Obama Annenberg Exposé

UPDATES: See below. Last address of the Annenberg Challenge was in north-suburban Northfield. Link to final list of grant recipients below.)***Free the Obama-Ayers Annenberg Documents! It is not news to anyone in Illinois that Chicago school reform has been spotty. Why else is one of Barack Obama's radical political allies from way back, um "spiritual advisers", the Rev. and state Rep. James Meeks, planning to invade tony New Trier HS in the northern suburbs on Chicago's opening day of school to demand more, more? But why doesn't the Rev. Meeks tackle Barack about that? (Why doesn't he tackle himself? Another wrinkle here--do you back this Barack?) Didn't Barack, along with his bomber buddy Bill Ayers, exercise amazing leadership in ushering in Chicago school reform in the 90s?

Thomas Lifson, The American Thinker on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) documents, currently embargoed by the U of I. Let's ramp up to ramming speed to challenge the Obama legend. Engage:

The cloak of media invisibility is slowly beginning to lift from Barack Obama's most important administrative leadership experience, helming an expensive educational reform effort in Chicago that failed to produce any measurable academic gains, according to the project's own final report.

Add in the fact that former Weatherman and admitted terrorist William Ayers (whom Obama describedin the Philadelphia debate as merely a "neighbor") was head of the operating arm of the CAC, working with Obama on distributing scores of millions of dollars to grantees in the wards of the city, and you have a topic that the Obama campaign wishes to avoid at all costs.

Bill Ayers, just a guy in the neighborhood. Chicago school reform a failure. Barack Obama an incompetent. And he is closely associated with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and gives a grant to a professed Maoist, Mike Klonsky. Labor professor Steve Diamond:

Who is Mike Klonsky? Well, on one level, he might just appear to be a protege of Bill Ayers in the education world. He received, as I detail below, a $175,000 grant from the Ayers/Obama-led Annenberg Challenge to run the Small Schools Workshop that he and Ayers started in Chicago to push their school reform agenda.

But that is only half the story. Klonsky was one of the most destructive hardline maoists in the SDS in the late 60's who emerged from SDS to form a pro-Chinese sect called the October League that later became the Beijing-recognized Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist).As chairman of the party, Klonsky travelled to Beijing itself in 1977 and, literally, toasted the Chinese stalinist leadership who, in turn, "hailed the formation of the CP(ML) as 'reflecting the aspirations of the proletariat and working people,' effectively recognizing the group as the all-but-official US Maoist party." (Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 228).

I know of no indications that Klonsky has ever expressed any regrets about that activity. Perhaps like his SDS comrade, Ayers, he, too, thinks he did not do enough back then. In my view they did more than enough.

Ed Lasky with more on the Annenberg challenge, Obama's thin claim to management leadership on his thin resume. In effect, it was political pork personified. Jim Geraghty, NRO again sums up Obama's astonishing secrecy about his records. Mayor Daley is coy about pushing for release of the records. John Kass on the Richard J. Daley library. One teeny snip:

Even before Shortshanks, when Chicago had a true reform mayor, his freedom of information officer was Clarence McClain, a former pimp with a bad wig who ended up in federal prison for taking bribes. Now that the Daleys run things, forget about it.

Andy McCarthy, NRO on Obama's terrorist next door. Chicago Daily Observer. NY Times blog calls it a kerfuffle. WSJ Washington Wire:

Obama criticized Clinton in the primary fight for stalling on the release of her White House schedules. She ultimately released them in March.

Free your docs, Barack. You can do it. Yes you can!

UPDATE: My friend John Ruberry's take, and another post from Thomas Lifson. Key Annenberg challenge documents that are available. (before the door slammed shut). Steve Diamond. U of Chicago records. Tom Maguire. Dan Riehl. Final grant recipients here and the last address? (Sharing the building? Easy Money Holding Co.:)

CHICAGO ANNENBERG CHALLENGE
770 FRONTAGE RD STE 108 NORTHFIELD, IL 60093

UPDATE: Well, I've never heard of this group, which was a north-suburban grant recipient (!? hardly an impoverished area), and I live in Wilmette and have followed education issues for at least 15 years: ALLIANCE FOR COMMUNITY EDUCATION
WILLMETTE, IL

1999 $125,000
And um, they spelled Wilmette wrong. More-- OK, found one related scholarly article citation for the Alliance for Community Education, Wilmette, by JT Coyle. Found Coyle's paper cited by Andrea Shindler, Wilmette, founder of the Foundation for Human Potential. Excerpt of a letter in support of the project by a UIC prof and to-be speaker at upcoming conference:

The conferences you directed on Art and the Brain (1988), Music and the Brain (1992), Sports.Dance, Movement and the Brain (1995), and Emotional Intelligence, Education, and the Brain (1997) are major contributions toward the integration of science, education, and human values. They are the only ones that I have ever attended in which artists and scientists, teachers and students, physicians and patients, and the general public seriously listened to each other, taught each other, and learned from each other. Much more is needed. The conference on Learning and the Brain: Myths and Realities, to be held this coming September, addresses the crucial distinction between neurological discoveries, on the one hand, and speculations regarding their educational implications, on the other hand. Without a clear understanding of this distinction, our children are in danger of becoming victims of failed educational experiments.

Danger indeed. (This emotional intelligence stuff is what they were doing in Wilmette while our test scores were dropping.) Ms. Shindler is now affiliated with the University of Illinois, Chicago, where Bill Ayers also teaches and per Huffpo donated to Barack Obama.