More on the Annenberg Challenge

American Thinker ^ | August 21, 2008 | Ed Lasky

[vietvet67]

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama's only claim to administrative leadership (as covered today by Thomas Lifson), was evaluated by the esteemed Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an independent outside body with expertise on educational reform. A larger study has a section focused on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama's project.

It does not take much for grantees who receive funds from the Obama-Ayers led Anneberg Chicago effort to sign its praises. When an outside group audits the performance and reveals scores of millions of dollars were all but wasted, I think that should have some bearing on our evaluation of Obama as a leader of change efforts.

No wonder the Obama campaign is engaging in an extraordinary level of secrecy regarding Obama's track record as State Senator (his written records unavailable), lawyer (no list of his clients available) and leader of the failed effort to reform public schooling in Chicago.

I suspect that in his Annenberg work, Obama used his power over the purse strings as a form of pork to reward insiders and allies. Neighborhood control of schools was one of the approaches he took -- a fertile ground for rewarding local allies and political powers-that-be. Also, as was already shown by the history of such approaches in New York City, the concept of more local input might be fine in theory,but in practice often results in localized civil wars-not to the improvement of local schools.

David Hinz noted the Fordham Study and offered some interesting commentary

According to a piece done by Alexander Russo for the Thomas B Fordham Institute:

When three of Chicago's most prominent education reform leaders met for lunch at a Thai restaurant six years ago to discuss the just-announced $500 million Annenberg Challenge, their main goal was to figure out how to ensure that any Annenberg money awarded to Chicago "didn't go down the drain," said William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Ayers, who was at that lunch table in late 1993, helped write the successful Chicago grant application.

Educators and administrators are ebullient in their praise for the program. It has been an unambiguous success, according to their testimonials. Again, from the Fordham Institute article:

Anecdotally, there is a strong sense of progress and achievement among those closely involved with the Challenge. "There are more and more schools improving the quality of education" as a result of the Chicago Challenge, said Peter Martinez, a senior program officer at the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, who has worked closely with the Challenge. "There are more and more good staff development programs, as opposed to half-baked efforts. Overall, there's more movement in this system now than there has ever been."

Others, such as William Ayers of the University of Illinois, paint a similarly positive picture. Ayers said the Chicago Challenge has done an "astonishingly good job" in several key areas. For example, it has "raised for public debate systemwide the issues of school size, professionalizing teaching, and the relationships between communities and their schools." Ayers also believes that the Annenberg Challenge has demonstrated the power of networks to create a sense of community among schools grappling with similar issues.

But, while those who have benefited monetarily from the grants have enthusiastically praised it, there is little evidence to show that the program his enjoyed any actual success.

Beyond testimonials from those associated with the Challenge, however, it becomes difficult to find conclusive indications of the program's impact. Outside of anecdotal examples, few of the networks contacted were able to distinguish clearly what specific role Annenberg funds had played in their effectiveness, and none of the networks contacted could supply research that attributes student-achievement gains to Annenberg funding.

--snip--

Therein lies the problem. While few connected with them doubt the value of the programs supported by the Chicago Challenge, their impact is not yet established. This lack of hard evaluation data on the effectiveness of the Challenge is a source of widespread frustration in a city where test scores have increasingly become the coin of the realm. "We don't have a lot to tell you," admitted University of Illinois professor Mark Smylie, who is principal investigator for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Study being conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago. The Challenge is "a difficult thing to evaluate," he explained. "None of these Challenges reflects a tightly designed programmatic initiative that renders itself useful to traditional evaluation."

While those closely associated with the challenge are certain that it is having a positive impact on the schools, there is no actual evidence to prove it.

So, what we have, is multi-million dollar educational boondoggle, being run by Ayres. What, you might be asking, does this have to do with Barack Obama? Thank you for asking.

Ayres, and the other founders of the Annenberg Challenge chose Barack Obama to be the first Chairman of the Board for the new program. Barack Obama, whose relationship to Ayres was "flimsy at best" worked directly for Ayres for eight years. This would seem to be more than just a casual relationship.

Posted at 11:21 AM | Email | Permalink

[SumProVita]

“I suspect that in his Annenberg work, Obama used his power over the purse strings as a form of pork to reward insiders and allies.”

$$$ THIS is what we need more information on (along with what I suspect to be Ayers’ influence regarding ideological indoctrination of teachers/students).

[Bender2]

Read Later Bump!

[Sioux-san]

Does anyone know if there is any connection between the Annenberg Challenge and the Annenberg that sponsors educational programming on television?

[MainFrame65]

Although the University of Illinois holds the complete records of the Annenberg Challenge, the Annenberg Institute at Brown University in Providence, RI houses a sub-set of the national Annenberg Challenge program that was set up in 1993 by a gift of $500 million from Walter Annenberg.

A summary and discussion of these records can be found at: http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/08/behind-annenberg-gate-inside-chicago.html

[556x45]

Perhaps Ayers et al were looking for a pliable empty suit and Obama filled that requirement perfectly — all the credentials but none of the substance. That certainly seems to the case in this presidential race.

[BatGuano]

Walter Annenberg was in the class ‘27 between my father's ‘26 and uncle's ‘30 class at The Peddie School, Hightstown, NJ. Mr. Annenberg, a very successful and generous businessman, and ambassador, must be spinning in his grave.

Although most of his charitable donations have been sound this “Challenge” has been rife with administrators lining their pockets with millions of dollars that were either not accounted for or covered by dishonest accounting. Ayers and Obama administering $50 million plus matching gifts totaling about half again more was a crime waiting to happen. It is no wonder that the Daley Library (named after another crook) and now Brown University seek excuses for not releasing public information. No coincidence that this is occurring just before the Dem convention.

[Enchante]

So Obambi, personally selected by his buddy Wm. Ayers (”just a guy who lives in my neighborhood”) to be Chairman of this “reform” project to spread $50-100 million in slush money around Chicago, cannot account for anything accomplished by this program.

Indeed, Ayers and Obambi thus far refuse to call for the opening of the archives kept at a PUBLICLY FUNDED university, and some mysterious “donor” of the archives is pulling strings behind the scenes to try to prevent any independent access to these archives.

I have read that the Annenberg funds were matched by “public” funds from other sources, so the whole project may have spent over $100 million in Chicago’s public schools.

Was anything really accomplished by this boondoggle, other than spreading money around Chicago to “win friends and influence people” for Obambi’s future political prospects?

[JerseyHighlander]

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Key Chicago Annenberg Challenge Documents

I will post over the next few days the key Chicago Annenberg Challenge documents that I was able to obtain prior to the door being slammed in the face of NRO writer Stanley Kurtz by the University of Illinois

While the records I have, including board minutes, financial records and annual reports, are no substitute for the material apparently held by the University, they do help explain the close links between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers as I explored here.

Chicago Annenberg Challenge Documents:

Tax Returns on Form 990PF:

These returns provide details about the grant recipients of the CAC including former Maoist and Bill Ayers's SDS comrade Mike Klonsky's Small Schools Workshop and the Developing Communities Project, once headed by Barack Obama.

1998

1999

2000 (to come)

2001

2002

2003

Independent Assessments of Impact of Chicago Annenberg Challenge:

The 2003 report concludes that the Challenge had no effect on student outcomes.

1999

2003 Parts One and Two

2003 Part Three

Posted by Steve Diamond at 3:49 PM

[JerseyHighlander]

BUMP TO THE ABOVE POST...

This story is the real deal, unlike the utterly insane birth certificate conspiracy, .

Let’s hope it stays a hard news item and the MSM can’t smear it as another birth certificate conspiracy theory.

[narses]

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[ELS]

Does anyone know if there is any connection between the Annenberg Challenge and the Annenberg [Foundation] that sponsors educational programming on television?

Yes, they were both funded by Walter Annenberg, a philanthropist.

[ELS]

Walter Annenberg Dies At 94

Forbes.com staff, 10.01.02, 5:29 PM ET

NEW YORK - Philanthropist Walter H. Annenberg, who ranked No. 34 on the 2002 Forbes Richest Americans list, died today at his home in Pennsylvania after a brief bout with pneumonia. He was 94.

Walter Annenberg

The University of Pennsylvania dropout inherited debt-ridden Triangle Publications from his father in 1942, when he was just 32. As the only son among Moses Annenberg's eight children, he managed to turn around Triangle, the moribund publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily Racing Form, positioning it for a dynamic period of growth and expanding the business with the addition of wildly successful magazines such as Seventeen and TV Guide. He sold the Inquirer to Knight-Ridder (nyse: KRI - news - people ) in 1970 and then the rest of the company to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (nyse: NWS - news - people ) for $3 billion in 1988.

Annenberg, whose estate is estimated at $4 billion, was a close friend and political ally of several presidents, beginning with Dwight Eisenhower and extending to Ronald Reagan. Nancy Reagan described him as one of former President Reagan's "closest friends for half a century." Richard Nixon appointed him ambassador to Britain in 1969, a position that he held for five and a half years.

Topping the list of his extensive philanthropic work are the endowment of journalism schools at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California, and the donation of a highly prized collection of modern art worth more than $1 billion to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Annenberg was also a benefactor to the United Negro College Fund, the state of Israel and numerous hospitals and schools.