Scholar Decries Former Education Effort Led by Presidential Candidate

Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative religious think tank in Washington, is questioning Barack Obama’s work with a nonprofit effort to improve public schools in Chicago.

During the 1990s, the Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate led the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which awarded $100-million to support educational causes. William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground, a 1960s leftist group, also helped guide the effort.

In an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Kurtz writes that due in part to Mr. Ayers, Mr. Obama oversaw an educational project that proposed bad ideas.

“The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism,” he writes.

(Read The Chronicle’s article about the fallout in the nonprofit world for Mr. Ayers’s relationship with Mr. Obama.)

What do you think? Did the Annenberg approach to improving education make a difference?