June 30, 2008

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Is The Educational Right Capable Of Debating Obama’s Educational Program?

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 12:43 pm

A sure sign that the 2008 election is shaping up to be a realigning election, decisively ending three decades of conservative dominance of American politics, is the declining quality of argument put forward by the Right. This is particularly true in the field of education, where right-wing education pundits are reduced to complaining about the long-dead political pasts of two Chicago-based Obama education supporters.

First, there was the attempt, with the Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern and The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation’s Mike Petrilli taking the lead, to smear Barack Obama with the 40-year-old political past of University of Illinois Professor Bill Ayers. And now comes the effort to vilify Obama by linking him with the political past of education blogger and director of Chicago’s Small School workshop Mike Klonsky.

All of this is a very sad excuse for substantive political discourse.

Obama was all of ten years old when most of the events in question took place, and there is absolutely nothing in the record to suggest that he has even the slightest sympathy or admiration for Ayers’ participation in the Weather Underground or Klonsky’s leadership of a Maoist sect. To the contrary, the record shows quite the opposite.

The issue is not what we should think of the Weather Underground or the Maoist October League, which soon became the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist); both organizations died a quick and well-deserved death decades ago, imploding from the internal contradictions of a mindless authoritarianism and (certainly in the case of the Weather Underground) a senseless glorification of violence.

Indeed, there is no danger of hyperbole in describing the politics of the Weather Underground as deranged.

Certainly Ayers’ recent apology for the Weather Underground’s descent into a nihilistic violence, which included homages to the Manson family — ‘the Vietnam War drove us to it’ — is entirely unpersuasive. The great preponderance of Americans opposing the war did so with non-violent action, and we remember the infantile calls of the Weathermen “to bring the war home” as a political godsend for many of those supporting the government’s war policies and opposing our efforts to reverse them. Nothing that is said here in criticism of the smears perpetrated on Obama should be read as an excuse for the Weather Underground or the self-styled Maoists.

The important point is a different one: the suggestion that Ayers’ and Klonsky’s distant pasts have anything to do with Obama’s educational program is entirely disingenuous. Rather than ferreting out dangerous radicals in Obama’s campaign, it’s a partisan effort to bolster the Republican cause. It’s tossing the kind of red herrings contained in e-mail chains repeating the falsehood that Obama is a Muslim — a base appeal to religious and ethnic prejudice.

This disingenuousness becomes apparent when one considers the selectivity employed in raising the political pasts of some, but not other, prominent educational supporters of presidential campaigns. One national figure who is far more influential in the field of education today than either Ayers or Klonsky, former Milwaukee Superintendent and outspoken voucher advocate Howard Fuller, was also a leader of a Stalinist sect in the 1970s. As Owusu Sadukai, Fuller led an outfit called the Revolutionary Workers League [Marxist-Leninist].

When Fuller endorsed George Bush’s presidential candidacy [described here in an interview in the far-right journal Human Events], there was not a peep from those who are now burning up their computer keyboards over Ayers’ and Klonsky’s support of Obama. Yet what is different, other than the presidential candidate and the fact that Fuller provides a public face for the vouchers movement, which allows it to pretend it has a community base — even as it funds itself with the money from the hard-right Bradley Foundation, which was founded by a supporter of the John Birch Society?

If we rightly dismiss as absurd the notion that Fuller’s distant past was remotely probative of George Bush’s educational agenda, what should we conclude about the attempts to smear Obama with the pasts of his supporters?

All three of these men — Ayers, Klonsky and Fuller — were prominent enough in their youth to leave a public record of the poorest political judgment. Yet their pasts have little bearing on their present educational philosophies, and no bearing on the Obama or McCain campaigns. If the educational right can’t take on Obama’s educational program on its merits, and substitutes this sort of smear for substantive debate, that reflects on it — not on Obama.

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  • It’s not just folks on the right who are, or should be, concerned about the influence of Ayers/Klonsky on Obama’s education policy.

    Ayers developed a race-based approach to politics in the late 60s and early 70s that relied on a variant of the “unequal exchange” argument of maoists and other third worldists. He applied it to the domestic US and argued that white workers lived off the backs of black workers.

    Today he has endorsed a related proposal by Gloria Ladson-Billings and Obama education advisor Linda Darling-Hammond for “repayment of centuries of education debt” that has allegedly accumulated over centuries to people of color.

    That is, in my view, fundamentally at odds - well, with rational argument - but also with the comprehensive multi-factor policy menu advocated by the EPI-convened Bold Approach.

    Ayers, Obama and Klonsky have been working together on education policy in various ways for many years, going back to the late 1980s. Ayers and Obama co-led the six year long $110 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge Program. Klonsky was a recipient of a 1995 grant of $175,000 from the Challenge for the Small Schools Workshop that he was hired by Ayers to head up (apparently Klonsky was a cab driver in Chicago at the time) in 1992.

    While I have some concern that Obama would even shake hands with someone who was almost single handedly responsible for wrecking the student antiwar movement with his violent, illegal and despicable acts, I am far more concerned that Obama thinks this guy has anything useful to say about American schoolchildren.

    (For the record, I think that Sol Stern made a similar argument - I hold no brief for neo-cons but his City Journal article was aimed at attempting to steer the conversation away from Ayers’ violent past to his current approach to education policy and theory.)

    Btw, Ayers brothers Rick and John and (late) father Tom and Klonsky’s wife, brother and daughter all work in or on education issues. So does Mark Rudd and Carl Davidson. Strikes me as a bit odd, frankly.

    Comment by Steve Diamond — June 30, 2008 @ 7:49 pm

  • [...] Stern replies to our post, Is the educational right capable of debating Obama’s educational program?, [...]

    Pingback by Sol Stern Replies On Obama And Klonsky | Edwize — July 1, 2008 @ 1:09 pm

  • [...] his reply [below] to our post, Is the educational right capable of debating Obama’s educational program?, Sol Stern wants to have his rhetorical cake and eat it, too. He wants credit for saying that it is [...]

    Pingback by More On Obama And Ayers | Edwize — July 1, 2008 @ 3:03 pm

  • Steve:

    I have yet to see any evidence that Obama is aware of Ayers’ educational views, much less that they have influenced him.

    If folks want to criticize Ayers’ educational views, go right ahead. Good vigorous debate is a healthy thing.

    Just don’t tar Obama by association with Ayers.

    BTW, I come from a large Irish Catholic working class family. Four of my five siblings are involved in education. My father was a sheet metal worker who became a shop teacher, and my mom was an elementary school teacher. There are people who I knew in politics before I became a teacher who are also involved in education. Is that odd? Millions of Americans work in education.

    Comment by Leo Casey — July 1, 2008 @ 3:43 pm

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