Amazingly, instead of disowning Ayers — which would make a lot more sense — Obama’s rebuttal document defends the man who implicated himself in terror bombings in his own 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days. The document calls it a “lie” that Ayers is an “unrepentant domestic terrorist” and that “the impression of Ayers’s good citizenship is incorrect.” It attempts, with endorsements from Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and two university professors, to make the case that Ayers is really a model citizen.
A model citizen — at least if you overlook the sworn congressional testimony that ties Ayers to a murder…
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‘They Wanted More School’
Obama on education reform.
In his book The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama tells of a “youth town hall meeting” he conducted in 2005 at Thornton Township High School, in what he describes as a predominantly black suburb of Chicago. To prepare for the visit by their newly elected and highly popular senator, students there were surveyed about the quality of their education, with the idea that they could present their concerns.
Obama writes:
“[T]heir number one issue was this: Because the school district couldn’t afford to keep teachers for a full school day, Thornton let out every day at 1:30 in the afternoon. With the abbreviated schedule, there was no time for students to take science lab or foreign language classes.
How come we’re getting shortchanged? they asked me. Seems like nobody even expects us to go to college, they said.
They wanted more school.”
Senator Obama probably did not know that the average teacher in Thornton Township District earned an impressive $83,000 that year, short days notwithstanding. (The figure does not include administrators, who made much more.)
In fact, more than one-quarter of the district’s teachers made more than $100,000 in 2005, according to figures compiled from the Illinois Board of Education by Champion News under the state’s freedom of information laws.
But Obama did at least identify the short school day at Thornton as a problem. Unfortunately, he has been less than audacious about the same problem in the nearby City of Chicago — a place where the teachers’ union that strongly supports him has been shortchanging children for decades in precisely this same way.
The elementary-school day and year in Chicago proper are the shortest of any major U.S. city. It lasts five hours and 45 minutes, and the schools are open just 174 days per year. This is entirely a result of the intransigence of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), a staunch ally of Barack Obama and an early endorser of his presidential candidacy.
The CTU has vigorously resisted all attempts to increase instruction time in Chicago schools. In 2007, the CTU thwarted Mayor Richard M. Daley’s attempt to make teachers teach for full school days. They negotiated a new contract that contained no extra hours but significant pay raises for the next four years.
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David Freddoso –
• Life Lies – 08/17
• Life with Obama – 08/13
• Dreams From My Farmer – 08/05
