Is Weather Underground agenda now part of USD 497 curriculum?

"We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution." - Bill Ayers, Weather Underground leader, in a 2006 speech at the World Economic Forum in Caracas, Venezuela

"John Dewey suggested that schools must be the engine of social transformation." - Glenn E. Singleton and Curtis Linton, Courageous Conversations About Race (2006)

"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." - Vladimir Lenin

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn

In their 1974 political manifesto, Prairie Fire, leaders of the Weather Underground, a communist terrorist organization, wrote, "We believe that radical teachers should work in schools in working class neighborhoods, in community or junior colleges. Radicalize other teachers, organize the parents, teach and encourage your students."

Bill Ayers was among those signing for the Weather Underground at the end of the introduction of Prairie Fire. His opinion about radicalizing teachers was unchanged four decades after the publication of Prairie Fire. "Revolutionaries want to change the world, of course, and teachers, it turns out, want to change the world too—typically one child at a time," he wrote in Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident (2013). "It wasn’t as much of a reach as you might imagine."

While the McCain-Palin campaign briefly (and ineptly) focused on Ayers’ days as a domestic terrorist, it failed to discuss Ayers’ work in education during the past several decades. Ayers earned an Ed.D. from Columbia University’s Teachers College, which was founded by Dr. John Dewey. For Ayers, attending the Teachers College was probably a natural choice. Dewey was active in the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), while Ayers was a community organizer with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the 1960s. SDS developed from the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the youth branch of LID. LID, which descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, was founded in 1905 by notable socialists Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Clarence Darrow, and Norman Thomas.

Ayers became a vice-president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2008. In addition, Ayers’ younger brother and fellow communist, Rick, serves as the co-president of the National Association of Multicultural Educators (NAME). Conveniently, Bill was on the co-president nomination team.

AERA’s president in 2005-06, Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor in curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was a keynote speaker at the Pacific Educational Group’s (PEG) Summit for Courageous Conversation in 2009. Another keynote speaker at that summit, Antonia Darder, was also a keynote speaker at a NAME event in 2011. Her speech was entitled "The Neoliberal Restructuring of Cities, Education Policy, and Possibilities for Social Transformation Through a Marxist Lens."

In 2008, both Ladson-Billings and Darder signed a statement that read, "We write to support our colleague Professor William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who is currently under determined and sustained political attack." Lisa Delpit and Sonia Nieto, featured speakers at PEG’s Summit for Courageous Conversation in 2013, also signed the statement.

Last month I noted that the Lawrence school district spent $10,200 on a two-day program presented by PEG’s Leidene King. The program, "Beyond Diversity: An Introduction to Courageous Conversations and a Foundation for Deinstitutionalizing Racism and Eliminating Racial Achievement Disparities" is based on a book, Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools, by Glenn E. Singleton, PEG’s CEO, and Curtis Linton, and is rooted in a discipline known as Critical Race Theory (CRT). In addition to writing the foreword for Singleton and Linton’s book, Ladson-Billings wrote the foreword for Ayers’ To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher (2001), and co-edited City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row (2008) with Ayers.

Unfortunately, PEG’s involvement with the Lawrence school district is much more extensive than I noted last month. Lawrence district and school administrators actually began using Singleton and Linton’s book as a study guide in 2005. A group of administrators, teachers, and community members attended the aforementioned Summit for Courageous Conversation in 2009. In 2012, a group of administrators and teachers attended the PEG summit and received the Summit Leadership Award. Rick Doll, Lawrence Public Schools superintendent, and Angelique Kobler, director of curriculum and instruction, were presenters at the 2013 summit.

According to a May 4, 2013 Lawrence Journal-World article, a PEG consultant asked Lawrence school board members and a handful of administrators what they thought "whiteness as property" means. That phrase comes from the title of a 1993 Harvard Law Review article by Cheryl I. Harris.* In 2000 Harris served on the Coordinating Committee of the Black Radical Congress (BRC). According to BRC leaders in a June 15, 1998 email, "It seemed to us the idea of bringing together the varied sections of the Black radical tradition—Socialists and Communists, revolutionary nationalists, and radical Black feminists and womanists—was long overdue."

Is it possible that Lawrence school board members were unaware of the fact that the major progenitors and proponents of CRT—including Harris, Ayers, Cornel West, and the late Derrick Bell—are almost exclusively Marxists?

Of course, one might overlook the Marxist nature of CRT if PEG showed signs of progress. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case. After paying PEG more than $850,000 over three years, the achievement gap between white and black students in St. Paul, Minn., remained unchanged. The achievement gap in math between white and Hispanic students actually widened. The Rochester (Minn.) School District spent approximately $238,000 with the PEG over a five-year period. Again, there was no evidence that the achievement gap between white and minority students narrowed.

At times, PEG even appears uninterested in demonstrating progress. "[PEG] could do better providing good reports on progress they’ve made," said Christine Stead, trustee of the Ann Arbor, Mich., school board in 2011. "You should never have a board be completely surprised at your findings and should be able to demonstrate your findings in some way that’s measurable. We’re not getting that from them." After a seven-year relationship with PEG, Ann Arbor Public Schools declined to renew its contract in 2012.

Between July 2010 and June 2012, USD 497 spent more than $225,000 with PEG for contracts, books, travel, summits, and other expenses. USD 497 also paid $79,700 to PEG as part of a no-bid contract during the 2013-14 school year. In addition, district costs for conference registrations and hotel accommodations at the PEG summit in St. Louis in October 2013 were approximately $15,607. That’s well over $300,000 spent on a program that is based on a controversial Marxist theory. Do the taxpayers really want to spend additional dollars on a dubious and, frankly, racist program, especially at a time when school districts throughout Kansas are saying they’re underfunded?

By the way, if you live in Topeka and believe only those crazy liberals in Lawrence would get involved with something as far out as CRT, think again. According to the February 2014 issue of Topeka Public Schools’ newsletter, "Three years ago our district and building leaders began to explore how race might be negatively impacting our student achievement levels. In order to have conversations about race, we needed guidance. We decided to solicit help and advice from Mr. Glenn Singleton with the Pacific Education [sic] Group."
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* UPDATE: The Journal-World's Peter Hancock wrote that the phrase "whiteness as property" comes from the title of a 1993 Harvard Law Review article by Cheryl I. Harris. I have since found an earlier reference to this phrase from the late Prof. Derrick Bell of Harvard University. Bell, you may remember, was Barack Obama's professor at Harvard Law School.