Name Names

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE LARGEST PROGRESSIVE INDOCTRINATION MOVEMENT IN THE U.S. — THE COALITION OF ESSENTIAL SCHOOLS

RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Linda Darling-Hammond

Linda Darling-Hammond, who served as education advisor to President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, is currently developing assessments for our new national curriculum, the Common Core State Standards.

Darling-Hammond is a long time advisory board member to the National Equity Project, formerly known as the Bay Area Coalition of Essential Schools and the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools (or BayCES). The National Equity Project/BayCES opened in 1991 as a regional office for Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools (CES).

Through an organization she co-founded called the School Redesign Network, and through the National Equity Project/BayCES, Darling-Hammond has worked closely over the years with socialist, Deborah Meier, communist, Bill Ayers, and several ultra-liberal organizations, including the crooked and recently de-funded ACORN, to open new progressive schools and transform existing public schools into progressive indoctrination centers. This reform effort was once widely known as the ‘small schools initiative’ or ‘small schools movement’.

To read more about Meier and Ayers, look for them below.

The most liberal school systems in our country today known for political and social indoctrination are districts that dove head first into CES/small school reform years ago and remain there today. Namely, Chicago Public Schools, New York City Public Schools, Oakland Unified School District, and Seattle Public Schools (among others).

Today, the National Equity Project’s main focus is addressing “race and class-based gaps in achievement… resulting from historical and institutional biases”. In short, ‘white privilege’.

Darling-Hammond has long been an advocate for repaying what she refers to as “an education debt” owed to African-Americans, a view fostered by many radical educators, including Obama friend, the late Derrick Bell, who was also an advocate for reparations for slavery.

The National Equity Project provides ‘equity coaching’ to educators in numerous school districts nationwide. This is the same equity coaching that brought us the ‘peanut butter and jelly sandwich is racist’ mentality that made news last year.

Darling-Hammond, who also had a hand in the creation of the controversial CSCOPE curriculum in Texas, recently endorsed the American Humanist Association’s Ten Guiding Principles for Teaching Values in America’s Public Schools. These principles include global awareness, a commitment to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, social justice, and service to an ‘interdependent world’.

Read more about the ‘education debt’ here.

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Vartan Gregorian

Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation, formerly served as president of Brown University. In 1996, Gregorian briefly stepped in as acting director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, which was then housed at Brown.

In his role as acting director, Gregorian was instrumental in the creation of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). Gregorian selected domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, who personally selected Barack Obama, to work on the board of the CAC. The mission of the CAC was to expand Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools throughout Chicago and surrounding areas.

In 2009, President Obama appointed Vartan Gregorian to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships.

In addition to his post as president of Carnegie Corporation, an organization that has long funded progressive education initiatives, Gregorian currently sits on the board of the Qatar Foundation.

The Qatar Foundation was started by the founder of Al Jazeera and currently employs the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan Al Banna. Despite this and other deep ties to Islamic terrorists, the State Department and the U.S. Department of Education have entered into an extensive partnership with the Qatar Foundation for the purpose of implementing several programs, including the ‘Connect All Schools’ Initiative.

In 1997, Fox Point Elementary School in Providence, Rhode Island entered into a collaborative learning partnership with Brown University, thereby dedicating the elementary school to the tenants and agenda set forth by the Coalition of Essential Schools. Fox Point Elementary then changed its name to Vartan Gregorian Elementary.

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Mike Klonsky

In 1968, as national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Mike Klonsky wrote an SDS resolution titled Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement. In the resolution, Klonsky admiringly quoted mass murderer Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, and called for an organized youth movement to engage in a revolutionary struggle against capitalism, “the system… at the root of man’s oppression”.

In 1969, Klonsky started a Maoist organization called the October League, which later changed its name to the “Communist Party (Marxist Leninist)”.

A year after Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, Klonsky became one of the first Americans ever to be invited to China by its communist government. During his visit, Klonsky emphasized his organization’s commitment to “lead the struggle to topple the U.S. imperialist ruling class”.

Today Mike Klonsky is a professor of education at DePaul University and national director of the Small Schools Workshop, an organization founded by communist and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Klonsky has been with the organization since its founding in 1991.

As explained here , the Small Schools Workshop received grant money through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (of which Barack Obama was chairman of the board) for the purpose of transforming existing schools into Coalition of Essential Schools member and affiliate schools.

Klonsky also currently serves on the national steering committee of Save Our Schools, an organization that works in partnership with the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES).

CES is the progressive reform movement behind both CSCOPE and Common Core. See the connections at Common Core/CSCOPE/CES Connection.

In the video below, Mike Klonsky and Bill Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn, declare to the media: “We’re going to be in the streets and in every institution in this country from now on.” “We’re gonna replace capitalism with socialism.”

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Deborah Meier

Deborah Meier is a founding leader of Democratic Socialists of America, a marxist organization that strives to end capitalism and bring about “a humane international social order”.

In 1985, just a few years after establishing the Central Park East Schools in New York, Meier joined forces with Theodore Sizer, founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, to open Central Park East Secondary School.

Meier and Sizer then worked together to launch a Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) affiliate center in New York City called the Center for Collaborative Education (CCE).

With the help of several organizations, including the Small Schools Workshop, which was founded by communist Bill Ayers’ and maoist Mike Klonsky, the Center for Collaborative Education transformed dozens of existing New York schools into ‘small schools’ and CES member schools.

Meier has since served as co-chair of the Coalition of Essential Schools and as principal of Mission Hill, a CES school in Boston.

Meier, as do many CES reformers, opposes standardized testing, asserting that “…tests of every sort are largely indicative of one’s family wealth and social status as well as the ethnic and racial background of students.”.

In commenting on an article about the recent Atlanta schools cheating scandal, Meire defends the guilty educators, claiming that it’s the cynicism of the system that is to blame and arguing that changing test scores didn’t harm the students.

In typical liberal fashion — as though no one other than the successful should be held accountable for their actions — Meier points the finger at corporations and the rich by stating, “…there’s probably plenty of teacher cheating at schools for rich kids and their families….” and “If we put teachers in jail for 10 years for cheating, while we make deals with bankers, investment houses, and on and on who cheat, mislead, what are we saying?”

Recent radical interactions:

Deborah Meier and maoist Klonsky ‘reflecting’.

Deborah Meier with Bill Ayers.

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Cathy Wilkerson

Cathy Wilkerson is a former member of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground Organization, along-side Bill Ayers.

In 1970, Wilkerson, who was out on bail for her part in the ‘Days of Rage’ riots in Chicago, was helping to construct a powerful nail bomb that was intended to be detonated at a dance attended by US military personnel and civilians at Fort Dix in New Jersey. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing three fellow Weather Underground members. Wilkerson escaped unharmed and went underground for ten years. After resurfacing, she was arrested and served less than a year in prison.

For the last 30 years, Wilkerson has taught math at several schools, including Bank Street College and El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, a Coalition of Essential Schools member school.

Specifically, Wilkerson teaches ‘RadicalMath’, which was created by Jonathan Osler, lead math teacher at El Puente Academy.

As I wrote here, RadicalMath integrates issues like racism and social justice into the lesson. For example, rather than simply teaching children to calculate the cost of food, ‘radical math’ teachers like Wilkerson make it clear to students that, “in a truly just society, food would be as free as the air we breathe”. Another example is a math project titled, “Mortgage Loans – Is Racism a Factor?”.

The Coalition of Essential Schools refers to this teaching strategy as “making math personal” and boasts that their teachers use these methods to deepen their relationships with the curriculum and with each other.

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Tim Wise

A self-proclaimed anti-racism expert, Tim Wise has no qualms about expressing his disgust for conservatives and traditional American values.

Just before the 2008 presidential election, Wise wrote a piece claiming that people attending McCain/Palin rallies were shouting demands to kill Barack Obama. The article warned that if fascism comes, it will come from “men and women…with baseball caps and What Would Jesus Do? wristbands… from the soil of middle America, from people known as values voters but whose values are toxic…by tailgaters at the big football game… a hockey mom or a NASCAR dad.”

Wise was a featured speaker at the 2009 Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum and has been invited to speak to students at several CES schools.

Wise was also a featured speaker at the 2010 White Privilege Conference. The conference has been attended by many Coalition of Essential Schools teachers and students.

Go to Students Schooled on White Privilege and ’5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO’ to read more about the White Privilege Conference and to learn which CES school district used tax payer dollars to transport students across 3 states to attend the conference.

In response to the Republican Party’s broad victory in the 2010 midterm elections, Wise wrote a seething ‘open letter to the white right’ warning ‘rich folks’ that their time is limited. He then went on to say:

“…conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys… unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms. Fine, keep it up. It doesn’t matter. Because you’re on the endangered list… you are not worth saving.”

“In forty years or so… there won’t be any more white people around who actually remember that Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Opie-Taylor-Down-at-the-Fishing Hole cornpone bullshit that you hold so near and dear to your heart… there won’t be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days… so therefore, we’ll be able to teach about them accurately and honestly…”

“… in about forty years, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it…”

“Do you hear it? The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently? Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.”

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Grant Wiggins

In 1990, the Kentucky Supreme Court declared Kentucky’s education system unconstitutional, requiring the state to throw out its laws on education and completely rewrite them.

Grant Wiggins, on behalf of the Coalition of Essential Schools, was one of several educators called on to assist in the rewriting and restructuring of Kentucky’s entire state public school system.

Wiggins, who had a hand in the design of the controversial Texas CSCOPE curriculum, has worked with the Coalition of Essential Schools for many years, as an educator, a creator of CES methods and teaching strategies, and in training educators to implement the CES reform model.

Wiggins was a featured speaker at the Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum in 2009.

Wiggins is currently working with Pearson, an organization partnering with the CCSSO, to provide professional development to educators for the  implementation of the nationally proposed Common Core State Standards.

The Coalition of Essential Schools is behind both CSCOPE and Common Core. Read more about Grant Wiggins and several others — the connections between CES schools, Common Core, and CSCOPE at Common Core / CSCOPE / CES Connection.

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Howard Machtinger

Former member of the Students for a Democratic Society and co-founder of the Weather Underground Organization alongside Bill Ayers, Howard Machtinger recently served several years as director of the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program at UNC’s School of Education.

The program hand-picked high school students for recruitment into the field of teaching by offering fully paid education and training. Under Machtinger’s direction, many NC Teaching Fellows were then sent to teach in schools belonging to the Coalition of Essential Schools network.

The Fellows program also promoted and partnered with several progressive organizations to promote their social justice infused curricula for use in public and charter schools.

President Obama’s education plan specifically references NC Teaching Fellows as a model of best practice in teacher recruitment.

To his credit, Machtinger has, in recent years, denounced the violence that he and other members of the Weather Underground Organization participated in during the 1960s. However, as an educator and as director of NC’s Teaching Fellows program, Machtinger continued to promote radical SDS style prejudice against whites, America and capitalism.

Machtinger wrote the following just 3 months ago:

“…today the right, including the religious right, is contemptuous and mean-spirited toward the poor, especially if they are people of color. They are losers, who are not fully citizens, whose voting rights need to be curtailed and whose culture needs a makeover. Even some of the Black mega-churches preach an updated version of the ‘gospel of wealth.’”

And with regard to the Tea Party, Machtinger wrote this:

“The question is whether there is any limit to popular toleration and submission to the Tea Party’s articulated individualism and its implicit white supremacy and macho strutting.”

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Bill Ayers

Bill Ayers, speaking at 2001 Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum

Communist, domestic terrorist and former co-founder of the Weather Underground Organization, William Ayers worked on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) with President Obama during the late 1990s. Through the CAC, Ayers and Obama invested $50 million dollars in the expansion of Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools (CES).

Bill Ayers’ organization, the Small Schools Workshop, which also received funding through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, was instrumental in the expansion of CES schools.

Ayers continues today to provide professional development training to CES educators through speaking engagements and workshops.

Bill Ayers quotes:

“Kill all the rich people. … Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents.”
“Teaching… urges revolutions small and large.”
“Education is the motor-force of revolution.”
“Capitalism promotes racism and militarism.”
“Queering Elementary Education is an important contribution to nourishing the ethical heart of teaching… a book for all teachers…” (from his written review of Queering Elementary Education, which offers essays on “locating a place for gay and lesbian themes in elementary reading, writing and talking”.)

CES schools is behind CSCOPE and Common Core. Read about the connections between CES schools, Common Core, and CSCOPE at What Are They Learning?

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Kevin Jennings

President Obama’s former ‘Safe Schools Czar’, Kevin Jennings, is founder and executive director of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

GLSEN is the creator of the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA), a student led organization for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) and straight ally youth’. GLSEN claims there are over 4,000 GSAs in middle and high schools today.

The first Gay-Straight Alliance to be launched in a public school was in 1991 at Newton South High School in Newton, Massachusetts. Newton South is a member school of the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES).

Through workshops and it’s annual fall forum, CES has promoted the start of Gay-Straight Alliances in schools nationwide, providing curriculum material, helping schools develop action plans, and developing strategies to incorporate LGBT themes into textbooks.

For more information and disgusting details on this extremely dangerous radical, go to MassResistance.org.

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Cornel West

Cornel West, a Princeton professor and marxist-socialist, participated as a featured speaker at the 2000 Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum.

West, who served as an advisor to President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, has supported and participated in several communist party projects and spoken out against Israel for its “occupation of the Palestinian territories”.

The Coalition of Essential Schools recommends Cornel West’s books on racism to educators.

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Reverend Jeremiah Wright

Barack Obama’s former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, participated as a featured speaker at the 2006 Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum in Chicago, IL.

Wright, former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, made headlines during Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign for his anti-American rantings and racially charged comments.

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

President Barack Obama

As admitted to in the video above, Obama served as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, through which $50 million dollars went to school reform efforts. As I’ve written several times in What Are They Learning?, that money went to Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools (CES). The stated purpose of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, was to nationally expand the model and principles of CES schools.

Obama still pushes the same progressive education reform movement today through publicized visits to CES schools and CES affiliated schools, and through federal funding and the creation of new education initiatives.

Read more about the Coaltion of Essential Schools at What Are They Learning? and in the book Red Army: The Radical Network That Must Be Defeated to Save America by Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott.