In 1969, hippies and the Vietnam War were abstractions to me, glimpses from photos in an occasional Life Magazine. I had not heard about the Weathermen.
I was twelve years old. In the following year my main source of normalcy and inspiration—my school day--would be turned upside down. I would go to a high school where riots and the threats of riots were commonplace.
Anti-American forces were at work to bring down America.
While I was worrying about junior high school, Larry Grathwohl, who had just come back to Cincinnati from Vietnam, was infiltrating the domestic terrorist group Weatherman, the only one to have done so. Larry saved potentially hundreds of lives when he alerted the FBI to a bomb placed near a Detroit police station and a restaurant.
Bill Ayers, Education Secretary of Weatherman, told him that in the revolution, lives would have to be sacrificed.
This week I have been traveling with Larry and Tina Trent, who have helped republish Larry’s memoir Bringing Down America, about his days with the domestic terrorists. Tina tells the story as we speak to various groups in Florida this week about how she happened to read Larry’s book in high school in the late 1970s. It was the one truthful one amidst a growing collection already devoted to hagiographies of the 1960s radicals in the library.
My interest in Bill Ayers began a few years ago when I learned about his career as a “Distinguished Professor of Education.” In reality he was working to destroy everything that was good about our education system. Ayers, after escaping punishment in 1980, used his position at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to spread his revolutionary ideas throughout the educational system--in the classes he taught, the books and articles he wrote, the conferences he attended, the dissertation committees he sat on, and the political connections he fostered with Barack Obama and Arne Duncan on the Annenberg Challenge.
One of the things that has encouraged me as we’ve talked to these groups is the awareness of Obama and Duncan’s education plan called Common Core. This is a complete federal power grab with an agenda in line with the educational aims of Bill Ayers. The last refuge of conservatives for education, homeschooling and private schools, will effectively be eliminated under Common Core.
I have no evidence directly connecting Bill Ayers to the writing of Common Core, but I do have evidence that Bill Ayers is still very influential in educational circles crafting the project. As I noted in my report for Accuracy in Media, in 2009, Bill Ayers was a keynote speaker at a Washington, D.C., education conference, alongside Arne Duncan, his Under Secretary, and a representative from Achieve, a well-connected D.C.-based non-profit credited with being the architect of Common Core. Linda Darling-Hammond, a longtime close associate of Bill Ayers, and Obama’s education transition team leader, is in charge of developing one of the two national tests that will be administered under Common Core.
More recently, Duncan, Darling-Hammond, and Ayers participated in the annual meeting of AERA, the American Educational Research Association, held in San Francisco from April 27 to May 1, 2013. This professional association boasts of over 25,000 members consisting of faculty, researchers, and graduate students who work at universities and colleges, federal and state agencies, school systems, test companies, and non-profit agencies. Ayers used to be vice president for curriculum in the organization.
Ayers was listed in the program as participating in eight activities this year, including a panel discussion called “The Role of Education in the Quest for Freedom,” “Dystopia and Education,” “Social Imagination and Political Activism in Education,” and “Making Comics as Educational Research and Theory” (his book To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher was adapted into a “graphic,” or comic, book in 2010; it is used widely in colleges of education).
Ayers also coauthored and presented a paper with the Marxist professor of education, Peter McLaren, titled “In Memoriam: Hugo Chavez.” Ayers had traveled at least four times to speak in Venezuela to promote his idea of education as “the motor-force of revolution.”
Arne Duncan
The Department of Education bragged about Arne Duncan’s speech at the AERA conference, which appeared to be devoted entirely to sessions advocating social justice and not academics. They did not mention Ayers.
In his address, Duncan talked about the “sea-change” in “assessments” under Common Core. Darling-Hammond’s tests, he said approvingly, would address “deeper learning.” “Diagnostic or formative assessments” will measure “student growth,” and determine whether students are “college-and-career ready.” Much in line with Ayers’s pedagogical strategy, Duncan hailed the forthcoming Assessment 3.0 that “will shift from seat-based learning to competency-based learning.” The “next frontier in assessment research,” said Duncan, is in “non-cognitive skills.”
Why would a school want to measure “non-cognitive skills” and what does this mean? Aren’t students supposed to be tested on their “cognitive skills,” their knowledge in subjects like history and science, and their skills in subject like math and writing?
Welcome to the Brave New World of social and emotional learning. As I noted, Darling-Hammond has served on the board of CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Ayers taught. Welcome to the Bill Ayers way of teaching, through emotionally invasive sessions, indoctrination, chaos, and confusion. (I describe this in my new book Bill Ayers: Teaching Revolution.)
It may be called “Assessment 3.0,” but it sounds an awful lot like the “criticism/self-criticism” sessions of the Weathermen Larry Grathwohl has been describing to me and to our audiences.
Weatherman recruited in high schools. Now they’ve essentially entered the Department of Education.
It’s no longer abstract when you can’t hide or remove your children.
For more information on our tour, go to www.bringingdownamerica.com. The site includes an archive of newspaper articles and documents about the Weathermen, compiled by Tina Trent. In it you will see the shameful history of the media endorsing the Weathermen and helping them lie about their violent pasts. If you’d like to have us come speak to your group, contact us. We’ll be in Georgia next month.
My antennae go up whenever any education initiative is associated with radicals, like Bill Ayers. We still don’t know why Bill Ayers was at an education conference with Arne Duncan and a representative from Achieve, the well-connected, Washington-based non-profit organizing this effort to nationalize education.
But once I began investigating the curricula and test questions I learned that sure enough, the rigorous “standards” turned out to be nothing more than efforts to impose a curriculum that will make global citizens out of all American students. Or the kind of curriculum Bill Ayers would like.
Now I learn via Tina Trent that an organization called NALEO (National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials), a pro-amnesty group, co-hosted an event in Los Angeles last month on Common Core.
The NALEO Newsletter announced “NALEO Educational Fund last month co-hosted a national kickoff on the common core state standards, in partnership with the Campaign for High School Equity (CHSE) in Los Angeles.”
They quoted the official line from the Department of Education: “The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led, voluntary effort to establish a single set of educational standards for English-language, arts and mathematics that states can share and adopt. They are designed to ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared for college, employment and success in the global economy.”
Right.
The official propaganda continues: “State leaders, through their membership in the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA) Center, have developed a common core of state standards with the assistance of content specialists and education experts.” Common Core, of course, was passed without legislative approval and usually without legislative knowledge, as happened here in Georgia. That’s why Senator William Ligon introduced a bill to withdraw the state from Common Core standards.
So who are these “content specialists and education experts”? It turns out that they are usually radicals, like Bill Ayers’s “pal” Linda Darling-Hammond who is in charge of developing one of the two sets of the nationally administered tests.
The meeting sponsored by NALEO had the usual suspects, and not any traditional Core Knowledge Curriculum representatives in the tradition of E.D. Hirsch, who advocates learning about the literary classics and history: “The program in Los Angeles included local NALEO members and representatives from the NAACP, the National Indian Education Association (NIEA), the South East Asian Resource Asian Center (SEARAC), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the National Urban League, the Alliance for Excellent Education, the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).”
Trent, who opposed Georgia’s Hate Crimes bill more than a decade ago, says that these are many of the same radical groups who were pushing for hate crimes legislation. And as with the hate crimes law, non-profits are being empowered by the government to promote Common Core. “In the hate crimes model, non-elected non-profits were given vast powers to advise police and develop procedures for identifying and prosecuting so-called ‘hate,’” says Trent. “What we ended up with was the politicization of justice itself, and a handover of government powers to activist groups with an identity politics agenda.” She warns that Common Core is empowering the same activist groups through the federal educational bureaucracy--hardly a process in accord with our republican, representative form of government.
Common Core, it turns out, is just one more way, as she puts it, that we are “handing over government operations to politically driven non-profits.”
Pro-amnesty non-profit groups have been trying to indoctrinate school children about immigration for a long time now. They fought an Arizona law that prohibited teaching hatred towards certain ethnic groups (primarily white Americans), which a Mexican-American (“Raza studies”) studies curriculum did. Education professors have also been using their classrooms to lobby for amnesty. Common Core, the initiative of Obama’s Department of Education, may be the latest way they are trying to deny the sovereignty of the United States in students’ minds.
This information about NALEO and other groups is one more piece of evidence for opposing Common Core. Do we need any more?
For more information about Common Core, see my website, www.dissidentprof.com, where I have a section on Common Core and links to organizations that are fighting this unconstitutional takeover of education.
He’s joined by Billy Dean and Larry Gatlin in the performance, which includes quotes from longtime Obama friend and former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers (“We are communist, women and men, underground in the United States”) and George Soros (“The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States”).
He also explains that Obama really doesn’t need to bother Congress, as “They’d just get in his way.”
Originally posted at American ThinkerCampaigning in Roanoke, Virginia, the President of the United States floated a new pitch to garner votes. The theme? All the credit for individual achievement goes to collectivism. Obama tossed a hunk of red meat to the ravenous and received an enthusiastic response when he declared, “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
No longer is Obama attempting to portray successful Americans merely as selfish rich people unwilling to share the fruit of their labor with the less fortunate; his newest approach is to argue that indeed there are those who have done well in America, but that those successes could have only been attained through communal effort.
Instead of choosing to advocate for the two important pillars of liberty, individualism and independence, Barack Obama is now making the toppling of individual achievement part of his campaign stump speech and doing it by tying prosperity to group dependency.
At the Roanoke rally, Obama emphatically stressed that “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own.”
At present, Barack Obama’s influence on America has helped transform it into a place where formerly free people are being denied the “inalienable right” to live as individual entities with individual hopes, dreams or goals. Neither are Americans any longer free to pursue personal success or happiness without government interference or censure. And if they do, those successes are now being publicly put down as not really personally achieved.
So, according to Barack Obama, “The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.” In other words, Barack Obama is of the opinion that the qualities of pluck and fortitude coupled with individual resourcefulness are now insufficient to achieve success.
Using the analogy of a fire department putting out a fire, the President told the cheering crowd full of fainting fans and lifesaving “paralegals” that in order to attain success, teamwork is imperative. Obama then said, “There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.”
One wonders whether the fire department analogy is Obama’s standard for success. Because if success is unattainable for a single individual, then Barack Obama is finally admitting he’s an abysmal failure and raises the question of whether the lone cowboy/Executive Orders option he seems so fond of contradicts the teamwork ideology he pushes for everyone else.
Nevertheless, the President haughtily reminded those who might take pride in individual achievement that humility is in order when he told them, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.”
Unable to defend his own record, it’s clear that what Obama is attempting to do is to debase the business successes of Mitt Romney. The President is trying to make the point that without the support of the collective and some government backup for good measure, men like Romney would never have accomplished what conservatives believe is attainable by everyone.
In short, Obama’s clever tactic advocates for collectivism versus individualism, maintains that individual effort is insufficient, and that if by chance a person does manage to surmount government-imposed obstacles and reach the summit of success, Obama is about the business of convincing the public that those achievements would not have been possible had it not been outside assistance.
In essence, Barack Obama is asking individuals to sacrifice the merit of personal achievement to communalism in order to further an ideology to which he is firmly committed, as well as remediate the reputation of those who’ve never exerted commendable effort or achieved anything at all.
Let’s not forget, this is a man who shamelessly took credit for and accepted the proceeds from a best-selling autobiography that may have been written for him by Bill Ayers. Clearly, Barack Obama had no trouble letting “somebody else” contribute to his literary success, nor does he appear uncomfortable accepting kudos for an effort he never made. So maybe in the spirit of fairness, the President is just extending the same respect to those eager to find value in being the recipient of government largesse, as he buys votes by painting individualism and personal achievement as something weak, pathetic, and undeserving of disproportionate monetary reimbursement.
And yet, as the President travels the country promoting continued “hope and change,” what he fails to recognize is the dichotomy of begging for money from the successful and then going to Virginia to preach that the people financing his bid for reelection have achieved nothing on their own.
However, do not be deceived – there is a method to Barack Obama’s stump speech madness. Besides revealing the true nature of his core beliefs, it seems the President is hoping to convince America that the successful couldn’t have had succeeded without the village initiating and sustaining those successes. This way Obama can then justify the use of higher taxes to deliver the fruits of someone else’s labor as recompense for the phantom participation he claims has enabled successful, hardworking Americans to rise above the ordinary and accomplish something to be truly proud of.
I try not to use the word “jack***” too often. Whenever I start writing about you, however, that word just seems to fit into every sentence – sort of like Selah fits into a Davidic Psalm. In fact, found myself using a little profanity when I heard about your recent remarks at an occupy Wall Street gathering in New York City. Here they are in their unedited stupidity:
“We are living in a militarized society. That, that, it's clear what the message is from power. The message is that Occupy represents violence, and marginalization and insanity, when in reality it's the 1% that represents violence, and insanity and militarism. We've got a militarized society and it’s become so common sense that, getting on the airplane coming out here, the first thing they said was ‘let all the, let all the, you know, uniformed military get on first’ and ‘thank you for your service.’ And I say as I always do: let's let the teachers and nurses get on first and thank them for their service. I mean, why is it that everything military has got to be good and everything that has to do with actual work, real work, not jobs, real work for people, that stuff gets discouraged and marginalized?"
Let’s be clear about something, Bill. You’re a tenured professor and that means you are the last person in the world to be lecturing anyone about real work. Tenure operates like socialism. There is no penalty for underperformance. There is only the reward of continued employment. That means you can say stupid things with regularity and never have to worry about occupying Wall Street with the chronically unemployed. You can just fly in, say a few stupid things in front of a fawning press, catch a Broadway show that evening, and head back to campus whenever you feel like it.
Teaching education does not really qualify as real work. Unlike military service, teaching education classes does not usually involve having people shoot at you. In fact, it would never happen if liberal educators were familiar with the research showing that concealed weapons permits reduce crime and should therefore be valid on campuses. Of course, most tenured educators don’t know this because they do not keep up with research after they get tenure.
Tenure also means that other radicals can hire you to fly in to speak at other universities for thousands of dollars per hour. And they cannot be fired for wasting taxpayer money on speeches by self-proclaimed domestic terrorists. Nor does it matter if the self-proclaimed domestic terrorists are incompetent and conspire with terrorists who sometimes blow up their own friends because they do not know how to properly assemble a pipe bomb.
I understand, of course, that your brothers and sisters in the Weather Underground never really meant to blow up their friends. They really meant to blow up their enemies. This is largely because they could not achieve significant political influence otherwise. No one really wants to follow the kind of people with whom you associated in your prime. Your crowd has always hovered about a half a step above Charles Manson. And your crowd is only slightly better groomed.
It should be self-evident that no one really deserves to follow you when you board a plane in an American airport. It makes good sense that you should board dead last. Nonetheless, you seem to question why our military are allowed to board before teachers like you board. The answer is simple, Bill. But, fearing you may still miss the point, I’ll print it in big, bold letters:
Soldiers bomb our foreign enemies. You, on the other hand, bomb your fellow citizens. And the teaching profession still defends you and embraces you.
I hope this helps you better understand the situation. Jack***!
In 1969, hippies and the Vietnam War were abstractions to me, glimpses from photos in an occasional Life Magazine. I had not heard about the Weathermen.
My interest in Bill Ayers began a few years ago when I learned about his career as a “Distinguished Professor of Education.” In reality he was working to destroy everything that was good about our education system. Ayers, after escaping punishment in 1980, used his position at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to spread his revolutionary ideas throughout the educational system--in the classes he taught, the books and articles he wrote, the conferences he attended, the dissertation committees he sat on, and the political connections he fostered with Barack Obama and Arne Duncan on the Annenberg Challenge.
I have no evidence directly connecting Bill Ayers to the writing of Common Core, but I do have evidence that Bill Ayers is still very influential in educational circles crafting the project. As I noted in my report for Accuracy in Media, in 2009, Bill Ayers was a keynote speaker at a Washington, D.C., education conference, alongside Arne Duncan, his Under Secretary, and a representative from Achieve, a well-connected D.C.-based non-profit credited with being the architect of Common Core. Linda Darling-Hammond, a longtime close associate of Bill Ayers, and Obama’s education transition team leader, is in charge of developing one of the two national tests that will be administered under Common Core.
Welcome to the Brave New World of social and emotional learning. As I noted, Darling-Hammond has served on the board of CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Ayers taught. Welcome to the Bill Ayers way of teaching, through emotionally invasive sessions, indoctrination, chaos, and confusion. (I describe this in my new book Bill Ayers: Teaching Revolution.)
It may be called “Assessment 3.0,” but it sounds an awful lot like the “criticism/self-criticism” sessions of the Weathermen Larry Grathwohl has been describing to me and to our audiences.
