Is Bill Ayers Influencing ‘Race to the Top’?

By  Mary Grabar

I would like to thank Mary for allowing me to post her work. RK

What happened to Bill Ayers since his time in the spotlight during the last Obama campaign? We know that Ayers, along with wife Bernardine Dohrn and Code Pink leader Jodie Evans, supported the Gaza Flotilla, incited protests in Egypt with the Free Gaza Movement in 2010, and advised Occupy Wall Street protesters on strategy. After all, he’s had a lot of experience, having spent his youth bombing such places as the New York City police headquarters and the Pentagon, and trying to bomb a dance hall for U.S. servicemen and their dates.

In 2008, only a few dared raise questions about then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s association with Bill Ayers. Most questions focused on Bill Ayers’ past as co-founder of the domestic terrorist group Weatherman. But by 1995, Ayers was an established professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and living in the tony Hyde Park neighborhood. That year, he threw a political launch party for Obama’s run as a state senator. From that year until at least 2002, both men worked closely on “education” issues.

Through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the “brainchild” of Ayers, they pumped millions of dollars to radical groups to bring their programs to inner-city schools. They looked to expand the radical educational goals Ayers was promoting by training “urban teachers.”

I know from reading Ayers’ incoherent articles, syllabi, and books on education that his ultimate goal is to prepare foot soldiers for the coming revolution. And what better place to start than in the poorest and poorest-performing schools in inner-city Chicago? After all, in a well-off suburb you might get a parent looking over assignments and noticing the embedded Marxism and historical errors. Not likely, though, with the poor, single mother overburdened with child care. Not likely with an “undocumented” immigrant father who cannot speak English or read in his own language.

So what has Bill Ayers been doing on the education front since then? Ayers makes frequent appearances on college campuses. He was named vice president for curriculum studies at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2009. In 2011, he was the keynote speaker at the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE).

It seems that he has also been visiting the White House.

At least we thought so in 2009, when initial White House visitor logs were released. Then we were told to rest assured that it was a different Ayers there. The White House has since been very selective in releasing visitor rolls. Indeed, they are appealing a judge’s order to release them as a result of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch. Will we know before Election Day how many times Bill Ayers visited the White House? Probably not.

Ayers’ influence on the administration matters because there is a federal education initiative coming from which there will be no escape through school districts, private schools, or home schools. Furthermore, the rigorous, uniform standards promised by the Department of Education through a contest called Race to the Top are anything but — unless you use the standards of social justice indoctrination.

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