Bill Ayers, Common Core, National Association of Scholars

By Mary Grabar November 1, 2013

This first appeared here.....

 If you're in the Atlanta area, please come and join us Sunday afternoon as Tina Trent and I are hosted by the Georgia Chapter of the National Association of Scholars at the beautiful Solarium in Decatur. I'll be talking about Bill Ayers and his influence on education, including Common Core, and Tina will be talking about the Weather Underground's influence on women's studies and changing our system of justice. Refreshments will be served.

Thanks to the Devereaux F. and Dorothy M. McClatchey Foundation for sponsorship. See previous post here for more details.

The timing is propitious, for Bill Ayers is out on tour hawking memoir #2 that is so full of lies and omissions that it contradicts memoir #1. See my article in FrontPage Magazine, "The Book of Lies Tour by Privileged Bill Ayers." More on Bill Ayers's book to come!

The book reviews are coming out and come to find out, Bll Ayers is not even liked by many on the Left.

Nation Magazine Jan Wiener's review in the Los Angeles Times was reposted in History News Network. Wiener outlines what Bill Ayers and his fellow privileged white Weathermen thought they would accomplish. But Ayers is obnoxious even to Nation Magazine writers. Ironically, I thought of Larry Grathwohl who was reading Weatherman (woman?) Kathy Wilkerson's memoir last spring. He'd read a few pages and shake his head in disgust. Wiener quotes Wilkerson's justification for the bomb that exploded in the New York City townhouse, intended for soldiers and their dates at a Fort Dix dance:

“The nails would wound people, too, and, in their suffering, perhaps they would develop more empathy for how the Vietnamese felt when the United States dropped daisy bombs.”

Wiener writes,

It’s a horrifying idea, but we should thank the author for owning up to it. The Confessions of Bill Ayers says nothing about the Weatherman plan to bomb the dance for noncommissioned officers and their dates at Fort Dix.

Wiener, a former member of SDS, like many on the Left faults Ayers and the Weathermen for destroying SDS and for discrediting the movement, thereby paving the way for the election of Republicans. But he is honest enough to point out Ayers's dissembling:

In Ayers’s new book of 'confessions' you find some semi-apologies for the Weather Underground bombing campaign, including the statement that he has “a thousand regrets.” You also find some self-justification, including the statement that 'the Weather Underground never killed or injured anyone.' That is not quite true. The Weather Underground killed Ted Gold, Terry Robbins, and Diana Oughton — their own members, who died when the pipe bomb they were building exploded. That was March 6, 1970, in a Greenwich Village townhouse.

Jack Cashill points out in his review in American Thinker, Ayers name-drops a lot--Dr. Spock, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Stanley Fish. Cashill recalls his college days, when he was the object of their recruitment efforts:

I knew the Rudds and Ayerses of the world too well. I went to school and worked at summer camps with them. In my experience, they were to a person smug, self-righteous, indulged, affluent, and more than a little insecure about their very softness. By 1969 I knew that when the barricades went up, we would be on opposite sides.

Jan Wiener and company at the Nation may believe they could have made a better world for the downtrodden, but Cashill sees through it:

My 'we' included all the friends and family I had grown up with in Newark, New Jersey. We were the children of cops (me), mailmen, plumbers, machinists, bartenders, cab drivers, house painters. We didn't romanticize poverty. We were struggling to get out of it. We didn't celebrate black people. We played basketball with them (or were them). We didn't denounce the American dream. We pursued it.

I think the idea of whether Bill Ayers wrote Obama's two memoirs is a diversion (though I wouldn't be surprised if he did, given the common style and self-elevation of the books). What is important is how Bill Ayers has continued to influence education. Common Core standards may not have been written by Bill Ayers, but there is a lot of commonality between them and the ideas Ayers has for education.

Speaking of which, kudos to Maureen Downey at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for publishing Jane Robbins's and Tanya Ditty's fantastic response to Fordham Institute's Michael Pettrilli and Michael Brickman claim that "Common Core opponents lack a better plan."

There are better alternatives--especially for low-income and middle-income students--and they have been proven by the research. Problem is they don't require all the advanced degrees and workshops (and requisite pay raises) and technology and whiz-bang new curricula that would profit the multinational textbook companies and computer companies.

Just think of that--proven education results with less cost and local control. Wonder why we're not using it?

To learn more, please come on Sunday!