Bill Ayers to keynote national teacher conference in February

Posted By Patrick Howley

On 12:28 AM 01/21/2013

Left-wing ’60s radical and onetime domestic terrorist Bill Ayers will be a keynote speaker at the Association of Teacher Educators annual conference in Atlanta next month.
Ayers gained notoriety alongside his wife Bernardine Dohrn as a member of the Weather Underground during the Vietnam War. He was involved in Chicago’s “Days of Rage” riot in 1969 and went underground as a fugitive from justice after an accidental Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in 1970 killed three Weather Underground members who were preparing a bomb that prematurely detonated.
Ayers admitted in a 2001 book that he participated in bombings of the New York City Police Department headquarters, the U.S. Capitol Building and the Pentagon in the early 1970s.
He subsequently became a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a “family friend” to Barack Obama before the president became a national political figure. Ayers and Dohrn currently live in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where Obama formerly resided.
The Virginia-based Association of Teacher Educators describes itself as a “membership organization devoted solely to the improvement of teacher education both for school-based and post secondary teacher educators.”
“ATE members represent over 650 colleges and universities, 500 major school systems, and the majority of the state departments of education. The ATE office is located in the Washington, DC area where it represents its members’ interests before governmental agencies and educational organizations,” according to the organization’s website.
“In addition, ATE has two voting seats on the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education.”
The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education was co-created by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, and is recognized as an accrediting institution by the U.S. Department of Education.