Steve Diamond notes that Barack Obama is beginning a walk back on his preposterously untrue former claims that Ayers was just a guy in his neighborhood. Using Linda Lenz, a close ally of both men to do so, the Chicago Sun Times quotes her as admitting that Ayers and Obama closely collaborated on the failed Chicago Annenberg Challenge fiasco.
Fishing around on Linda Lenz, however, simply underscores the Ayres-Obama-Trinity Church role in promoting the notion, anethema I'm sure to most voters, of an "educational debt" owed to Black students:
The post includes a fascinating video of a panel chaired by Lenz in 2006 that included Bill Ayers. Ayers uses this May 2006 talk to endorse the proposal to "reframe" the concept of the achievement gap - the gap in outcomes between students of different racial, ethnic or class backgrounds - as an "education debt" that needs to be repaid by whites to people of color, in other words, reparations.
This reparations-based approach to education was apparently first proposed the month before by Gloria Ladson-Billings in her Presidential Address to the American Education Research Association. Ayers is now a Vice President-elect of AERA.
The education debt idea has also been endorsed by Linda Darling-Hammond, education advisor to Barack Obama, via a group called the Forum for Education and Democracy (FED). FED's Executive Director is George Wood who also was part of the panel chaired by Lenz in 2006.
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