Obama and Ayers Bashed Teachers
Back in the 1980s, long before Barack Obama and William Ayers supposedly knew each other, both were active in the same school “reform” projects in Illinoise.
As Steve Diamond of Global Labor and Politics points out, teachers often took the brunt of Obama and Ayers education reform.
Ayers carried his authoritarian approach to politics from the late 60s into his work in education starting in the mid 1980s. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois in Chicago in 1987 and became part of the citywide school reform effort there. The major group that emerged was the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, or ABCs, which Ayers was a part of and later headed up. Another member of the ABCs was the Developing Communities Project headed up by Barack Obama.
ABCs primary goal, its raison d’etre, was not a progressive or democratic goal. It was set up to attack the Chicago Teachers Union which had led an unpopular strike in 1987. It also wanted to rein in the power of the Chicago school administration which it considered a bureaucratic barrier to reform.
The primary reform that ABCs lobbied for was the creation of what were called Local School Councils, or LSCs. A huge lobbying effort in 1988 led to the Chicago School Reform Act passing the legislature in 1988. The LSCs would be set up on a school by school basis and would be made up of parents, teachers and principals, but controlled largely by parents. They were able to fire principals and control school curriculum.
Over the next several years something like 20% or more of school principals were dismissed.
Ironically, hispanic principals were among the first victims of the LSCs.
Now, who opposed the LSC power grab by the ABCs coalition? Much of black Chicago! Operation PUSH opposed it, as did The Woodlawn Organization, and many black leaders saw the LSCs reform as the result of white elites manipulating hispanic parents who had been greatly inconvenienced during the strike in order to attack black teachers and school administrators.
And who supported the LSC power grab?
Well, one of the few black organizations was Barack Obama’s DCP. And then there was Bill Ayers, of course. Ayers wrote an op ed in the Chicago papers celebrating the anti-bureaucratic intent of the bill - meaning of course the Teachers Union and the administration. This attack on “bureaucracy” is a favorite theme of Ayers and if it sounds familiar to some it should: it was a maoist concept - the idea that what gets in the way of social progress is “bureaucracy” which needs to be smashed. Of course, any representative democratic institution like a teachers’ union or school board often gets swept into such a broad concept.
And as readers of Global Labor well know the central purpose of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge conceived of by Bill Ayers in 1993 was to bolster the LSCs which were then waning in power due to demoralization and some dissent in the business community. So it should not surprise anyone to learn that Ayers was able to recruit elite Chicagoans in his continuing attack on teachers and principals. One union activist at the time called the efforts of Ayers and Klonsky “teacher bashing.” No wonder union support for the CAC was lukewarm at best and no union representative was found on the CAC board.
For Ayers the CAC money to back the LSCs harked back to the local control battle that the New Left had joined with the Black Panthers to support in 1968 in New York City’s Ocean Hill Brownsville school district. That effort led to a disastrous confrontation with the almost all white teachers union. But 25 years later in Chicago Ayers and Obama went on the attack against black teachers!
