Obama’s classroom campaign: No junior lobbyist left behind
Photoshop: Leo Alberti
My syndicated column today digs a little deeper into President Obama’s September 8 speech to schoolchildren. The school guides now featured front and center on the www.ed.gov website were developed by the White House Teaching Fellows — a group which includes several activist educators as you’ll see below.
Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in old neighborhood pal and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers’ pedagogical philosophy. It was the Chicago Annenberg Challenge way when the two served as board members of the educational foundation — and it is the Washington Obama way now.
***
Obama’s classroom campaign: No junior lobbyist left behind
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009
“ABC” stands for All Barack’s Children. On September 8, young students across the country will be watching television. Yes, they’ll be parked in front of the boob tube and computer screens watching President Obama’s address on education.
Instead of practicing cursive, reviewing multiplication tables, diagramming sentences, or learning something concrete, America’s kids will be lectured about the importance of learning. And then the schoolchildren, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, will be exhorted to Do Something — other than sit in their seats and receive academic instruction, that is.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan dispatched letters to principals nationwide boasting that “This is the first time an American president has spoken directly to the nation’s school children about persisting and succeeding in school.” But the goal is not merely morale-boosting. According to White House event-related guides developed by the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching Fellows, grade-school students will be told to “listen to the speech” and “could think about the following:”
*What is the President trying to tell me?
*What is the President asking me to do?
*What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?
• Students can record important parts of the speech where the President is asking them to do something. Students might think about: What specific job is he asking me to do? Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people?
After the speech, teachers will ask students:
*What do you think the President wants us to do?
*Does the speech make you want to do anything?
*Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?
Obama’s White House Teaching Fellows include Chicago high school educator Xian Barrett, a fierce opponent of charter schools who founded a “Social Justice Club” and bussed students to protests and Michelle Bissonette, a Los Altos, Calif., teacher who is “focused on developing my leadership as a more culturally and racially conscious educator.”
The activist tradition of government schools using students as junior lobbyists cannot be ignored. Zealous teacher’s unions have enlisted captive schoolchildren as letter-writers in their campaigns for higher education spending. Out-of-control activists have enlisted their secondary-school charges in pro-illegal immigration protests, gay marriage ceremonies, environmental propaganda stunts, and anti-war events.
And last year’s presidential campaign saw disgraceful abuses of power by pro-Obama instructors. In New Rochelle, New York, elementary students were given an in-class assignment to color in drawings of Barack Obama – including a picture of a campaign button featuring his face and the slogan “Students for Obama 2008.”
In Cumberland County, N.C., a fifth-grade-school teacher turned a “civics” discussion into an unhinged harangue against a girl who said her family supported John McCain.
Nor can the Democrats’ strategy of using kiddie human shields to advance their legislative agenda be overlooked in the context and timing of Obama’s speech. Children have been front and center of the Left’s push for an ever-increasing government role in health care – from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s use of seventh-grader Baltimore school kid Graeme Frost to push for the massive S-CHIP entitlement expansion, to President Obama’s none-too-coincidental choice of Massachusetts 11-year-old town hall questioner Julia Hall (the daughter of a prominent Obama activist/organizer who assailed Obamacare critics’ “mean” signs), to the Kennedy family’s decision to put grandson Max Allen on center stage to pray for health care reform at his uncle’s funeral last week.
So when the Department of Education directs schools to gather children ‘round the TV monitors for Obama’s pep talk and then do this…
• Create posters of their goals. Posters could be formatted in quadrants or puzzle pieces or trails marked with the labels: personal, academic, community, country. Each area could be labeled with three steps for achieving goals in those areas. It might make sense to focus on personal and academic so community and country goals come more readily.
• Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.
…parents have every right to worry about their children being used as Political Guinea Pigs for Change.
***
Postscript: Stanley Kurtz’s invaluable investigation of the Obama/Ayers/Chicago Annenberg Challenge ties last fall is must-read. A very timely and relevant excerpt:
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago’s public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation’s other key body, the “Collaborative,” which shaped education policy.
The CAC’s basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.
…The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.
In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and the Political,” Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
…CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).
Mr. Obama once conducted “leadership training” seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama’s early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC’s in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.
…Mr. Ayers is the founder of the “small schools” movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to “confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.” He believes teacher education programs should serve as “sites of resistance” to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his “Teaching Toward Freedom,” is to “teach against oppression,” against America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.
The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming “guilt by association.” Yet the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.
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Categories: Education,Graeme Frost,Health care
Errah, the point of “What can I do for the President” exercise next week is to find the next crop of 20 something czars. The current ones are probably shopping their resumes right now so they have something solid before the years end.
Hope for Change in 2010
Eh, you gotta get regular people to run for office Mark, and the way the lefist media works right now, no regular human being wants their life smeared all over the free world. Look what they did to Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.
Since the “ivy league” types have no morals or ethics, they are much more blase’ about what is exposed, whether it’s driving an intern off a bridge and leaving her to die, or flying to argentina on the government dime to cheat on their wives.
As parents, what we’ve got to do is raise up our kids as blameless as possible with a hard sense of responsibility and then ask *them* to run the country.
On September 8th, if barry hussien is airing in our district, my girls will be hunting doves with their daddy. It’s a way for them to practice civic responsibility in gun ownership.
can someone who is a member at hotair please tell them their story has an error? They are saying THURSDAY versus TUESDAY is the date of the BO bo in our schools. For some folks who dont have much time, they may go with pulling kids thurs when the damage will have been done on tuesday.
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/09/02/wh-deletes-line-about-schoolkids-helping-obama-from-speech-prep-materials/
thanks.
My children’s school district will not show it live. They will put it out on the district website so parents can choose to indoctrinate their own children if they choose. Of course this district is 80% white so we are a bunch of racists by the leftist rules but that is fine with me. The word has lost all meaning because of overuse by the left and minorities.
Drudge shows Obama administration is changing some of their wording for their propaganda message. Hide and watch.
More pap from the statists, and of course we have the libtard defending the actions of the Narcissist in chief.
The progressive statists are the decay of morals and society through their documented actions, not as our illustrious math teacher thinks. The collective should stick to math, history just is not its forte.
All hail the obama jugend! nothing to see here, move along
My classroom-volunteer and PTA-volunteer wife will be over this morning asking school administration officials what the “O-fficial” activity will be that day.
If it involves even one nanosecond of time where my children will be forced to watch this nonsense, we will be keeping them home that day.
During their time at home, my teaching-credentialed wife will be doing the instruction…as she has all summer.
They won’t miss a beat.
If the MSM is going to say nothing while the Obama administration “brands” the president and his party to a captive audience of kids and teenage-2010 and `12 voters, then they will have no right to complain when the next Republican president does likewise
FWIW, the principal of my son’s high school did call to tell me that a.) they’ve received no official orders to air the broadcast, and b.), that my son, may excuse himself if the ‘speech’ is broadcast in the school.
Still there, Kingfish?
The monster thread link doesn’t open!
Wait a minute!!!!
There are NOT 798,321 comments here.
Mercury in retrograde strikes again!
Also, the page numbers are gone, now just “older” and “newer”.
Is Word Press tinkering here?
Folks, you’re missing a key part of lgm’s post:
I had to check twice to verify it was really lgm that said that.
Hi, purealchemy. The lack of discussion on the recent numbering phenomenon here is probably due to the fact that we’ve hit it in a couple of threads already.
Michelle confirmed that the tech team is working to resolve it.
Thanks a bunch, Salt!
Where did Michelle confirm this?
What kind of salt are you? Sea salt? Red salt? Smoked salt? Dea Sea salt? French grey sea salt?
Right here.
(Although that link will break the moment they fix the numbering.
)
Ha. I guess it depends on my mood. Perhaps Celtic Sea Salt.
Tanks! That zero boy is right on top of things.
Careful, he might bite your finger off. Libtards have been known to do that.
Could it be the lingering smell of failure coming from this administratin has even infected the loyal drumbeaters
The monster thread still isn’t healed!
OH NO!
How hard can this be?
Liberals are trying to say “Did it bother you when President Bush did the same thing?”
But the Whitehouse says this is the first time a president ever addressed an entire nation of kids directly. So why are libs trying to say President Bush did it? Anyone?
Our elem. school is opting out, since they don’t have enough time to preview and get permission slips out and back. I had called to complain.
The district has set up an opt-out permission form, will send that in with my 8th grader.
Micheleeroo said:
The Libtards are so busy pointing fingers and trying,in vain, to distract that they are close to breaking their own necks. Being Libtards, they think by playing the Blame Bush card it will contunue to work, it no longer works and they are in the shrill stage of frustration.
According to lgm, Reagan was a habitual liar! What does that make Clinton and Obama? The only answer is pathological liars!
What planet does lgm come from? It can’t be this one…
There’s nothing like a pre-made lesson plan. Public school just love them. It is one less thing for the teachers to do. Many of the public schools have become glorified day care centers instead of learning institutions. They get more and more tax money to accomplish less and less. Why stop at keeping students home for the speech? Just keep them home period. Boycott the schools and see what happens. Suppose they schools were opened and nobody came? I had to spend time teaching my children what they should have learned in school and they are better for it. They are now teaching their piers the US history and current events knowledge that all students should know.
rambler said:
I remember in College I had a US History Professor that said, on the first day, you had to buy the text book in front of you but you can put that away. he taught from 40′ and 50′s books as well as all the books and reference he had gathered over the years and the depth of what this country was all about he taught. It was the best class I ever took.
Gosh darn Obamabots:
http://www.dailykostv.com/w/002099/
I just received this from my wife titled “NOMINEE FOR “EMAIL OF THE YEAR”!!!”
…and Obama wants to help!
Subverting the next generation…
This is CHILD ABUSE plain and simple.
BHO should suffer the consequences of his behavior.
lgm backwards is mgl—maniacal gasbag liberal. Odumbo is a lying sack of _________ fill in the blank. He makes Carter look like Einstein.