I have yet to see any evidence that Obama is aware of Ayers’ educational views, much less that they have influenced him.

If folks want to criticize Ayers’ educational views, go right ahead. Good vigorous debate is a healthy thing.

Just don’t tar Obama by association with Ayers.

BTW, I come from a large Irish Catholic working class family. Four of my five siblings are involved in education. My father was a sheet metal worker who became a shop teacher, and my mom was an elementary school teacher. There are people who I knew in politics before I became a teacher who are also involved in education. Is that odd? Millions of Americans work in education.

Ayers developed a race-based approach to politics in the late 60s and early 70s that relied on a variant of the “unequal exchange” argument of maoists and other third worldists. He applied it to the domestic US and argued that white workers lived off the backs of black workers.

Today he has endorsed a related proposal by Gloria Ladson-Billings and Obama education advisor Linda Darling-Hammond for “repayment of centuries of education debt” that has allegedly accumulated over centuries to people of color.

That is, in my view, fundamentally at odds – well, with rational argument – but also with the comprehensive multi-factor policy menu advocated by the EPI-convened Bold Approach.

Ayers, Obama and Klonsky have been working together on education policy in various ways for many years, going back to the late 1980s. Ayers and Obama co-led the six year long $110 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge Program. Klonsky was a recipient of a 1995 grant of $175,000 from the Challenge for the Small Schools Workshop that he was hired by Ayers to head up (apparently Klonsky was a cab driver in Chicago at the time) in 1992.

While I have some concern that Obama would even shake hands with someone who was almost single handedly responsible for wrecking the student antiwar movement with his violent, illegal and despicable acts, I am far more concerned that Obama thinks this guy has anything useful to say about American schoolchildren.

(For the record, I think that Sol Stern made a similar argument – I hold no brief for neo-cons but his City Journal article was aimed at attempting to steer the conversation away from Ayers’ violent past to his current approach to education policy and theory.)

Btw, Ayers brothers Rick and John and (late) father Tom and Klonsky’s wife, brother and daughter all work in or on education issues. So does Mark Rudd and Carl Davidson. Strikes me as a bit odd, frankly.