Actually it's theorized that one of the weathermen intentionally set off the bomb that killed three because she suddenly grew a conscience knowing that if that bomb was built and planted as planned it would kill many innocent people. We'll never know if that is true.
I'll be waiting to see your source where Ayers denies what he said. The interview of him that I read he admitted saying it. I look forward to reading your source.
"Around this time, Ayers summed up the Weatherman philosophy as "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents—that's where it's really at."
"The rhetoric was excessive because the times were excessive," says Ayers. "The war had escalated, so naturally the language escalated. No one thought I meant that literally.""
I think he meant that literally. What kind of person would even say that? Should we really trust a person who would say something like that to tell the truth about whether they meant it or not? Or in the case of your source should we trust that kind of a person to tell the truth about whether they said it at all. It's not exactly like he's a guy of high morals.
I read the articles you posted by Kurtz and I disagree with how he frames his arguments. Kurtz makes it seem that something insidious was somehow perpetrated through the CAC - look at the title: "Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools". This happens to be my area of expertise - I have a PhD in education policy, I have studied community organizing related to school reform and I work with philanthropic foundations to evaluate their work around community change and education efforts. Kurtz is putting a very negative spin on the choices that were made based on faulty assumptions.
First: Kurtz seems to find it strange that Obama was chosen for CAC but Obama had been the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, had worked in Chicago neighborhoods as a community organizer, and was a young up and coming professor and political talent. Why wouldn't a philanthropic initiative choose him to help lead? Ayers may have had to approve him but so did four other people and one of those other four was primarily responsible for Obama's recruitment per her own statements (see the recent NYTimes article).
Second: Kurtz states without providing evidence that, "The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism."
I find it VERY hard to believe that if this was true, conservative Mr. Annenberg would have funded it. The Annenberg grants were intended to try a grassroots, community oriented approach to localized education reform. This initiative was trying an approach that cyclically comes back into fashion. The community schools wave that has lately received a great deal of attention and funding, as well as the small schools (pushed largely by the Gates Foundation - not known to be radical) and charter school waves, are all examples of efforts to provide more local control, more equitable schools and often more involvement of an array of non-academic community organizations to help improve school performance. They are not really "radical" in the sense that I think Kurtz means at all.
I am happy to say more about the theories/research behind these approaches should anyone want to hear them but the essential idea is that schools are core institutions of communities and children in the worst schools need an array of supports to succeed. Those supports include things like safe afterschool activities, basic health care and dental, food, etc. Another central piece is that often times, parents are not engaged with the education system for a variety of reasons - they may work multiple jobs, may not speak English, may not understand that the school is failing, may feel intimidated about approaching more educated teachers and administrators (who are often from different racial and class backgrounds), etc. The idea behind community organizing components of school reforms like the CAC is to get children and families connected to basic services and to get parents (and teachers) feeling empowered enough to engage in local school reform efforts (both in the schools and at the policy level). Groups like ACORN are often tapped to do this work because they are the ones that do this kind of work and do it well. The research suggests that this approach can be powerful even if it's limited in it's ultimate impact.
Third: "CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement."
Not surprising. Look at how successful the multi-billion dollar academic focused No Child Left Behind has been at raising test scores. Improving education is a multi-faceted and entrenched problem that requires more than just school reform.
Fourth: "CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections."
The perceived threat posed by newly empowered parent groups is a common one in these initiatives and the only way to get through it is to air those concerns. Obama's actions are not at all odd and actually sound appropriate.
Fifth: "So even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered to the grant program he had put in place."
It is not at all strange that the board chose to stick with many of the original grantees after Ayers was less involved - philanthropic efforts are often criticized, in fact, for not sticking with grantees long enough for them to actually effect complex issues.
Sixth: Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to 'confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.'
Small schools have all sorts of themes from arts to history. Confronting issues of inequity, war and violence, frankly, doesn't seem like a bad theme. Ayers isn't the principal of the school - the school is more likely teaching pacifism than radicalism. School boards don't tend to approve small schools (which are public) that aren't relatively mainstream, they'd get too much flack from parents and tax payers.
Seventh: "As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle."
Ayers was one of a team that wrote the grant, one of a team that chose the board and one a group that chose the grantees. There are many reasons (as I noted above) that those board members would choose to fund the organizations that they did and take the overall approach to reform that they did. This is a flimsy statement that is not at all fair to Mr. Obama.
And believe me, a couple days digging through records, does not make him an expert. It would however, give him time to find assorted "evidence" of whatever assumptions he went in with. And he did go in with assumptions as your National Review article outright states.
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The only people who died were a few members by accident not intentionally.
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False.
Wow, I knew we would agree on something.
Actually it's theorized that one of the weathermen intentionally set off the bomb that killed three because she suddenly grew a conscience knowing that if that bomb was built and planted as planned it would kill many innocent people. We'll never know if that is true.
I'll be waiting to see your source where Ayers denies what he said. The interview of him that I read he admitted saying it. I look forward to reading your source.
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Correct, we will never know if that is true since it is speculation.
"Around this time, Ayers summed up the Weatherman philosophy as "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents—that's where it's really at."
"The rhetoric was excessive because the times were excessive," says Ayers. "The war had escalated, so naturally the language escalated. No one thought I meant that literally.""
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2001/No-Regrets/
I think he meant that literally. What kind of person would even say that? Should we really trust a person who would say something like that to tell the truth about whether they meant it or not? Or in the case of your source should we trust that kind of a person to tell the truth about whether they said it at all. It's not exactly like he's a guy of high morals.
I read the articles you posted by Kurtz and I disagree with how he frames his arguments. Kurtz makes it seem that something insidious was somehow perpetrated through the CAC - look at the title: "Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools". This happens to be my area of expertise - I have a PhD in education policy, I have studied community organizing related to school reform and I work with philanthropic foundations to evaluate their work around community change and education efforts. Kurtz is putting a very negative spin on the choices that were made based on faulty assumptions.
First: Kurtz seems to find it strange that Obama was chosen for CAC but Obama had been the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, had worked in Chicago neighborhoods as a community organizer, and was a young up and coming professor and political talent. Why wouldn't a philanthropic initiative choose him to help lead? Ayers may have had to approve him but so did four other people and one of those other four was primarily responsible for Obama's recruitment per her own statements (see the recent NYTimes article).
Second: Kurtz states without providing evidence that, "The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism."
I find it VERY hard to believe that if this was true, conservative Mr. Annenberg would have funded it. The Annenberg grants were intended to try a grassroots, community oriented approach to localized education reform. This initiative was trying an approach that cyclically comes back into fashion. The community schools wave that has lately received a great deal of attention and funding, as well as the small schools (pushed largely by the Gates Foundation - not known to be radical) and charter school waves, are all examples of efforts to provide more local control, more equitable schools and often more involvement of an array of non-academic community organizations to help improve school performance. They are not really "radical" in the sense that I think Kurtz means at all.
I am happy to say more about the theories/research behind these approaches should anyone want to hear them but the essential idea is that schools are core institutions of communities and children in the worst schools need an array of supports to succeed. Those supports include things like safe afterschool activities, basic health care and dental, food, etc. Another central piece is that often times, parents are not engaged with the education system for a variety of reasons - they may work multiple jobs, may not speak English, may not understand that the school is failing, may feel intimidated about approaching more educated teachers and administrators (who are often from different racial and class backgrounds), etc. The idea behind community organizing components of school reforms like the CAC is to get children and families connected to basic services and to get parents (and teachers) feeling empowered enough to engage in local school reform efforts (both in the schools and at the policy level). Groups like ACORN are often tapped to do this work because they are the ones that do this kind of work and do it well. The research suggests that this approach can be powerful even if it's limited in it's ultimate impact.
Third: "CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement."
Not surprising. Look at how successful the multi-billion dollar academic focused No Child Left Behind has been at raising test scores. Improving education is a multi-faceted and entrenched problem that requires more than just school reform.
Fourth: "CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections."
The perceived threat posed by newly empowered parent groups is a common one in these initiatives and the only way to get through it is to air those concerns. Obama's actions are not at all odd and actually sound appropriate.
Fifth: "So even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered to the grant program he had put in place."
It is not at all strange that the board chose to stick with many of the original grantees after Ayers was less involved - philanthropic efforts are often criticized, in fact, for not sticking with grantees long enough for them to actually effect complex issues.
Sixth: Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to 'confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.'
Small schools have all sorts of themes from arts to history. Confronting issues of inequity, war and violence, frankly, doesn't seem like a bad theme. Ayers isn't the principal of the school - the school is more likely teaching pacifism than radicalism. School boards don't tend to approve small schools (which are public) that aren't relatively mainstream, they'd get too much flack from parents and tax payers.
Seventh: "As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle."
Ayers was one of a team that wrote the grant, one of a team that chose the board and one a group that chose the grantees. There are many reasons (as I noted above) that those board members would choose to fund the organizations that they did and take the overall approach to reform that they did. This is a flimsy statement that is not at all fair to Mr. Obama.
And believe me, a couple days digging through records, does not make him an expert. It would however, give him time to find assorted "evidence" of whatever assumptions he went in with. And he did go in with assumptions as your National Review article outright states.
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"I think" he meant.......is speculation.
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