The Chicago Annenberg Challenge

Tom Maguire at Just One Minute has been following the various threads of Obama's involvement with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Obama was the chairman.

The Times Discovers The Chicago Annenberg Challenge
Barack Obama wants to talk about education reform and has realized he can't duck his history with unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Fortunately the Times is here to help:

CHICAGO -- Senator Barack Obama learned how hard it can be to solve America's public education problems when he headed a philanthropic drive here a decade ago that spent $150 million on Chicago's troubled schools and barely made a dent.

Ahh, the old "I learned from my mistakes and occasional successes" spin I had suggested a few weeks back. Let's watch the Times hone in on the Bill Ayers connection - regular readers will recall that Bill Ayers co-wrote the grant proposal that led to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, then worked for years with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge through a group he formed and led called the Chicago School Reform Collaborative. There is an excellent chance that Obama and Ayers first partnered up on public school reform back in 1988, during an earlier city-wide push for hope and change in the Chicago schools.

One of Tom's commenters sums up the issue perfectly:

Mr. X, a candidate for US President, a member of a major political party, has omitted from his resume his ONLY executive experience, a position in which he oversaw the spending of $50 million dollars (plus at least the same amount in matching funds). The purpose of the project was to improve public schools. The conclusion at the end of the project was that no improvement had occurred.

Researchers looking at the paperwork for this project find that grants for teaching math were denied, but grants with political themes were granted.

Now substitute some Republican name for X in the preceding. Would you regard this as something worth looking into? Yeah, I think you would.

The "administrative overhead" was a bit over $8 million. That is a lot of paperclips... Steve Diamond is also covering this story and has some excellent observations. This is a complex and potentially very damaging seven years of Obama's life. It needs to be brought to light. Is this the person we want to run the United States?