"By offering support through professional development and technical assistance, teaching and learning improved, the quality and quantity of professional development increased, and the community became more knowledgeable and better equipped to create successful school reform."
Sounds great, except that there was no measurable success in improving education. For an objective, non-political assessment of both the national Challenge and the Chicago Challenge by professional educators, see this link.
As the case studies reveal, expecting reformers outside the system to work with that system to reform the system itself proved to be a tall order -- especially when the outside reform groups also had their own ideas to implement, agendas to advance, and budgets to worry about. The experiences of New York and Chicago show that even reformers armed with $25-50 million are no match for school districts with budgets in the billions. There turned out to be no practical way to get a district to cooperate with a reform plan if the district didn't share that plan's philosophy -- and its theory of change....
As we read these case studies, we imagined going on a treasure hunt, carefully following the map one is handed, and eventually arriving at the location marked with an X. Yet there's no treasure to be found. For it turns out that one was handed the wrong map. It was said to lead to a stash of diamonds but in fact it led to a picnic table, a bicycle repair shop, or the road out of town....
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, supervised by Obama and Ayers, made most of its grants to those "outside reform groups." Who and what these "reform groups" were is the question. Only one is known for sure: The Small Schools Workshop, headed by former SDS radical Mike Klonsky, an avowed Maoist Communist in the '80's, but a Chicago cabdriver in the '90's.
Kass is correct -- these records will never see the light of day.
Mike Klonsky, the Maoist Hardliner, Obama supporter and former best friend of the Weatherman terrorist group founders William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, received a $175,000 grant from the William Ayers/Barack Obama-led Annenberg Challenge to run the Small Schools Workshop.
Klonsky belonged to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was best friends with William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn who later became famous for their acts of terrorism when the SDS broke up and the Weathermen terror group was formed.
Between 1979 and 1981, Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (CPML) chairman and Obama supporter Mike Klonsky was repeatedly feted with state-dinner-level visits to Beijing.
Yesterday, Klonsky was posting a blog on the Obama website:
But, that was yesterday.
Today his blog was removed from the Obama website.
Comrade Klonsky is no longer with us.