Young Mr. Obama - By Edward McClelland Page 0,37

few schools claimed big successes. Galileo Scholastic Academy hired a full-time literacy coordinator who put teachers through Great Books training and started a young authors contest. In five years, Galileo nearly doubled the percentage of students reading above the national norm.

Chicago is an enormous school district—at the time, it had 410,000 students—so even $150 million was spread thinly. Each Challenge school got an average of $47,000—just 1.2 percent of a typical annual budget. After the Challenge ended, a study by the University of Illinois at Chicago found that the money hadn’t made much difference.

“Our research indicates that student outcomes in Annenberg schools were much like those in non-Annenberg schools and across the Chicago school system as a whole, indicating that among the schools it supported, the Challenge had little impact on student outcomes,” the study concluded.

Student academic engagement was “slightly greater” in the Annenberg schools. Classroom behaviors, sense of self-efficacy, and social competence were all “weaker.”

Do-gooder money distributed from a downtown office building could not alter the demographics of the Chicago Public Schools: 85 percent of the students were black or Latino. An equal number came from low-income families. When Walter Annenberg conceived the Challenge, he wondered why the whole world wanted to attend America’s colleges but not its public schools. His half billion dollars didn’t change that. Obama’s first daughter, Malia, was born while he headed the Challenge. Like most well-to-do Hyde Parkers, he ended up sending her to the Lab School.

The Annenberg Challenge undoubtedly helped Obama. It put him at the head of a major civic undertaking and placed him alongside the city’s wealthiest philanthropists. The board met monthly for the first six months and quarterly after that. Obama’s duties included meetings with Vartan Gregorian, president of Brown University. When Obama and Gregorian lunched at the Metropolitan Club, they were joined by Maggie Daley, the mayor’s wife; Scott Smith, publisher of the Chicago Tribune; and Penny Pritzker, a member of the family that has used its multibillion-dollar Hyatt Hotels fortune to stick its name on theaters, libraries, parks, and the University of Chicago’s medical school. Five years after that luncheon, Pritzker would become the first big-money donor to support Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign. As a candidate for the state senate, he listed the Annenberg Challenge on his campaign literature alongside his civil rights work.

Bill Ayers wasn’t Obama’s “terrorist pal,” as right-wingers would one day claim. But he was more than just a “guy who lives in my neighborhood,” Obama’s attempt to brush off the relationship. They were colleagues, members of overlapping social and professional circles, but they weren’t close friends.

Obama was friends with Rashid Khalidi, the controversial Arab-American scholar. He had much more in common with Khalidi than with Ayers. Both were outsiders to Chicago, both had Muslim fathers, both had distinguished themselves at influential universities. Khalidi was born in New York City, the son of a Lebanese Christian mother and a Palestinian father who worked at the United Nations. An Oxford Ph.D., he headed the U of C’s Center for International Studies. Author of Palestinian Identity, Khalidi supported a Palestinian state and harshly condemned America’s unwavering support for Israel. The campus newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, called him “a University personality both revered and reviled for his heavy criticism of the State of Israel and American policy.” Obama and Khalidi shared the sort of friendship that world-class universities foster. Even though Obama had settled in Chicago and married into a Chicago family, he was still the son of Honolulu, Jakarta, and New York. His outlook was as much global as it was local. He would be far more engaged by a discussion of Middle Eastern policy in the dining room of International House than an argument about the White Sox’s pitching staff at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap. Like Obama, Khalidi would go back east to realize his ambitions. In 2003, he was named the Edward Said Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University. During a farewell party, Obama toasted him warmly, recalling conversations that had given him “consistent reminders of my own blind spots and my own biases.”

Dreams from My Father was finally published in 1995. Obama gave a reading for two dozen friends in the back room of 57th Street Books and managed to cause a small stir in Hyde Park. Dreams was reviewed in the New York Times (“persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither”) and the Washington Post. Just as impressively, it scored Obama a feature story