Obama needed Bill Ayers’s ok to get on the board of Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), which he chaired and whose

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. [Italics added]

Ayers believed in this sort of thing.  He wrote

that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. . . . .  “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” [he] said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

CAC was made to order for him.  It

translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn). [Italics added]

More more more in WSJ, where Stanley Kurtz delivers on his plowing through the UIC library archives.