Sol Stern, writing in City Journal,  highlights what is often overlooked in the discussion about Ayers' and Obama's Chicago Annenberg Challenge: It represents yet another effort to spread Ayers' brand of educational humbug to poor urban schoolchildren to further disadvantage them in life:

America's historical ideal of public schooling as a means of assimilating all children (and particularly the children of new immigrants) into a common civic and democratic culture is already under assault from the multiculturalists and their race- and gender-centered pedagogy. Now Ayers and his social justice movement, by dismissing the civic culture ideal as nothing more than "capitalist hegemony," subvert the public schools even further-while subsidized by the taxpayers, including the capitalists who supposedly control the schools.

And it's not just from his government-funded outpost at the University of Illinois that Ayers is spreading the word about radical social justice teaching. He maintains a busy lecture schedule at other ed schools around the country, and he does teacher training and professional development for the Chicago public schools. All that still leaves him enough time to give nostalgic lectures on college campuses about his Weather Underground experiences.