Obama funded Afro-centric education

As a New York Post editorial explains, Barack Obama, in his capacity as chairman of William Ayers’s brainchild, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, directed $200,000 to an organization that trained Chicago public school teachers in Afro-centric education.

OBAMA’S EDUCATION IDIOCY
October 22, 2008

So, what was Barack Obama up to when he ran former Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers’ “education reform” foundation?

Not much good—at least according to the guy in charge of Chicago’s public schools while he was there.

“There was a total lack of accountability” at Obama and Ayers’ Chicago Annenberg Challenge, former city school superintendent Paul Vallas has told The Post. Indeed, “If you went back and asked, you’d be hard-pressed to find out how the money was spent.”

Well, maybe.

As it turns out, the Obama-helmed CAC was directing big bucks toward the propagation—in Chicago public schools—of the whack-job racist ideology most famously preached by Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

That’s the bottom line of research on CAC documents by Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

For example, the Obama-led foundation funneled more than $200,000 to an outfit called the Coalition for Improved Education in South Shore.

Its mission: training public-school teachers in “Afrocentric” education, a pseudo-scientific movement that (as a trainer brought in with CAC funds put it) rejects Western civilization, and America in particular, as “white supremacist” and seeks to “recover our disrupted ancestral culture.”

Reading, writing and ‘rithmetic this isn’t. All of which gives the lie to Obama’s breezy assertion in last week’s debate that his CAC activities were somehow bipartisan or mainstream.

It also certainly explains why schools chosen for the foundation’s largesse showed no gains in student performance.

Sadly, this latest revelation also casts new light on one of Obama’s finest moments—his candid and hope-filled primary-season address on race in America.

Back then, faced with Rev. Wright’s equally anti-American sermons, he made the plausible case that while his devotion to his pastor was based on 20 years of community involvement, he rejected Wright’s extreme views.

But how can anyone now take that assertion seriously, given that he spent years funding the teaching of those ideas?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 23, 2008 08:59 AM | Send