Is Bill Ayers Influencing ‘Race to the Top’?
What happened to Bill Ayers since his time in the spotlight during the last Obama campaign? We know that Ayers, along with wife Bernardine Dohrn and Code Pink leader Jodie Evans, supported the Gaza Flotilla, incited protests in Egypt with the Free Gaza Movement in 2010, and advised Occupy Wall Street protesters on strategy. After all, he’s had a lot of experience, having spent his youth bombing such places as the New York City police headquarters and the Pentagon, and trying to bomb a dance hall for U.S. servicemen and their dates.
In 2008, only a few dared raise questions about then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s association with Bill Ayers. Most questions focused on Bill Ayers’ past as co-founder of the domestic terrorist group Weatherman. But by 1995, Ayers was an established professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and living in the tony Hyde Park neighborhood. That year, he threw a political launch party for Obama’s run as a state senator. From that year until at least 2002, both men worked closely on “education” issues.
Through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the “brainchild” of Ayers, they pumped millions of dollars to radical groups to bring their programs to inner-city schools. They looked to expand the radical educational goals Ayers was promoting by training “urban teachers.”
I know from reading Ayers’ incoherent articles, syllabi, and books on education that his ultimate goal is to prepare foot soldiers for the coming revolution. And what better place to start than in the poorest and poorest-performing schools in inner-city Chicago? After all, in a well-off suburb you might get a parent looking over assignments and noticing the embedded Marxism and historical errors. Not likely, though, with the poor, single mother overburdened with child care. Not likely with an “undocumented” immigrant father who cannot speak English or read in his own language.
So what has Bill Ayers been doing on the education front since then? Ayers makes frequent appearances on college campuses. He was named vice president for curriculum studies at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2009. In 2011, he was the keynote speaker at the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE).
It seems that he has also been visiting the White House.
At least we thought so in 2009, when initial White House visitor logs were released. Then we were told to rest assured that it was a different Ayers there. The White House has since been very selective in releasing visitor rolls. Indeed, they are appealing a judge’s order to release them as a result of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch. Will we know before Election Day how many times Bill Ayers visited the White House? Probably not.
Ayers’ influence on the administration matters because there is a federal education initiative coming from which there will be no escape through school districts, private schools, or home schools. Furthermore, the rigorous, uniform standards promised by the Department of Education through a contest called Race to the Top are anything but — unless you use the standards of social justice indoctrination.
As I described in my report for Accuracy in Media (“Terrorist Professor Bill Ayers and Obama’s Federal School Curriculum”): under the new Common Core initiative attached to Race to the Top, all school children will be required to pass national tests now essentially being written by Ayers “pal” and close radical colleague, Professor of Education Linda Darling-Hammond. The close collegial relationship between the two is matched by their similar education philosophies. Be prepared to have your children tested for the right attitudes in “social justice” through such means as “collaborative discussion,” one of the actual criteria now in place for eleventh- and twelfth-graders.
How much influence has Ayers had? At this point, we don’t know exactly.
But we do know that in October 2009, he was one of the keynote speakers at a conference by the Renaissance Group, a group made up mostly of state colleges. We do know that at that same conference Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter spoke. So did Nevin Brown from a company called Achieve Inc., which is essentially project manager for Common Core. Also, like most of the players in this educational initiative, Achieve is the recipient of the largesse of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In his latest book Spreading the Wealth, Stanley Kurtz quite logically maintains that after the 2008 controversy Obama decided he would distance himself from Ayers and instead have a proxy like Linda Darling-Hammond working with the White House. Although Darling-Hammond does not share Ayers’ bomb-throwing history, she is on the same page when it comes to education.
So Ayers was at a conference with the two highest officials in the Department of Education. The video links for the conference on the Renaissance web page are not working. The director says he is having technical people looking into the problem. So far, this is all we have. That doesn’t mean there isn’t more.
Read more about the coming diktats of Common Core in my report here.
When a Radical-in-Chief is breast fed on communist precepts (Islamist ones too), all manner of treachery to America is inevitable.
In fact, the deconstruction of America becomes the leadership’s primary too. Any good communist/Marxist/socialist ( same dogma ) will tell you, that without co-opting the kiddies the mission will not be complete.
This is precisely why placing radical feminists, gay devotees, and others of a radical bent, is imperative within the school system.
In fact, by the time the kiddies go to college, they are met with a force so indoctrinating it is impossible not to describe many campuses as boot camps.
Therefore, having Valerie Jarrett as his top adviser was imperative for the Radical-in-Chief, she knows the indoctrinating terrain well -/2012/08/17/valerie-jarretts-communist-leanings-why-she-matters-serving-as-barack-hussein-obamas-alter-ego-cementing-the-redgreen-alliance-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
and then onto the later stages – /2012/08/21/the-paradox-pitfalls-of-liberal-democracies-in-a-time-of-immoral-relativism-the-havoc-wrought-by-leftist-academia-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
Mission accomplished.
This is from Blazingcatfur. It’s not just in America that the indoctrination is coming fast and furious.
http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.ca/2012/09/tdsb-promotes-polygamy-group-sex-to.html
“The individual who forwarded this to [Blazingcatfur] is a teacher. Have a look at the couplings the TDSB is promoting to your children. This poster is in Junior High Schools where 11 year old’s can read it.”
Please note that these remarks about BlazingCatFur are about what the Toronto (Ontario Canada) District School Board is doing. While the policies promoted by that school board are very disturbing – to me anyway – I’m not sure if Bill Ayers has influenced them directly. In other words, while interesting, these remarks probably don’t bear directly on the topic at hand.
Ho-what goes on in Ontario is very pertinent. That’s where Michael Fullan is based and his template for school reform is widely used in the US. The Alberta Wheel of Competency gets used in the US as well. Because OECD and UNESCO and the accreditation agencies are the international drivers of this ed reform template, you find a great deal of commonality across the West. For example, a great deal of the elementary Lnguage Arts Common Core Progression is on servers in New Zealand. Or was. That’s where Marie Clay was from.
You will see Linds Darling-Hammond, Michael Fullan, Michael Barber, Ken Robinson, Tony Wagner, Pasi Sahlberg and others regularly endorsing education reforms in various places around the world together. Always pushing the gut the transmission of cultural knowledge vision. As I said in the missing comment, you cannot separate this global ed vision from the global Transformation of the economy or the UN’s environmental program around Green Growth. Ayers never lost his taste for Revolution. He simply gained credentials to pursue it legally and profitably and less visibly. In education the Tranformational vision he is pursuing is called Reconstruction. It is social, political, economic, and global. And it is quite far along.
There are so many Radical Socialist ,Islamist, Terrorist (Domestic and International), Communist , Gay, Bisexual and Racist friends and associates in the USURPERS past and his PRESENT all of whom are given a ‘FREE PASS’ by the Lame stream EneMedia and whom the pathetic limp RINO’s dare not expose.
This is why the Affirmative Action, Teleprompter Kid the LYING, Unqualified, Inefficient, Incompetent, Gay , Celebrity USURPER Barry HUSSEIN Soetero Kardashian has such a strong chance of re-election.
The 2013 CASEL Guide I mentioned earlier in the missing comment is also for Preschool.
You may have noticed preschools have begun to advertise that they are accredited. This is how CASEL programs get to the pre-Kindergarten set. Head Start has also explicitly added an SEL component in the last year.
And these are not carveouts. Once every 2 weeks. The focus goes to the daily operation of the classroom or experience.
Former terrrist?
“Guilty as sin, free as a bird — what a great country!”. -terrorist Bill Ayers upon being aquitted. Never disavowed his group or the terrorist acts he perpetrated.
So why parrot the meme of “former terrorist”?
How about “Domestic terrorist”, “unrepentant terrorist”, or just plain “terrorist and good friend of Barack Obama, Bill Ayers”.
Good point.
That man should not be allowed near the minds of children with a million foot pole. I am quite confident that there are a few radical plants in my rural school district. With hindsight and understanding, I now know a few teachers from the public school that I attened who suscribed to this radical ideology.
They might as well come get me now, because I will be countereducating my children every step of the way. I have been told by an unemployed social worker that I was a child abuser because I stated that I was going to teach my children to value life and that abortion is wrong. I know some of these radicals in my school district already have beef with me because of our family’s values. I say bring it on.
I once walked this radical path. I turned the ship around when I saw these beasts for who they really are. Who would use children in this way? My family owns a small business, it is our lifeblood, our livelihood depends entirely on it. I will not have my children in a classroom that degrades our way of life and teaches disrespect to my children’s father whose blood, sweat, and tears built the business that feeds us and clothes us. I will not have my children learning the culture of death. They can keep trying to intimidate, threaten, and slander my family. I will not back down. Let’s turn this ship around.
So how do we, as individuals, turn this country around and stop the indoctrination of our children? Its been going on for a very long time and we are already seeing the results.
Bill Ayers was denied the title of “Professor Emeritus” when he retired from the Department (?School, Faculty?) of Education from Northwestern University. Chris Kennedy, a son of Robert Kennedy, is on the Board of Trustees, and he prevented Ayers’ getting the award because Ayers had dedicated a book to Sirhan Sirhan, who had assassinated his father, Robert Kennedy.
This is true.
Many good points Mary – and all good reasons to eliminate the conduit the radicals use with impunity to side-track our children and our freedoms – the Department of Education.
Ayers schmayers! You could photograph the reanimated corpse of Joe Stalin in the oval office giving dictation to Obama’s secretary and neither the media nor the Democrat constituency would bat an eyelash. As the saying used to go, “You’d have to catch him with a dead girl or a live boy to get to a scandal”, but Teddy Kennedy disproved the former and Barney Fwanks have drowned that baby- pun not intended but I’ll go with it anyway. No. No associations or scandals can kill the democrat zombie. The only thing that will restore order is one final electoral battle to determine if there are more of us than there are of them. May God help us.
10. Harry the Spiller ::
There is something to what you have said alright, about the blindness of the current regime.
However, there is more than one way and the upcoming election is only a fractional approach because it needs that each and every election has to be for what it means to be a citizen — that must be made true for every one of the candidates as well.
Constant vigilance and respect for the law is not a one-time thing.
Our elections cannot just be about counting noses in a dictatorship, we know how those turn out. We no longer have a legitimate government, for the same reasons we had a revolution to form this nation, we must oppose the destruction of what that effort established.
There are more of us than the entire consolidated criminal class, they must be made to feel the weight of law even in those places where they feel most strongly they are above the law — in government, all three branches. They have neither the power nor the authority to impose their will if we stand against them and refuse to submit.
We know who they are, where they are, also how they are most vulnerable — they must be made to taste the fear they try to instill in us; be made to feel the punishment they inflict by interference in every phase of our lives and the lives of our children.
Every day and in every way, each of us must bring reality to them with every breath they take. There are 80 million people in this country waiting for the other shoe to drop, if it’s required for the Republic is to be restored they will take to the front lines. We will be joined by yet another 50 million who will do all they can to bring order out of this chaos. That is the heart of America.
That’s what I think.
Otherwise, it’s eat it and shut up.
“Ayers’ influence on the administration matters because there is a federal education initiative coming from which there will be no escape through school districts, private schools, or home schools. Furthermore, the rigorous, uniform standards promised by the Department of Education through a contest called Race to the Top are anything but — unless you use the standards of social justice indoctrination.”
I’m so sick of the schools pushing “social justice.” Not only is it rank socialism, it’s dangerous too. People who follow it certainly don’t have much respect for the Constitution and they think that “quaint” little ideas like Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion are ideas that are best left on the ash heap of history. There are many people like Ayers out there, especially in the public school system. Every day we must be on guard to stop this by protesting against it. Keep an eye on the schools, on the teachers, and, most important, what they are teaching. Parents are the last line of defense we have. It’s a tough job, but a very important one.
If the American “justice” system were not so screwed up that walking talking pile of excrement Ayers and his nasty wife would be still serving time at hard labor.
Nostalgia for the 60′s blinds many in my generation to the true violent and criminal nature of people like Dohrn & Ayers.
Tell me, what is about your generation that can’t seem to throw off its past? The sixties generation can’t seem to understand the parade has past.
I think every generation is nostalgic for its youth, especially a youth that came during the “sex, drugs, & rock-n-roll” era, which was BTW a heck of a lot of fun.
Some of us grew up and some didn’t. I don’t have a clue why there are so many who didn’t. My epiphany came after I voted for hope & change in Jimmuh Cartuh, then started a family and bought a house at 13% interest and watched my paycheck go down the tubes with inflation running well over 10%. If one has any sense of personal responsibility that situation will wake your ass up in a hurry.
Creating more “social justice”-minded and idiotic Occupy Whatever types who’ll demand and support and leftist drivel no matter how dumb and/or harmful… it’s the Bill Ayers’ way!
When this bunch of anti-American propaganda pushers start influencing the current curriculum taught in private schools as well, then we will finally get some relief from the incessant pounding of radical ideology being forced down our throats in the public school system.
I do have hope for the failure on their part. What is the end game? I suppose they would require social justice litmus tests to gain admission to college and exclusion from thecwork force anyone who refuses to be reeducated. I have hope because we are already seeing the social justice brand of education unravel in higher education. If parents refuse paying to send their children to the higher indoctrination mills, then the whole thing falos flat on it’s face. It has already become unsustainable… pop goes the bubble. They can try as they might, but the piwer ultimately remains in the hands of the parents. I have already started educating my son for the possibility of pursuing a trade with the possibility of self employment just in case. No matter what happens, there will never not be a need for plumbers, carpenters, and electricians. Skills that can always be traded for survival.
I am also focusing strongly on math, reading, and writing. You can never go wrong with those skills. I also plan to teach them as much science as my skill level allows, with an emphasis on medical science. The social justice garbage is just a religion, I plan not to waste their time and brain cells on. I wasted enough of my life hating on capitalism and white men. I can see clearly all that I will not teach them.
What makes one a “former terrorist?” Must we refer to Charles Manson as a “former murderer?” Just call him a terrorist. That is what he is. Just because he has not personally committed acts of violence recently, as far as we know, does not make him a “former” anything.
Ok, I’ll do the Godwin.
Hitler is a “former dictator” and a “former Nazi”, isn’t he?
The one thing we can say about Ayers is that he is getting old. I hope he is in poor health!
He has offspring and ideological progeny.
Of course Ayers is involved. “De-education” of whole nations, as proposed by Gramsci and widely practiced in every socialist country, is a major prerequisite for installing a “permanent (fill in the blank) majority.”
I do not understand how this sub-human cretin or his concubine “wife” are still breathing! Aren’t there some faithful patriots in the Chicago area to hunt these dogs down????
If its the Chicago student population, he may need to teach them to read first.
Fostering and growing dicontent? Most parents are getting fed up and the
Students Left Behind, the star program from the Illinois Teachers Union will interfer.
Efforts to do the same on the US/Mexico border are failing although some have taken root in S. Cali. including open borders: ‘the lands used to belong to Mexico therefore illega;s have the right to be here’. They never respond when I ask about the Guatemalans, Irish, Chinese entering illegally.
As with any movement based on faulty premise, there will always be a countermovement that will take it down. It is important to take it down early and quickly.
Bill Ayers, seriously? Who cares about this guy? Oh yeah, according to the disgraced Sarah Palin, Obama “palled around” with terrorists! This is a waste of time and energy and reflects poorly on all conservatives except the most conspiratorially minded who serve to just make all of us look crazy. Bill Ayers is in the dust bin of history, leave him there and focus on what is important please.
I’m not so sure that he isn’t relevant.
There’s a saying that the past is prologue, ergo, nothing that goes into history’s dustbin can ever be considered irrelevant. To think so would mean not only setting ourselves up for failure, but failing to learn the lessons of the past.
Just some food for thought.
If your kids are spouting nonsense about AGW as a threat to Gaia, describe Geo. Washington mostly as a 18th century slave-owning hypocrite, think it’s only fair to pay reparations to the Indians and the blacks, and describe America’s presence in the world as malignant, you’re seeing the effects of Ayers’ influence on public school education. He controls Ed. schools’ cirricula: the teachers who teach your kids have first to graduate from schools that teach what Ayers dictates.
“Move along”, eh?
Et tu, Brutus?
There is absolutely nothing more important than what Ayers has done to our educational establishment. Of course he didn’t do it alone, but he is a leader in the movement that has already fundamentally transformed K – 12 schools. He is still on the vanguard, with all his totalitarian, collectivist aims intact. If you think that doesn’t matter, you don’t know what’s going on, as it were.
And you may not find it relevant that Obama was intimately involved with Ayers in this education revolution in Chicago. But I can’t imagine why not.
Please read this which I initially posted in April of 2009. Though a bit long winded, the ending is telling and in keeping with this article “Bill Ayers and the Kennedy Assassination” http://jer-jersplace.blogspot.com/2010/04/bill-ayers-and-kennedy-assassination.html
I still wonder reportedly exactly “WHY” OUR MORE VERBALLY BASED “WOMEN ALONE” MADE THIS MARXIST(ANTI-CHRIST) REGIME POSSIBLE? Marxism, denial of the set-apart Spirit & the ONLY SIN that NEVER can be forgiven in this world or the next! All I can think of is…Welcome to Adam’s world, even BEFORE the first-born & first-murderer, Cain was born! I’m betting his MOTHER put him up to it? just saying…
Social justice doesn’t enter my mind when I am being treated for an illness. I want only physicians who were not part of some race to the top quota program. I don’t think those in charge have ever run anything that didn’t put social justice ahead of everything else. I really think most programs, education and otherwise, should stay out of social justice. Merit should count for a lot and I’m not sure the current administration fully understands the concept of merit. Michelle’s ideas for improving school menus is being found to be unsuccessful; She would have learned a lot if she had surveyed the garbage cans. Before anyone tries to improve education, they should understand how it works.
Our school district, San Lorenzo, Ca set up small learning communities. The person who implemented them was the principle or VP at a high school in our district. His background was working many years for a project in Chicago that developed the small learning community model. I actually like the model. But touring the classroom, I could see from posters and work, that it was overtly leftist. This was like six years ago, before I’d heard of Obama and Annenberg, but it sounds the same. Here’s a bit of a blurb on one small group, Future Academy:
As enrollment expanded, so did the academy theme. Building on the original focus of serving the community through teaching and learning, the Future Academy broadened its scope. Through more varied opportunities to interact with the community, students ventured further into affecting substantial change in it.
Three years ago the brochure for this academy talked about how they would train the lawyers, social workers, and activists to work for social justice and environmental issues.
I think they are a little tamer then the vision the original planner, which was likely the Chicago administrator I spoke with.
Just saying, here’s a place to look to learn what they are planning.
Would like to learn more about it.
The small learning community work is actually the model for what the Common Core planned implementation looks like. The model is social interaction among the students and community action research. Some of it is based on Ted Sizer’s Essential Schools Model and others on the Standards for Teaching and Learning that were developed in Chicago out of National-Louis University with a Joyce Foundation grant. It is part of what the Chicago Annenburg Challenge was pushing as well.
Because the small learning community got Gates Foundation sponsorship it became part of their high school model for reform. The Gates Foundation is a primary funder of much of the curriculum being developed for the Common Core as well as most of the other initiatives associated with the actual classroom implementation. The biggest influence is the teacher evaluation measures it is pushing through its MET Project. We are seeing a lot of the administrators from participating urban school districts being shifted to being supers in their own districts to shift those unsuspecting parents and taxpayers away from the transmission of knowledge. The template can best be described as change the students’ values, attitudes, and beliefs and then track those attributes through data in what is called Continuous Improvement. Affective, not knowledge. In federal, state, and local computer archives. Called the Data Quality Campaign.
Perhaps George Orwell was just not imaginative enough about what an all-encompassing state would look like.
Any person that has attempted to kill other citizens has no right to say what a child should learn in school about how to treat other people.I teach and I’m sick of the leftist agenda that is being spoon fed to children and most of it without their parents knowledge.
Maybe the “progressives?” should stop aborting their children and stop trying to hyjack our children. My college student, liberal NYC public school educated daughter will be voting for Romney because I talk to her frequently about our history. I teach pre school and although I teach children to be kind to all, I don’t teach the Ayres dribble.Take the time to teach your children your values. It will work. She never says a techer is her hero, she says I am. Most children will choose their parents as their heros.
The Middle School social studies (Civics)textbook in Louisville, Kentucky describes “citizen” as “someone who lives in a community”. Louisville has a large Hispanic population, with a significant number of illegal aliens thrown into the population group. At school, children from the families of illegal immigrants are not informed of the legal pathways to becoming a citizen, or that without going through the naturalization process, they would have to be born in the US or have parents that are citizens– Instead their teacher assures them that living in the community makes anyone a citizen. I began to wonder if all this incorrect teaching has helped to create a misunderstanding of the laws by the illegal immigrant community. As a side note: The same teacher also identified the famous facade of the Supreme Court Building as the Lincoln Monument, including mis-identifying one of entrance statues as Lincoln. Sigh.
Other interesting and mystifying actions. A number of influential social studies teachers are attempting to remove “the foundation for Constitutional ideas” from the World History curriculum. The ideas of the Constitution are barely touched in 8th grade US History, (Birth of the Nation through the Civil War) and only lightly touched on in their Junior year (the post-Civil War to Modern Times). Including this subject during their 10th-grade year gave a solid foundation on the democratic concepts which guided the writing of the Constitution. Why is there a powerful movement – funded and promoted by the Toyata Corp – which seeks to re-write our history programs and leave out huge chunks of our former content? Toyata’s program took an advanced 10th grade curriculum and reduced to the I’8th grade level. I’d really like to gain some insight into this situation.
Ayers has been responsible for the “reforms” which seek to eliminate competition for grades,enforcing mandatory student group work on a daily basis (which allows the non-productive students to sponge off the work of the productive students), enforcing the merging of all-learning levels, as well as the advocating the de-valuation of accelerated students, (who are often treated with hostility by faculty as the obstacles to “an equal playing field”.