July 1, 2008

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More On Obama And Ayers

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 2:56 pm

In 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 not fair to link Barack Obama to Ayers’ past as a leader of the Weather Underground, simply because Ayers supports Obama’s candidacy and the two had a casual acquaintance in the world of Chicago politics where Ayers is enough of a fixture to have the explicit approval of the current mayor. So far, so good. But then Stern goes on to raise the issue of Ayers’ current educational views, which he describes as “saying exactly the same thing as he did during his Weatherman days, except not punctuating his political points with bombs,” bringing us full circle back to Ayers’ past. What is more, Stern avers, Obama is ‘ducking’ the issue of Ayers’ educational views, which he has a responsibility to denounce. In sum, having announced that he shut the front door to an argument that links Obama to Ayers, he opens up the back door and invites it in in a different form.

What exactly is Obama’s relationship to Ayers, such that one could reasonably claim that he would need to take such a public stance? Ayers is not an educational advisor of Obama, and he participates in no body shaping Obama’s educational policy. He is a casual acquaintance from the world of politics, one of hundreds if not thousands Obama would know in his home town of Chicago. Obama sat on one or two of the same committees as Ayers, such as the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, of the sort where elected officials characteristically lend their names but not their time. Finally, Ayers is one academic on a very long list of Obama supporters in academia who have no connection to the Obama campaign.

The notion that Obama has a responsibility to know what Ayers’ educational views are, and to take a public position on them is thus most unreasonable. The readers of this blog are mostly drawn from the field of education: how many of us have read Ayers’ work, and have any direct knowledge of what his educational ideas are? Yet a presidential candidate is supposed to have such a command of this and untold numbers of analogous issues in other fields, and offer informed, judicious public pronouncements on them?

The sole piece of evidence Stern offers to support his conjecture that Obama is somehow engaged in subterfuge over Ayers’ educational views — that Obama incorrectly described him as a professor of English rather than a professor of Education — is completely consistent with Obama having only a passing acquaintance with Ayers. Moreover, it requires an extraordinary leap of logic to see such a misstatement as evidence of an attempt to ‘duck’ the question of Ayers’ educational views.

What this argument does is link the names of Obama and Ayers without justification, in guilt by association. No matter who makes the argument — and for the record, no one at the UFT or the AFT ever did — it is wrong.

3 Comments »

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  • This is wrong. Obama was Chairman of the Board of the Annenberg Challenge, picked by Ayers. Ayers was co-chair of the Challenge’s operative body, the Chicago School Collaborative. Together they worked hand in glove for five years raising an additional 60 million dollars on top of the 50 million dollar grant and then using that money to intervene in the Chicago “school war.” How long are you and others going to ignore the close longstanding relationship IN EDUCATION of Obama and Ayers. Anyone who wants the details can find them on my blog where I summarize the Annenberg grant proposal, its annual reports and its board minutes.

    In my view there are three positions being staked out in education now: the race based approach of Ayers, Darling Hammond and others in the Obama camp; the NCLB/reform/charter school camp; and the EPI type multi factor approach. So this is not an abstract battle about the past - it is about how the authoritarian race-based politics of Ayers and others are influencing the present.

    Finally, regarding Ayers and the Obama campaign today - while he may not have an official role in the campaign Obama himself admitted they continue to talk, there have been reports that he is an advisor to Obama and Mike Klonsky - a non-entity in education and, well, everywhere else, a stalinist ghost of the 60s past - was able to blog on the official Obama website for months on education policy and the “social justice” agenda of the authoritarian left. Klonsky was put into his position by Ayers at the Small Schools Workshop which receive $175,000 from the Annenberg Challenge led jointly by Ayers and Obama.

    It is only the longstanding connection to Ayers that could have gotten Klonsky the education blog page. The very day I posted a blog about it his blog was shut down and all of his posts were erased from the site without a word of explanation from the Obama campaign or Klonsky.

    Comment by Steve Diamond — July 1, 2008 @ 7:27 pm

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