The Trouble with Ayers

Linda Lenz does lame damage control for the Obama campaign on the Obama Ayers Annenberg Challenge papers in the Sun Times. She attempts to whitewash Bill Ayers by citing his current position and writings as a UIC education professor, then drags down some distinguished Chicagoans who were also associated with the CAC. Nowhere does she mention Ayers' radical past, nor Obama's deliberate and long association with him, professional and political. Sen. Sweetness and Light, Hope and Change has a lot to explain.

Blogger and law professor Steve Diamond, who has closely followed these papers, along with Stanley Kurtz, takes Lenz (and the Sun Times, for failing to detail her relationships) to task. In part:

Ms. Lenz is associated with the Alliance for Excellent Education on whose board sits Obama education advisor Linda Darling-Hammond. And on Ms. Lenz' board of directors at the Community Renewal Society is Warren Chapman, one of the founders of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and a former staff member of the Joyce Foundation on whose board served Barack Obama.

While Ms. Lenz brushes over the self-proclaimed "radical" nature of school reform in Chicago she also ignores the fact that a central goal of the Annenberg Challenge led by Ayers and Obama was to bolster flagging Local School Councils, a new power center in the schools set up in the wake of a teachers strike to watchdog teachers and principals.

And although in a recent talk she gave she lauds the research conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research of the University of Chicago, she ignores their studied conclusion that the Annenberg Challenge was a failure. $160,000,000 down the drain and no improvement in student outcomes.

This was a criminal misuse of resources, putting political correctness and building a political base first-- and a crying shame for those students left behind. Barack Obama has a lot to explain.

HT Bill Baar, also for this from The Real Barack Obama:

Lenz’s objectivity is zilch, as the Obama/Ayers connections continue:

• Chicago Catalyst’s largest funder is The Joyce Foundation¹, upon whose board Obama served for eight years, beginning in 1994, during which time, in 1995, “Anne Hallett of the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform, William Ayers of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Warren Chapman of the Joyce Foundation” proposed the CAC (Also see Diamond’s Annenberg-Gate).
• Mike Klonsky, who runs Progressives for Obama, is a former member of Lenz’s Catalyst Chicago editorial board, as is John Ayers, Bill Ayers’ brother.
• Thomas G. Ayers, Bill Ayers’ father, was a contributor to the Community Renewal Society, as are: Bettylu Saltzman, whom we learned recently, has been an Obama supporter since at least his run for the Illinois legislature; Obama bundler John Rogers (and Exelon director), through his Ariel Mutual Fund; Sidley Austin, the law firm which employed both Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill Ayers’ wife, Bernadine Dohrn; and Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama’s church until recently tossed under the Obama bus.

Recall Klonsky is a Maoist, considered by the PRC as practically an official, and when it came out Obama had to repudiate him. Recall also that Ayers and Obama gave Klonsky an Annenberg grant. To cap it off, there's a video of Lenz at National Louis University, which educates many of our children's teachers on the North Shore, with Ayers advocating for reparations to close the education gap (!):