IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 163“The death knell is ringing for Chicago’s local school councils, as it has been for years.” ‘One of
the biggest abuses of the local control system is that principals have no tenure, and have to cater to
the whims of local groups of parents who often have no concept of education except their own likes
and dislikes. Anderson also reports that “the constant onslaught of negative buzz regarding LSCs
has created the widespread impression that LSCs are hapless, ineffective, and at times as the case of
Curie High School seemingly illustrates, dangerous to school improvement.” The interest of the
foundations, and their grant money, was steadily fading.’ (David Moberg, “Can Democracy Save
Chicago’s Schools?,” American Prospect, November 30, 2002) One of the few tangible results of
the creation of the LSCs at the individual school level was that several hundred experienced and
previously tenured principals were fired, which drastically lowered the administrative quality of the
system, but which promised a big savings to the greedy banks who owned the Chicago municipal
bonds marketed by firms like Nuveen and Co, and who wanted to be sure that their interest
payments had top priority.
BILL AYERS: FROM TERRORIST TO EDUCATION REFORMER
Thanks to the fact that his father Tom had intelligence community connections on a very high
level, Bill Ayers was able to emerge from clandestine criminal life and re-invent himself as an
education reformer. A key part of this was his magical ability to get money from the foundations.
His knack was so deft that it suggested that he had been a foundation operative all along, even
before Executive Order 12333. Steve Diamond has chronicled the process by which the former
fugitive Bill Ayers was transformed into a few short years into a top authority on education policy,
and above all into a dispenser of tens of millions of dollars of corporate largesse: ‘Bill raised money
to start the Small Schools Workshop in the early 90s and eventually hired another former Maoist
from the 60s (and actually someone who was a bitter opponent of Ayers as SDS disintegrated)
named Mike Klonsky to head it up. Bill’s brother John later got in on the small schools approach
also, raising money in part from the Annenberg Challenge program started by Bill and chaired by
Obama... A leading figure in the Chicago business groups that were lobbying for cost cutting and
“efficiency” in the Chicago schools in the 1980s was Bill Ayers’ father, Thomas Ayers.... Tom
Ayers co-authored a report of a joint public-private task force on school reform and was later
nominated to head up Chicago United, a business backed school reform group that Ayers helped
found, by Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, but was opposed successfully by black community activists.
When the 1988 Reform Act was passed a group called Leadership for Quality Education (LQE) was
formed...by the elite business lobby that was in part behind the new reforms, to train the newly
elected local school council members. Some 6000 LSC members were elected. And they became a
huge thorn in the side of school administration in Chicago. Interestingly, one LSC member was
John Ayers, son of Tom and brother of Bill. In 1993, John was made head of the LQE - which, by
then, according to Shipps, was caught in the middle of the battle emerging to re-centralize control of
the schools in the hands of the mayor. In the fall of 1988, however, Obama left the city to go off to
law school. My best guess, though, is that it was in that 86-88 time frame that Obama likely met up
with the Ayers family.’ (Steve Diamond, ‘Who “sent” Obama?’ globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22,
2008) Again, this cannot be seen as a matter of pure coincidence, but rather of people like
Huntington and Brzezinski putting their protégé in contact with an important regional leader of the
US financier establishment.