Chicago Annenberg Challenge

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The Chicago Annenberg Challenge ( CAC ), also known as the Annenberg Challenge to Chicago , was part of the national Annenberg Challenge (translatable as “Annenberg Challenge”), which was founded in 1995 as a public-private partnership in the USA . It aimed to reform the primary schools. Their performance should be increased by means of basic investments in the form of professional development measures and technical support. The CAC was funded by a foundation of the conservative publisher, billionaire and patron Walter Annenberg, who was friends with Ronald Reagan . The Annenberg Foundation should be supplemented by other private donors in a 2: 1 ratio.

The CAC received a sum of 49.2 million US dollars from the national initiative in 1995. By 1999 the Chicago Challenge managed to raise an additional $ 60 million from private donors. The CAC existed until January 2002. The remaining assets were transferred to a follow-up project, the Chicago Public Education Fund . The CAC files have been made available to the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago for research.

The successful application for funding to the Annenberg Foundation was made in 1993 by Bill Ayers , co-founder of the militant US underground organization Weathermen , professor of educational sciences at the University of Illinois in Chicago and today president of the primary school teachers' association "Aera"; later the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform and the Joyce Foundation were also involved. Ayers was an activist for the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (ABC) group within this reform movement. ABC also included the Developing Communities Project , headed by Barack Obama at the time , as well as the Chicago United group, which came from the business community and was chaired by Thomas Ayers, the father of William Ayers. A major achievement of the Chicago school reform movement was a 1988 bill that counterbalanced teacher advocacy and school administration by installing local councils in all schools in Chicago to give parents and political activists influence over the schools. From 1995 onwards, the Mayor of Chicago made increasingly successful attempts to undermine the influence of the councils. The CAC fought back by donating millions of dollars to the councils. Among other things, $ 175,000 went to the Small Schools Workshop founded by Bill Ayers in the 1990s, for which Ayers recruited Mike Klonsky. Klonsky was one of the founders and leaders of the Maoist-oriented Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) in the USA. The activities of the CAC were also controversial internally at times. A Challenge board member, Arnold Weber, business sector representative and former president of Northwestern University , criticized the $ 2 million award to local school boards as a potential "political threat" to school principals.

At the beginning the CAC consisted of three parts:

  • The Chicago School Reform Collaborative as an operational arm, consisting of representatives of the school reform movement that emerged in 1987, co-chaired by Bill Ayers. Within the framework of the CAC, it was the task of the collaborative to select potential scholarship holders, prepare proposals for applications and develop other ways of supporting the reform process led by the school councils for the CAC.
  • A board of directors initially appointed by the Chicago School Reform Cooperative. The board was entrusted with fundraising and approving grants. He also appointed an executive director, Ken Rolling, of the Woods Fund of Chicago. Members of the board were Chicago celebrities from both business and society. From 1995 to 2000, Barack Obama (then a practicing lawyer) was Chairman of the Board. As a candidate for the Illinois Parliament, Obama hosted one of his first fundraising dinners at the home of Ayers, who lived in the same neighborhood in south Chicago. Shortly thereafter, Obama became chairman of the Annenberg Challenge to Chicago. Cooperation with the militant Bill Ayers in the CAC was held against Obama by journalists in the primary campaign for the 2008 US presidential election and by Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin in the main election campaign . Obama has been indirectly implied - but without being able to prove it - that he may have shared Ayers' radical political views, and that Obama's election as chairman of the CAC may have come from Ayers.
  • The Chicago Schools Research Consortium , a research offshoot of the CAC. The Research Consortium was responsible for assessing the impact of spending on funds granted by the CAC. Ironically, the panel concluded that the $ 110 million spent in Chicago over six years had little or no impact on student performance.

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