170 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographythen President of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago; and Wanda White,
Executive Director of the Community Workshop on Economic Development. Some of these
individuals would resign and be replaced by other equally prominent Chicagoans.’ (Steve Diamond,
‘That “Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’
noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008)
For practical purposes, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was a monster with two heads. One
was the Board, where Obama presided. ‘The second operating entity of the CAC would be the
Collaborative that would represent various constituencies in the Chicago schools and wider
community. [...] The co-chair of the CAC’s Collaborative from 1995 until 2000 was Bill Ayers.
Thus, the leaders of the two operative arms of the CAC from its inception until 2000 were Bill
Ayers and Barack Obama. (Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind
the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008) Note the foundation jargon term,
“the collaborative,” which we have seen in a previous chapter.
One of the tasks which Obama and Ayers had to work on together derived from the fact that,
even though the grant proposals had alleged that there was an insatiable hunger for community
control among Chicago parents, there was overwhelming indifference throughout the city to the
Local School Councils, and it soon proved to be very hard to recruit any candidates to run for the
available posts. Accordingly, more foundation money had to be offered to convince parents to run
for the LSCs. (The Chicago local school councils each consisted of the principal, two teachers, six
parents, two community members, and a student representative in the case of high schools.) This
question can be regarded as a crucial experiment which shows that community control of schools is
generally not a spontaneous grass-roots demand by parents, but rather represents a completely
artificial tactic introduced from the outside by cynical foundation operatives for purposes of
manipulation and political wrecking. ‘The Collaborative and the Board became direct players in the
Chicago LSC elections held in 1996. According to the CAC Report: “In 1996 the Chicago Public
Schools were scheduled to hold the fourth election of Local School Council (LSC) representatives
since the school reform of act [sic] of 1988 was passed. As in the past two elections support from
the central office of the Chicago Public Schools appeared to be minimal. Until, that is, members of
the Collaborative coalesced with school reform groups around the city and began to put pressure on
the Chicago Public Schools’ central office to promote the elections both by recruiting enough
candidates for the open seats so that contested elections would be held and by urging parents and
community members to vote. [...] The Board approved a grant of $125,000 for this effort. One of
the first grants awarded in 1995 was a $175,000 Implementation Grant to the Small Schools
Workshop. The Workshop had been founded by Bill Ayers in 1992 and was headed up by his
former Weather Underground comrade, Mike Klonsky.’ (Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who Lives in
My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008) We
have already seen that to suppose that conflicts between Ayers and Klonsky represented nothing
more than the division of labor between two operatives.
$100 MILLION OF GRANT MONEY, HUNDREDS OF PRINCIPALS FIRED, BUT
“NO MEASURABLE OR SIGNIFICANT GAIN” FOR CHICAGO SCHOOL KIDS
And how did the Annenberg Chicago Challenge pan out? If increasing levels of student
achievement were the goal, it was an abject failure. A posting by Steve Diamond on
noquarterusa.net pointed out that in a ‘study that was done on the Annenberg Challenge in Chicago
Public Schools—the one where Obama was Chairman of the Board, after all that funding which