Mike Klonsky: Another Communist in Obama’s Fringe Promoting “Progressivism” and his Small Schools

 

From Discover the Networks:

MIKE KLONSKY

• Former member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society
• Founded an organization called the “Communist Party (Marxist Leninist)”
• Was highly admired by Mao Zedong
• Co-founded (with William Ayers) a project known as the “Small Schools Workshop,” where teachers portrayed American capitalism as an economic system infested with racism, imperialism, and all manner of injustice
• Served on President Bill Clinton‘s Advisory Panel on School Violence.
• Ran a blog on the Barack Obama presidential campaign’s official website in 2008

Michael Klonsky was born in 1943. His father, Robert Klonsky, was an American communist who was convicted in the mid-1950s for advocating the forcible overthrow of the U.S. government — a violation of anti-communist legislation known as the Smith Act.

In the 1960s Michael Klonsky, while attending San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge), joined the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1968 he became SDS’s national chairman. That same year, he helped spark the riots that erupted in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. Klonsky was also a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

In 1968 Klonsky penned a document titled “Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement,” wherein he quoted — with admiration — Chinese dictator Mao Zedong. This document called for the development of “an organized class-conscious youth movement” to engage in “revolutionary struggle” to “expose war, racism, the exploitation of labor, and the oppression of youth.” By way of his “class analysis of capitalist institutions,” Klonsky concluded that “racism is an inherent part of capitalism and a primary tool used to exploit all working people.” Urging “a more militant campus movement” that would “expose the racist and class nature of [college] admissions,” Klonsky demanded the preferential “admission of black students and brown students to help wage the fight against racism on the campus.”

When fellow SDSers such as William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn broke away from the group and formed the new Weather Underground, Klonsky did not join them. Rather, he founded the “October League,” a Maoist organization that later (in June 1977) changed its name to the “Communist Party (Marxist Leninist)” (CPML).

In his role as CPML chairman, Klonsky was highly admired by Mao Zedong. In 1977, a year after Mao’s death, Klonsky became one of the first Americans ever to be invited by China’s Communist government to visit that country. He met with Mao’s successor, Chairman Hua Kuo-feng, and received what the Washington Post described as “the warmest reception ever given an American by the new Chinese leader.” Reported the Post:

“Vice Premier Li Hsien-nien told Klonsky at the banquet that the founding of the [CMPL] reflects the aspirations of the proletariat and other working people of the United States, and is a new victory for the Marxist-Leninist movement in the United States….

“Klonsky replied, according to the Chinese news agency, ‘As a Marxist-Leninist party in one of the two superpowers, and recognizing our responsibility to lead the struggle to topple the U.S. imperialist ruling class, we are determined as well to make a contribution to the worldwide struggle against the two superpowers, the United States and Soviet social-imperialism, the main enemies of the peoples of the world.’”

The Chinese government repeatedly invited Klonsky to state-dinner-level visits in Beijing between 1979 and 1981. In 1981, however, CPML dissolved as a result of factional splits and key defections.

Klonsky subsequently earned a doctorate and became a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he was reunited with his old SDS comrade William Ayers, who also taught in UIC’s education department. In 1991 Klonsky and Ayers co-founded a project known as the “Small Schools Workshop” (SSW), premised on the notion that if high schools were to limit their enrollment to no more than 400 students (and optimally to fewer than 200), the learning atmosphere on campus would be improved. Klonsky has served as SSW’s director since 1993.

In National Review Online, Andrew McCarthy reveals SSW’s hidden agendas: 

“The concept may be called small schools, but Klonsky and Ayers uniquely grasp the force-multiplier effect. In a small class, the teacher preaching the ‘social justice’ gospel that American capitalism is a racist, materialist, imperialist cauldron of injustice can have greater impact on the students he seeks to mold into his conception of the ‘good citizen’ — and on the teachers he is teaching to be preachers.”

In 2006 the City Journal’s Sol Stern observed that theorists like Klonsky and Ayers

“nurse a rancorous view of an America in which it is always two minutes to midnight and a knock on the door by the thought police is imminent. The education professors feel themselves anointed to use the nation’s K-12 classrooms to resist this oppressive system. Thus … teachers [are urged] not to mince words with children about the evils of the existing social order. They should portray ‘homelessness as a consequence of the private dealings of landlords, an arms buildup as a consequence of corporate decisions, racial exclusion as a consequence of a private property-holder’s choice.’ In other words, they should turn the little ones into young socialists and critical theorists.”

Klonsky himself has confirmed that this is precisely SSW’s objective:

“[S]uccessful social justice education ensures that teachers strike a balance between debating sociopolitical problems that affect children’s lives and teaching them academic basics on which they will be tested. A science teacher can plant an urban garden, allowing students to learn about plant biology, the imbalance in how fresh produce is distributed and how that affects the health of community residents. An English teacher can explore misogyny or materialism in American culture through the lens of hip-hop lyrics. Or as Rico Gutstein, a professor of mathematics education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, suggests, a math teacher can run probability simulations using real data to understand the dynamics behind income inequality or racial profiling. These are ‘examples of lessons where you can really learn the math basics,’ he says, ‘but the purpose of learning the math actually becomes an entree into, and a deeper understanding of, the political ramifications of the issue.’”

When Barack Obama and William Ayers collaborated on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) education-reform project (where Obama chaired the board that oversaw funding decisions), CAC gave SSW a series of grants totaling $1,056,162. The Joyce Foundation and the Woods Fund of Chicago, on whose boards Obama also sat, gave SSW another $912,556.

In the 1990s, Klonsky served on President Bill Clinton‘s Advisory Panel on School Violence.

In a 2001 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Klonsky candidly revealed that he and Ayers were still pursuing the same radical agendas they had advocated in their younger days. “We’ve learned how to work within the system,” Klonsky said. “The fight to save and improve public education embodies all the issues we were fighting for back then.”

In 2008 Klonsky supported Barack Obama for U.S. President because his “campaign has become a rallying point for young activists and offers hope for rebuilding the civil rights and antiwar coalitions that have potential to become a real critical force in society.”

Klonsky was given the privilege of running a blog on the Obama campaign’s official website. The blog focused, as Klonsky put it, on “education politics and teaching for social justice.” But when blogger Steve Diamond called attention to Klonsky’s blog in June 2009, the Obama campaign scrubbed its website of anything Klonsky had ever written.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2436

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Another Communist in Obama’s Orb

Excerpted; read entire article HERE

Klonsky was a regular guest of the Chicoms until 1981, when the relationship soured over the post-Mao leadership’s free-market reforms. (Yes, Klonsky is apparently more committed to communism than China’s own Communist Party.) So what was a Leftist radical without platform to do? Why, what else? He became an American college professor specializing in education.

After getting his doctorate, Klonsky eventually made his way to Chicago and hooked up with his old SDS comrade (and self-professed “small ‘c’ communist”) Bill Ayers. Together, they co-founded the Small Schools Workshop in 1991. The goal — as Ayers has repeatedly made clear, most prominently in a 2006 speech before Hugo Chavez at an education forum in Caracas — is to bring the same Leftist revolution that has always galvanized them into the classroom.

The concept may be called small schools, but Klonsky and Ayers uniquely grasp the force-multiplier effect. In a small class, the teacher preaching the “social justice” gospel that American capitalism is a racist, materialist, imperialist cauldron of injustice can have greater impact on the students he seeks to mold into his conception of the “good citizen” — and on the teachers he is teaching to be preachers. Writing trenchantly about how this system of “critical pedagogy” short-changes the basic education needs of disadvantaged children, the City Journal’s Sol Stern observes that theorists like Klonsky and Ayers:

nurse a rancorous view of an America in which it is always two minutes to midnight and a knock on the door by the thought police is imminent. The education professors feel themselves anointed to use the nation’s K-12 classrooms to resist this oppressive system. Thus … teachers [are urged] not to mince words with children about the evils of the existing social order. They should portray “homelessness as a consequence of the private dealings of landlords, an arms buildup as a consequence of corporate decisions, racial exclusion as a consequence of a private property-holder’s choice.” In other words, they should turn the little ones into young socialists and critical theorists.

Klonsky himself confirms that this is precisely the goal (italics mine):

[S]uccessful social justice education ensures that teachers strike a balance between debating sociopolitical problems that affect children’s lives and teaching them academic basics on which they will be tested. A science teacher can plant an urban garden, allowing students to learn about plant biology, the imbalance in how fresh produce is distributed and how that affects the health of community residents. An English teacher can explore misogyny or materialism in American culture through the lens of hip-hop lyrics. Or as Rico Gutstein, a professor of mathematics education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, suggests, a math teacher can run probability simulations using real data to understand the dynamics behind income inequality or racial profiling. These are “examples of lessons where you can really learn the math basics,” he says, “but the purpose of learning the math actually becomes an entree into, and a deeper understanding of, the political ramifications of the issue.”

When Obama and Ayers collaborated together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) education-reform project, with Obama chairing the board that oversaw funding decisions, CAC underwrote the Klonsky/Ayers Small Schools Workshop with a whopping $1,056,162. And that’s not all. Nearly another million dollars was steered to the Small Schools Workshop by the Joyce and Woods Funds when Obama sat on their boards. The grand total comes to $1,968,718.

http://article.nationalreview.com/376079/another-communist-in-obamas-orb/andrew-c-mccarthy?page=2

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Connecting ALL THREE: KLONSKY, AYERS, Obama

Bill Ayers is just a guy who lived in Sen Obama’s neighborhood.

This is the office building where, according to public records, Bill Ayers and Barack Obama shared office space.

Nobody cares about the relationship shared by Sen Obama and a former domestic terrorist who helped set bombs in buildings all across the country. No one cares about the activities of a man who was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for a decade and only avoided prosecution because the FBI illegally wiretapped his conversations.

Sen Obama was only 8 years old when he helped with those bombings. Of course, Sen Obama was a young man before Ayers turned himself into the authorities, ending more than a decade of underground existence.

We are told that Sen Obama hardly knew Ayers, except that he sat on a couple of charitable foundations with the man — charitable foundations that with Obama’s consent funneled nearly $2 million into Ayers own pet projects.

They barely knew each other, although Ayers chose a little known community organizer by the name of Barack Obama to oversee the disbursement of nearly $150 million to select projects, as CEO of the Chicago Annanberg Challenge. Many of those projects were the brainchild, and were overseen by Bill Ayers.

They hardly knew each other, even though they shared an office for three years. That address was also shared by Mike Klonsky, an activist with ACORN.

We have been told that Sen Obama had no relationship with ACORN, he never worked directly for ACORN and therefore cannot be tarred with any of the ACORN fraud.

That address was also shared by Mike Klonsky, an activist with ACORN. 

http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/hinzsight_story/david_hinz/2008/10/20/sen_obama_and_bill_ayers_shared_an_office_for_three_years

  Mike Klonsky

http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=75282

Klonsky writes for Obama for America blog until discovered; name and blog “scrubbed”….. Bill Ayers and Klonsky know each other…….Obama and Ayers are connected.

So WHAT is Obama’s ideology about Education in America?