Obama and education

The Ayres story is less about Obama’s personal friends and their backgrounds than about his education plans for his presidency. Obama’s web site seems to list his education priorities. It includes child care to the infant level:

Zero to Five Plan: The Obama-Biden comprehensive “Zero to Five” plan will provide critical support to young children and their parents. Unlike other early childhood education plans, the Obama-Biden plan places key emphasis at early care and education for infants, which is essential for children to be ready to enter kindergarten. Obama and Biden will create Early Learning Challenge Grants to promote state “zero to five” efforts and help states move toward voluntary, universal pre-school.

There is research showing damage to small children from very early day care. One thinks of Romanian nurseries filled with near-autistic children deprived of maternal nurturing. It seems that Obama is committed to the use of early day care, even for infants.

They would go back to bilingual education, even though it has been shown to worsen school outcomes.

Support English Language Learners: Obama and Biden support transitional bilingual education and will help Limited English Proficient students get ahead by holding schools accountable for making sure these students complete school.

The rest is mostly the usual ed school blather. What about his real agenda ?

Well, we could listen to his friend Ayres, a “progressive school reformer.”

November 2006 at the World Education Forum in Caracas hosted by dictator Hugo Chavez.
With Chavez at his side, Ayers voiced his support for “the political educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how . . . all of you continue to overcome the failures of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.”
Ayers told the great humanitarian Chavez: “Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions large and small. La educacion es revolucion.” It is that form of socialist revolution that Ayers, and Obama, have worked to bring to America.

Ayres is a major figure in the Daley empire of Chicago.

Chicago’s current mayor, Richard M. Daley, has employed Ayers as a teacher trainer for Chicago’s public schools and consulted him on the city’s education-reform plans.
Just last month, Ayers was elected vice-president for curriculum for the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association. AERA is the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers.
In a recent interview on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” Obama upgraded Ayers’ status from “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” to “somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.”
Actually, Obama knew him quite well, having worked together on a school “reform” project called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
In the 1990s, Ayers was instrumental in starting the Annenberg Challenge, securing a $50 million grant to reform the Chicago Public Schools, part of a national initiative funded by the late Ambassador Walter Annenberg.
Obama was given the Annenberg board chairmanship only months before his first run for office. He ran the fiscal arm that distributed grants to schools and raised matching funds.
Ayers participated in a second entity known as the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, the operational arm that worked with grant recipients.
During Obama’s tenure as Annenberg board chairman, Ayers’ own education projects received substantial funding.
One of Ayers’ descriptions for a course called “Improving Learning Environments” says a prospective K-12 teacher needs to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, teaching for social justice and liberation.”

Sol Stern has some thoughts.

Obama is a dangerous man and his education background shows his Marxist economics are not necessarily the worst threat.

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2 Responses to “Obama and education”

  1. cassandra says:

    Yes, on top of EVERYTHING else regarding Obama’s nefarious associations, he’s also a true believer in progressive education, which has been an insidious growing pox on our school systems since the days of William Heard Kilpatrick.

  2. doombuggy says:

    Here we go some more with Leftists wanting to work their magic through the school system. Journalism and education are favored vehicles for Leftists to transmit their policies.