Stanley Kurtz on Obama and Ayers

The Barack Obama campaign keeps wishing the questions about Bill Ayers, the former terrorist who bombed the Pentagon in 1972, will go away. They will. When Obama addresses them.

Don't look for Obama to do that, but I'm hoping the Cult of Change leader will be asked about the man Obama dismissed as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood" in Friday's debate.

Remember: Obama launched his political career in the home, pictured on the right, of the onetime leader of the Weather Underground.

In today's Wall Street Journal Online, Stanley Kurtz writes about Obama and his radical pal, who were partners in a $50 million charitable project called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

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. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.

In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or ACORN).

Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with ACORN, and ACORN members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. 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.

In other words, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, despite the millions spent, failed. That means Ayers failed. As did Obama.

But it was a money boon for community organizers such as ACORN. And two former community organizers, Ayers and Obama, let the students down.

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