he tackled a publicized, important, politically charged topic, and belly-flopped.  The obvious difference is that his failure is not being discussed.  And it's possible he was merely a figurehead who was hoping to take credit for success but distanced himself from failure; I leave it to his spinners to present that lack of interest in education reform more positively.

As to where this story is headed - who knows?  I don't think Hillary's staffers are regular readers here, but they may have picked it up from Global Labor,  Larry Johnson or Jeralyn Merritt, and they sure could use this now.  McCain's people and the RNC ought to like this story since McCain is comfortable bashing Ayers, but September or October may be fine for them.

The MSM has done nothing here, unsurprisingly.  As to Rush, Hannity, and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy - other than Hot Air, American Thinker, and Wizbang this is getting no traction.  Michael Barone wrote about how the Ayers story had broken through to the MSM, but they have a long way to go.  And we call ourselves a Noise Machine!

A few excerpts appear after the break to document points made above.

1.  The Working Group [link]

When three of Chicago's most prominent education reform leaders met for lunch at a Thai restaurant six years ago to discuss the just-announced $500 million Annenberg Challenge, their main goal was to figure out how to ensure that any Annenberg money awarded to Chicago "didn't go down the drain," said William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Ayers, who was at that lunch table in late 1993, helped write the successful Chicago grant application.

...Having secured Annenberg funding for Chicago, the working group would soon evolve into a more formal organization, albeit with strong ties to the groups that wrote the grant proposal. Initially run out of shared space in the offices of the Cross-City Campaign and administered through an existing philanthropic organization called the Donors Forum, the Chicago Challenge soon became its own new foundation with status as an independent fiscal agent. By late 1995, Ken Rolling had been named executive director, a board of directors had been established, and the first round of grants had been awarded. Rolling lacked experience in education but came from the foundation world and was well-versed in community organizing. The board, which was intended to set policy, raise matching funds, and hire an executive director, included prominent educators and business leaders. A second entity, the newly-created Chicago School Reform Collaborative, was also established. Its twenty-plus members were elected from the group of educators and advocates who had helped shape the grant proposal. Initially, at least, this offshoot of the working group functioned as the operations arm of the Chicago Challenge. However, this situation created procedural and ethical concerns and in time the Collaborative was transformed into an advisory body.

Comments

[Danube of Thought]

What's the big deal about Ayers? Didn't he always phone in advance to warn about his bombs? Somebody said so--was it Appalled, or was it Foo Bar?

[Tom Maguire]

Ok, you're kidding, but...

The "we didn't kill anyone" defense sort of fell short yesterday.

[hrtshpdbox]

A superbly well-linked and well-reasoned analysis of the salient aspects of MO's favorite issue (politically, just how clueless IS she)?

"Didn't he always phone in advance to warn about his bombs?"

ROFL, I'll bet Ayers now rues the day his pal Barry decided to seek national office.

[Thomas Collins]

OK, I accept Michelle's invitation. here are my questions:

1. Will President Obama use the bully pulpit of the Presidency to exhort elementary, middle and high schools to emphasize the teaching of basic reading and comprehension, computation and experimental science skills, or will he give psychobabble speeches about diversity and self-esteem?

2. Will President Obama support vouchers so that parents who currently don't have the financial ability to leave a failing public school will have that choice?

3. Will President Obama reject the Weather Underground view of America and promote the view of America as a grand experiment that holds out the best chance in a fickle world for humans to pursue life, liberty and happiness? And will he exhort American history teachers to point out the benefits of the American experiment? Will he exhort teachers, when they teach the history of slavery, to introduce the students to the scholarship regarding Arab and black African involvement in the slave trade, or will he promote the view that slavery is simply the sin of the evil white man?

3. President Obama has said he would meet with our enemies abroad. Will he meet with our friends here such as Thomas Sowell and seek out their views on what is wrong with contemporary American education and how to fix it?

4. Will President Obama exhort his pals on the Harvard Law Review to produce legal scholarship supporting the ability of public school principals to have autonomy in the setting of school rules? Will he set the tone in the Presidency that the ACLU suing public schools trying to foster a sense of discipline helps noone and hurts the poor?

5. Candidate Obama has emphasized the importance of the rhetorical aspects of the Presidency. Will President Obama use his rhetorical skills from the Presidential bully pulpit to promote excellence in education or to pander to leftist special interest groups?

6. Will President Obama articulate clearly his views on what constitutes educational excellence (whether it be education in the liberal arts, mathematics, natural and social sciences, fine arts, music or trades)?

7. Will President Obama denounce the view held by many in the academy that an individual classified by the academic establishment as a minority, by virtue of power relations, cannot be a racist? Will he urge our educational institutions to educate students about racism in all its aspects and all its practitioners, of whatever race, creed or color?

Yes, by all means, Michelle, let's focus on the issues and have truly honest conversations.

[who, me?]

Sickening, that the moneyed Annenberg initiative has been coopted, courtesy of the usual suspects, into more Marxist poison.

[megapotamus]

Ayers, miserable worthless rat-bastard that it is, has abused the usually beneficial sentiment of let-bygones-be-bygones to claim a perch to preach his malignant lunacy. For this crowd NOTHING is ever over. Obammy claiming infancy as a defense falls down over this fact. Knowing Ayers virtuless ambitions reveals that Barry is as slippery as they come. Old "Museum Council" Hillary could learn a thing or two. Remember O'Banya claiming of Ayers, "This guy is a professor of English and someone who served blah blah blah..." A faulty memory or he really is not that acquainted with Ayers? None of the above. Barry knows damn good and well what Ayers is, what he intends and how he intends to accomplish it. Ayers wants to bring Marxist/Castroist/Chavist revolution HERE. Just as the Weathermen vowed to bring the war home. The crapulent traitor knows his own mug is, um, problematic so what to do? In extremis, appears BHO. Ayers launches his political career and the rest is not yet history. Barry is ignorant of this? Who the hell is he, Helen Keller?

Ayers is going to make Wright look like Hsu.

Wright.
Ayers.
Rezko.
WAR! Huh! Good God, y'all!
Wha-ut is it good for?

[Jane]

Now DOT, you can't judge a man by the company he keeps. Can you?

[DebinNC]

Obama on education in his PA race speech:

"We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students."

Obama has identified the problem. Has he articulated the solution to segregated schools? Don't most cities have a minority-to-majority school choice plan in place?

[MagicalPat]

... education is the thing we should be angry about.”

Is there anything this woman is not angry about???

[Enlightened]

OT - kinda creepy - The DC Madam committed suicide????? Hmmmm.

[Sue]

You know, I read somewhere that the segregated schools in DC were the best schools in the country. If you look at African/Americans who have succeeded in this country, segregated schools didn't hurt them. Not that I'm advocating for segregation, but I don't think desegregation accomplished its goal. I think democrats have thoroughly shown they don't have a clue about education. Not to educate, anyway.

[Porchlight]

Enlightened,

That buzz you hear is the sound of all of DC going "hmmmmmm." Everyone who isn't sighing with relief, that is.

[in_awe]

Perhaps Obama should try balancing Wright's view of the nation and its problems, with that espoused by Bill Cosby. (He even has a PhD in Education.)

Cosby has been roundly attacked by grievence mongers because he rightly assigns co-ownership of the ills afflicting the black community on the black community itself - and the race baiters like Wright.

Unfortunately, Obama will attempt to avoid taking a firm stance in public. Instead he hopes once again that his non-clarifying, clarifications relative to a person will be enlarged to represent his stance on topics he won't take on directly.

[Gmax]

This may be a Soviet style suicide. You know the kind with multiple gunshot wounds to the head.

[MikeS]

I don't believe that Obama's recollections about Ayers are foggy. When Obama met him, Ayers was a famously controversial figure who has made no effort to stay out of the news since. Yet it seems the fogginess persists to this day.

It's apparent, that within the Obama Campaign, there have been discussions about what to say regarding the Ayers Connection. Obama's recollections of Ayers would certainly have been refreshed then.

After careful consideration the Campaign chose this "foggy recollection" of a neighbor narrative which includes some pretty egregious omissions.

So, the foggy recollection is an outright lie, and the omissions are suspicious. I can't help thinking that there is another Ayers Connection shoe, out there somewhere, waiting to drop.

[clarice]

Sue. My Black friends cried when the DC schools desegregated--Dunbar High School (Black) was one of the best high schools in the country; certainly it turned out more really accomplished Black students than any other. At the moment, the DC public schools remain a joke and Dunbar is at the bottom of the heap of high schools.

[Neo]

"His (Obama's) campaign is not being derailed by his race, it's being derailed by a person who doesn't want him to prove that we have made great advances in this country," Huckabee told reporters. ... "Jeremiah Wright needs for Obama to lose so he can justify his anger, his hostile bitterness against the United States of America," Huckabee said.

[Jeff]

I live in Oregon, a soon to be battleground state, and Obama's media offensive (and it is offensive) is in full swing.

His education ad is... not worth the effort. Basically, somehow he personally is going to expand early childhood education (indoctrination), hire more teachers (I thought that was a local function), pay them more (I know that's a local function), and basically shower money on the problems from the Federal level. Then he goes into PSA mode about how that's not enough - parents actually have to act like parents.

For a few seconds at the end he actually sounds a bit like a Republican.

Basically he's offering a chicken in every pot... with the reminder that we've got to pluck the bird.

Ah, here it is, although not with the NC reference: http://youtube.com/watch?v=pdCEg8elaYc

Oh, and Mr. Obama, I understand you went to either private schools (Catholic, and the very tony Punahou Prep school) in Hawaii, and I have no idea what in Indonesia. Punahou isn't for the financially destitute.

[Jane]

Ya know, shouldn't Obama be advocating segregated schools, what with that difference in clapping thing?

[Rick Ballard]

"I think democrats have thoroughly shown they don't have a clue about education."

Sue,

I disagree strongly. I believe that the Dems are fully aware of the fact that even a modestly educated electorate would see through a "no results" charade such as that perpetrated by Obama and Ayers with Annenberg money. It takes a very deep level of ignorance to keep falling for the same smiles and lies decade after decade after decade.

Actual education is a much bigger existential threat to Democrats than is islamofascism. We're talking about their phoney-baloney jobs here!

[JorgXMcKie]

Evidently a guy in Indiana did manage to kill himself some years ago by using a power drill to drill multiple holes in his head. Just kept drilling til he hit a bad spot, I guess.

The joke where I came from was the guy found in the river, wrapped up in about 50 feet of chains and padlocks. "Just like the rotten S.O.B. Stolt more chain than he could swim with."

[JorgXMcKie]

Oh, and about MO's anger. I belief their is no plumbing its depths. She' angry about everything, all the way down. I sincerely doubt if becoming the First Lady will affect it much. Perhaps electing her Empress of the World would, but I've got my doubts.

[Sue]

Clarice,

I can't remember where I read the article, but it was about the unintended consequences of desegregation. From what I remember, those who were advocating for desegregation weren't doing so to break up the black schools and send black students to white schools, but to put pressure on the all white school boards to put more money into the black schools. The ruling turned out to hurt them by taking them away from black role models.

[pagar]

IMO, Ayers and his friends have bought America to This

"
In the US, of course, the NeoCommunists were the Sixties Radicals who decided to carry on a "Long March through the Institutions." That means the college faculties, the high schools, the media, Hollywood, and government. Today, major foundations started by Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie have turned Hard Left. Capitalist money is turned against the very engines of prosperity."

"Hillary Clinton's puppy love for Saul Alinsky, when she was a college student in the Sixties, is symbolic of the way the "new" radicals fell in love with the old, hard-line Communists. Hillary Clinton started her adult life as a millenarian zealot, following the old prophet of radicalism. It's anybody's guess what she believes today, but I suspect it's not the Methodism of her youth. The methods of the Democratic Party today are taken straight out of Saul Alinsky's playbook."

"A new Stalin-Nazi alliance is alive in Europe and parts of the US, as Leftists openly ally themselves with Islamic Fascists. Islamists worship Allah and the Leftists worship atheism, but the ideological differences are not that big compared to the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Common enemies and common goals overcome doctrinal differences, to be worked out later."

Another great James Lewis article at American Thinker.

[ROA]

If Obama thinks parents need to act like parents, why did he let his daughters listen to Reverend Wright spew ludicrous conspiracy theories week after week?

[Danube of Thought]

I think that in general the GOP is almost (but not quite) equally to blame for the travesty of modern public education. Once they acquiesced in the intrusion of the federal government and federal money, the game was up. The rest is just mere quibbling over details.

No principled conservative, not even a principled Republican, would get anywhere near such crap as "No Child Left Behind." By all means, leave 'em behind, where the people who know best (parents, local school authorities) can see to their education. But that train left the station long ago.

[Sue]

Rick,

We're talking about their phoney-baloney jobs here!

I still say they are clueless about how to educate. And by that I mean, teaching students reading, writing and arithmetic, with recess, geography, health, english and history thrown in for good measure. And music once a week. You can tell when I went to school, can't you?

[SunnyDay]

One of Palfrey's "girls" committed suicide in January, too.

[PaulL]

I don't think Obama said that he disagreed with Wright's views on education, that we need to put lessons into rap music format in order for black children to learn them.

[Sue]

I wonder what Thomas Sowell thinks about black children not being able to learn like white children? I sure wouldn't want to put my learning abilities up against his. And I doubt he learned much different than I did, even though he is from a slightly older generation.

[clarice]

Hill can't do much with this

[Enlightened]

Well, Hill can simply say "I disown Bill, can we just MoveOn, this conversation doesn't help Chelsea"......

[DebinNC]

Re Operation Chaos in NC and IN next Tuesday: Does anyone know which Dem would be a weaker opponent in the Fall at this point? I don't, so I'm planning on choosing the Rep ballot. Plus, I don't want to look back and think I enabled either of these Dems winning the WH.

[willis]

"and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students."

Aren't the teachers educating those black, inner city students mostly black. Aren't the school administrators and school boards of these inferior inner city schools mostly black? Isn't the per-capita spending on these black, inner city schools as high as any public school system anywhere? What would Obama change to fix the problem?

[Ennis]

"I live in Oregon, a soon to be battleground state"

What "battleground"?

There are too many old hippies and moonbats living there now. All it is now is an extension of the Northern Californian socialist workers paradise.

[Porchlight]

DebinNC,

At the Presidential level, I'm not sure there's much downside to Operation Chaos. Hillary might be the stronger opponent IF she didn't have to stomp on Obama to get the nomination. It seems pretty clear that if that happens, the Dems will be in deep yogurt in the general and beyond.

However, there may be downticket Rep primary races where your vote is needed. I voted Rep in TX for what it's worth - I wasn't brave enough to take the OC plunge.

[Scott Meyer]

Thank you for taking the time to pull this together. I will read it all tonight. I think education is an issue that Republicans could use to undermine the Democratic chokehold on blacks. Use it as a useful funding mechanism that circumvents all of the poverty merchants doing nothing in the 50 largest cities in the country were drop-out rates exceed 50 percent--according to a recent study by a foundation headed by Colin Powell, his wife, and Mort Kondracke's wife.

[kim]

Ah, Ennis. Hiya.
==========

[PWT]

Bigger Thomas 'aint gonna get the keys to the car this time around.

[kim]

Charter schools; public school accountability, by contract, with students, teachers, and parents.
===================================

[Enlightened]

Ruh Roh. Northwestern just cancelled an honorary degree for the good Rev. Now that might hurt.

[susan]

Wright, Ayers, Dohrn, Rezko, Khalidi, Alsammarae...does Barack Obama have any SANE friends??? If he becomes president, maybe we'll need to form a new cabinet post to continually evaluate the mental stability of the president and his associates, and another one just to keep Ayers hand away from "the button"!!!

[Bill O'bama]

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Rev. Wright, but at least the man told the truth - as he believes it. He said Barry talks as a POLITICIAN....and that is ALL any one needs to know about Barry despite his nose in the sky rhetoric about hope and change and "yes we can" - well sure you can, what you can is take a looooong summer vacation after IN and NC :)

[clarice]

Hill's women pals get caught trying to suppress the Black vote in N Car.
Crookess v Pansy

[Enlightened]

What a Cabinet:

President - Barack Hussein Obama
First She-Devil - Michelle Obama
Vice President - ???????
Secretary of Education - Bill Ayers
Secretary of State - Bernadette Dohrn
Treasury Secretary - Tony Rezko
Spiritual Advisor - Jeremiah Wright
Secretary of DHS - Aiham Alsammarae
Attorney General - Rashid Khalidi

Holy Carp.

[DebinNC]

I wish there was a remedy for the achievement gap that didn't involve parental involvement, but there isn't. Until more black parents are willing to oversee homework and obliterate the studying = "acting white" pathology, nothing will change. I don't know why, but, much more so than whites, black parents subcribe to the "It's the school's job to teach" philosophy, limiting their contribution to getting them dressed and on the school bus.

[JM Hanes]

TM:

From the source of your last excerpt, I found this bit equally telling:

It is not known what, if any, pressure was exerted on the Challenge to fund members of the working group, but it is easy to imagine that the group exercised influence on expanding the number of grants awarded to different networks. For perhaps the first year, the working group -- now called the Collaborative -- was highly involved in key activities and decisions. For example, the original sessions outlining how the application process would work were conducted by the Collaborative, according to Bill McKersie. McKersie wrote his 1996 dissertation on the education reform work of several Chicago-area foundations (and at one point was under consideration as the executive director of the Challenge). "The Collaborative was very much running the show," said McKersie of the three community meetings he attended in 1995. "They were way out in front of the staff," he said.

In fact, the working group was responsible for reviewing the first round of applications from organizations in Chicago that wished to be funded. According to Hallett, the group members did not formally approve grants. "There was no intention for the Collaborative to be the grant-making entity," said Anne Hallett. "They simply made recommendations, and in any case we were already staffed [with separate Chicago Challenge employees] when the first grants were made." However, others suggest that the working group/Collaborative remained influential throughout the formative period of the Challenge. In addition, Bill McKersie points out that many of those in control of the process were neophytes. "A set of people who didn't have a lot of experience in grant making got control of the process," said McKersie.

If Obama had been a working member of the Collaborative, I think you'd have a much better case for tying him to Ayers. If, in typcial non-profit fashion, the Challenge's Executive Director played liason between the Collaborative and his board, Obama and Ayers could easily have brushed little more than elbows on this operational front. I won't serve on non-profit Boards where individual Board members don't have direct contact with organization staff, because I've found that Executive Directors almost universally minimize internal conflicts and external difficulties and, more often than not, work hardest of all to minimize Board interference. In this case, there's a second degree of separation between staff and the Collaborative as well.

Perhaps someone else can ferret out more convincing evidence of an Ayers/Obama axis of evil; so far, I'd say this story comports almost perfectly with Obama's habitual efforts at positioning himself to plant his name on success and walk away from failure. Chairing the Challenge probably gave him access to higher, and more well-heeled, powers than Ayers. Maybe none of the literature mentions him because he was otherwise not present, as your Slate source rather more than implies. Team Obama has clearly tried to airbrush the Annenberg connection out of the picture. It raises some pretty obvious questions about Obama's leadership on the education front; I wouldn't be surprised if the Ayers' factor never even crossed his Chicago-based campaign gurus' radar till it landed on their doorstep. I could only marvel at their laughable counter to Ayer's infamous Sept. 11th snippet: "The interview occurred prior to publication." There's your context!

On education, per se, the Annenberg story here is rather fascinating. We find two popular conservative conceits, decentralized control and test-based metrics in opposition to each other at the heart of what appears to be the Anneburg failure. Indeed, the kind of non-governmental initiatives and experimental modeling the Annenberg Challenge in Chicago might be said to represent could find considerable approval in Republican circles. The assessment being culled for references to Obama and Ayers seems well worth pondering in its own right.

[Ed]

Vice President- ?????? I think its fairly obvious that position is held for Richardson.

Why are Obamabots bringing up Peter Paul now that they are loosing? Isnt that dividing the party?

[JM Hanes]

Clarice:

From your voter suppression link:

A D.C. advocacy group called Women's Voices, Women Vote is being accused of waging a high-tech voter suppression campaign, after voters in predominantly black districts in North Carolina began receiving automated phone calls implying that they hadn't properly registered to vote in the upcoming Democratic primary.

I had to laugh. There they go again, using Republican tactics. Let not the force be troubled, however, I hereby throw in my rhetorical (Republican) towel on the issue!

[rita forte]

Ken Rolling...? Wasn't he that guy who killed his whole family in Wisconsin? Yeah, that's it! Now we've got Obama!!!