* At an October 1969 gathering in Chicago, Klonsky was a guest speaker along with Tom Hayden and Mark Rudd. In his remarks, Klonsky urged his audience “to have an outright hatred for all pigs [police].”
* In 1994 Klonsky and his wife, Susan, were listed on a “Membership, Subscription and Mailing List” for the Chicago Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
* In National Review Online, Andrew McCarthy reveals the hidden agendas of the Small Schools Workshop (SSW) program on which Klonsky has worked:
“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.’”