I don’t think a friendship with Mr Ayers, in and of itself, disqualifies anyone from the Presidency. Mr Ayers is known as a reformer and so it is natural that someone else known as a reformer would find him of interest.
No, that’s not too interesting.
What IS interesting is the nature of the reforms being planned. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge is truly an Obama-style project – it had vague goals that were not designed to be understood, the method in which these goals were to be achieved was as clear as mud, and the outcome was muddled at best. Read the 1999 and 2003 reports, or at least as much as you can understand of them, and I think you will get the idea.
As far as I can tell, the real point of the Annenberg Challenge was a bureaucratic turf battle between businesspeople, who wanted students who could read and write, the teachers and administrators working in the schools, and this fuzzy “decentralized” system of councils that the Challenge promoted. The Annenberg Challenge reports assessed student performance but did not try to understand what was changed in the classroom, what happened there and why the outcomes were as they were. The whole thing was attention to bureaucratic inputs and turf fighting.
The opaque educational bureaucratic language made reading those reports an exercise in masochism and I’m sure this was quite deliberate. There was no feeling like you were in the classroom or personally involved with anything, or that the people writing the report cared about students or teaching.
The reason I go into this in detail is that I believe this is a glimpse of how Obama would run things. He would go for style over substance and he would wind up accomplishing nothing. He had $50 million to blow in the Annenberg Challenge, and it essentially vanished into thin air.
If you want to see a reason to condemn Obama, I think his role as Chairman of the Challenge is a good start. Not because of any personal associations but because he had a chance to make a difference and accomplished nothing.
D
