IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 171included the $50 million from Annenberg and matching funds from state, Federal and other
resources, the study concluded that there was “no measurable or significant gain” on the part of
students.’^62 In other words Ayers and Obama promoted a program that spent millions of private and
public funds and accomplished nothing. I would note that the rubric used for this evaluation
included not just student gains in hard core academic achievement areas but also in soft areas such
as self-image, personal efficacy, school attendance, persistence, etc. Voters, bloggers, media
analysts and MSM should be asking an essential question: If Obama was the chair of this Board (I
think for its duration adding up to about 8 years) and nothing was really accomplished to improve
the achievement and capacities of children to learn, what makes us think he will be successful on a
national scale?’^63 A good question. The answer must reflect that the goal of the Annenberg Chicago
Challenge never had anything to do with helping students or improving schools. Its goal, and that of
the foundation community that funded it, was social control through the divide-and-conquer
counterinsurgency method of pitting Local School Councils against the unions and the
administration. In this regard, it appears to have been reasonably successful. The Chicago political
crisis of 1986-1987, which might have turned into a mass strike of all working people and
unemployed people against the lunatic policies of the Reagan-Bush-Big Jim Thompson-Thomas
Ayers financiers, was defused and deflected. The LSCs were also somewhat effective in providing
cover for the system to fire principals, managers, and other trained and experienced personnel,
possibly replacing them with political hacks looking for sinecures. Finally, the futility and constant
strife of the LSCs wore out the existing parent activists until the situation was ripe for a partial
privatization under corporate and business auspices, ratcheting everything down yet another big
notch. Soon, the foundation oligarchs could see, the useless burden of universal free compulsory
public education in the United States would cease to exist – a great savings from the point of view
of Wall Street, but the death-knell for representative government in the United States.
THE BIGGEST PROJECT OF OBAMA’S LIFE ENDS IN ABJECT FAILURE
In 2003 the final technical report of the CCSR on the CAC was published. The results were not
pretty. The “bottom line” according to the report was that the CAC did not achieve its goal of
improvement in student academic achievement and nonacademic outcomes. While student test
scores improved in the so-called Annenberg Schools that received some of the $150 million
disbursed in the six years from 1995 to 2001, “This was similar to improvement across the
system....There were no statistically significant differences in student achievement between
Annenberg schools and demographically similar non-Annenberg schools. This indicates that there
was no Annenberg effect on achievement.” The report identified the political conflict between the
Local School Council promotion efforts of the CAC – such as the $2 million Leadership
Development Initiative - as a possible factor hindering a positive impact on student achievement.
(Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama
Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008)
We must therefore conclude that Barack Hussein Obama, in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge,
the biggest and most ambitious project of his life up until 2007, was an abject failure. His efforts
produced no gain for Chicago school students. It should be clear in retrospect why he almost never
talks about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. On the one hand, he would have to talk about his
close personal cooperation with the unrepentant terrorist bomber Bill Ayers. On the other hand, he
would have to dodge embarrassing questions about what the positive impact of all of this sound and
fury had finally been.