The State of the Community address by Mayor Larry Morrissey was a disappointment to those who applauded his fleeting moment of courage at the Board of Education on Tuesday, and who expected something more from him after many months of silence.  School Board member Bob Evans at a recent candidate’s forum called the conspicuous silence of Morrissey and the school board’s business handlers “a most cowardly act.”  Morrissey’s Thursday speech took an hour to deliver, with applause from an audience mostly comprised of Chamber of Commerce and Alignment Rockford fellows.

Morrissey hammers board

The last two school board meetings, drawing crowds of 400 to 500 vocal demonstrators, have been an embarrassment to the school board and its handlers. Morrissey hammered the school board on Tuesday and again on Thursday for its bungled unpacking of the despised closures. On Tuesday, while he chided the board for threatening to close the Montessori School where he is a parent, he declined to take a stand against ratification of the closing of six Westside campuses that effectively undoes two decades of desegregation efforts in Rockford.  Board president, David Kelly let out a show-stopping cry as the Mayor hit the two-minute mark, “Mr. Mayor, you have your house, and this is our house. Please stop!”  Some cheered, “Let him speak.”  To which the Mayor replied, “Thursday is my state of the community speech. And I’ll have more than two minutes.” I’ll be back, said the Mayo-nator. Thursday, Morrissey continued his contention with the board for its poor job of preparing the public for privatized education in Rockford.

While maintaining a public distance, Sheffield and Morrissey have been dance partners in privatization since the beginning.  Mayor Morrissey is among the original champions of the Alignment Rockford and the Rockford Charter Initiative organizations. He welcomed Dr LaVonne Sheffield in 2009 when she presented her Broad agenda and methodology. (1) The greeters included privatization advocate extraordinaire Paul Vallas who recommended Sheffield, based on their work together implementing charters in the East Baton Rouge Recovery District.  EBR is the most charter soaked district in America.

The first paragraph of Alignment Rockford’s (AR) webpage, (2) states that the organization exists to “facilitate the coordinated alignment of community resources with the strategic plan for district 205 of Dr Lavonne Sheffield.” An identical clip art pic of smiling students on a school bus also smiles from a Gates Foundation webpage. AR emulates the model of Alignment Nashville, Tennessee except that Rockford’s version has a far higher proportion of district 205 administrators on its board of directors. Neither organization seems to invite many teachers along on the journey.  It will be interesting to see how Carpenter’s Local head Brad Long reconciles his participation in AR with the union busting going on at 205.  Among the School Board candidates, Tim Rollins sits as AR Operations Chair.  This fact appears only on his printed material and is either not mentioned or has been removed from his website. (3) Curiously, Rollins told an audience at the first candidate’s forum he was “undecided, but open to charters.” Tennessee, AR’s model is a right to work state, where education reformers are even now completing legislation to end collective bargaining rights for teachers. Every school will set its own scale of compensation for teachers. It will also become illegal for bargaining units to approach Boards of Education. (4)

Rumors and fear abound in Rockford

PTO parents voiced suspicion that the Kennedy / Montessori campus is being cleared as a charter complex for the Gifted Program.  Whispers to Gifted parents that their program is protected did not help to dispel rumors. Barely a month ago prominent community leaders denied any charter motive, now a national spokesperson for privatization rushes to defend Rockford’s repurposing.  A Rock River Times article, Charters 101, drew an indignant rebuttal from the head of the Illinois Charter Network Association. The aptly named author, Jim Publicover, is a well educated spin agent whose previous job was with Trone Inc. (5) There his mission was using social media to bring brands to the public and the public to brands, a curiously Rovian construct when applied to democracy and public education. According to his resume, he has no experience or training as an educator. In practice, charters are a mixed bag: 17% do better, 35 % do worse, and 48% do the same as the public schools they replaced. Rockford’s Galapagos Charter franchise is still within the grace period.  Chicago’s massive effort, Renaissance 2010 yielded fair to poor results. (6)

During these months of confusion and worry for parents, children, teachers and others Morrissey has been notoriously silent.  With Morrissey finally adding his voice to those of the outraged parents of children at Maria Montessori School, that program (and others) received a temporary stay of execution on Tuesday, but we should well remember the recent words of the district’s $1000 per day consultant, Shannon Bingham “What is not successfully cut this year, will be cut next year, the year after, and so on… people in Rockford are suffering from attachment to specialty programs that Rockford cannot afford.”

Sheffield’s model and Seattle’s lesson

Superintendent Sheffield vehemently asserts that she does not support charters, and although Morrissey blew her public cover, in actuality she does not need to.  As soon as she completes the crashing of our district and performs the requisite amputations, local vulture capitalists stand ready to rent and sell us the therapy and prosthetics of privatization.  Sheffield, according to the Broad playbook is herewith expendable, like her counterpart in Seattle, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, thrown out last week along with her CFO after three years on the job.  The list of grievances sung by person after person in Seattle at the fateful board meeting mirror our own concerns:

Gone.  For fostering an air of secrecy and intimidation, leading to retribution against teachers and those in the administration who sought to report wrongdoing.

Gone.  For manufacturing a crisis and enacting massive school closings in lower income neighborhoods, including closing the Seattle African Studies Magnet.

Gone.  For ignoring the chorus of voices imploring her to work with and not against the community.

Gone.  For bringing cronies, consultants and carpetbaggers to serve her Broad agenda, including a $750, 000 grant from Bill Gates’ Foundation aimed at discrediting the teachers union during negotiation time. (7)

Gone. For pressing for larger classrooms, new curricula, testing and assessment that served the privatization reformers more than the children.

After a no confidence vote by Seattle teachers and a forensic audit by the state, Goodloe-Johnson was ultimately fired along with her CFO, Don Kennedy, for failing to stop the siphoning off of $1.8 million in funds to a crony phony non-profit that masqueraded as a minority assistance education program.  The board members offered personal and public apologies to the taxpayers of the community.  All this damage took place in three short years.   It will cost Seattle Public Schools a year’s salary of $300,000 to get rid of Goodloe-Johnson. Sheffield’s salary package in Rockford exceeds that of Goodloe-Johnson. (8)

If we understand that Sheffield is expendable, a possibility members of the alignment are discretely beginning to voice, the issue for Rockford is: What will remain after Sheffield? According to bestselling author Diane Ravitch, speaking last week in Madison with supporters of school board candidate Jane Hayes, “Across America, Broad superintendents are falling like autumn leaves.” The Broad Foundation has dropped Goodloe-Johnson from their list of fellows.  Sheffield is still available for speaking engagements nationally.  We have a board election in April.

Morrissey unpacks re election platform

Morrissey, on Thursday suggested that with HB 1886, we can abolish the entire system of elected school boards in favor of appointments and that with Representative Dave Winters’ HB 1673, we can limit remedies for public workers  who seek promised compensation and benefits. (9) A February 2011 directive from the conservative Fordham Foundation instructs policy makers to go straight to the end goals, without pausing for compromise in privatizing education and breaking unions. (10) The Gates Foundation has spent more than $4 billion across the U.S. to break up large school districts, proliferate charter schools, and advance teacher evaluation linked to standardized test scores. Despite the efforts of Sheffield, Morrissey and others to paint Rockford as desperate and deserving, here in Obama’s backyard, we did not receive coveted Race to the Top bail out funds.  Sheffield has blamed us for her pumped up-trumped up deficit. Morrissey bet on charters.

Finally, in a bow towards Wisconsin’s Governor Walker, Morrissey made his own stab at collective bargaining for public sector workers. Thereby, Mayor Morrissey set his re election platform and endorsed the layoff last week of more than 500 teachers and district 205 staff.  Sheffield has threatened to carve higher into the workforce if concessions are not granted by the teacher’s union.  Can the chaos our community is experiencing be the fulfillment of an elaborately choreographed dance leading to the outrageous and undemocratic destination proposed by our mayor? Is this being planned behind closed doors with support and collusion by elected legislators, business leaders, and our own School Board?   Mayor Morrissey, what have you done? With a rebel yell they cried “Morr, Morr, Morr.”  Sheffield will net nearly $1 million in salary and benefits for her time in the river city. Who will pick up the pieces?  We will. (11)

David Stocker is an artist, teacher and song writer living in Rockford for 23 years. He has created the DISTRICT 205 IS ON FIRE SONGBOOK for activists.

Footnotes/sources:

1. http://www.rockford.edu/news/25091/Rockford-College-in-the-News-Rockford-superintendent-search-recap-Mayo.htm

2. http://www.alignmentrockford.com

3. http://rollins4rockford.com/

4. http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/jan/29/bills-in-legislature-have-teachers-furious/

5. http://www.trone.com

6. http://millermps.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/chicago-school-reform-plan-launched-during-duncan%E2%80%99s-tenure-fails-%E2%80%9Cto-make-the-grade%E2%80%9D/

7. http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2010/09/02/seattle-reaches-contract-agreement-with-teachers-union-but-support-slim-for-superintendent

8. https://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/the-superintendents-send-off/

9. http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocNum=1673&GAID=11&DocTypeID=HB&LegId=58835&SessionID=84&GA=97

10. http://www.edexcellencemedia.net/publications/2011/20110106_STSD_PolicyBrief/20110106_STSD_PolicyBrief.pdf)

11. Dennis Kucinich speaks in Madison 3/12/11

<30>                                                                        3/11/11

View the article: Sound explosion: Artist in residence helps Freeport students tap into magic of music

My (not very) secret plan during the tour was to share peace songs and if possible learn some new music. So I schlepped my Martin Backpacker, some flutes and harmonicas along the whole route. Learning songs was challenging, but my bag of original and traditional peace songs found loving listeners. Worldly translators provided an often humorous bridge to unforgettable sing-alongs. Imagine translating Zulu into Italian into Arabic… Singing in the early education classroom just 50 feet beneath a heavily fortified Israeli army guard post in Hebron… In the home of a large family of shepherd folk living in remote caves south of At Tuwani where kids and elders sang “One More Step” drumming on plastic buckets and pans while a dust storm raged outside… From Mike’s Place in Tel Aviv (site of a tragic 2003 terror bombing) onstage with Jeff Green of One Drum during the Sukkot holiday…To an impromptu guest appearance at a street wedding reception at Deheshia Refugee Camp in Bethlehem singing Annan’s song “Peace and Solidarity” amid the joyful cheers of the young Palestinian men gathered to honor their friend.

• I sang to the walls we carry within us, which are movable with love.
• I sang to the 28″ high concrete separation Wall, which did not move.

But you know, all walls eventually crumble especially those built on fear and hatred.

I have pictures and remembrances; please ask me to come sing to you and to tell this story.

I am humbled and  grateful for the support that came through RUM, Stan and the folks that donated to make my trip possible. I feel  alive to the rest of the world and excited for our reunin to tell stories.  Thanks also to Rockford people who came this path before and offered advice  Stan, Ada, Nancy, Nate, Eric, and Dave Martin. Love to Carrie and Netha, and Sara for holding hearts with Ian while I am here…and to my mom, dad, in California emma and luke  for giving their blessing on this haj.

Today was a Jewish high holiday. Succot. (sp?) People make little tents in their yard open to the sky..open to heaven. They invite friends and family to come in the tent and talk about tradition and the meaning of a spiritual path.  There is a story about four elemental herbs. One with taste and no smell, one with smell and no taste, one with neither taste nor smell, and one with smell and taste. In Succot, the herbs are laid out and explored.  We are to learn that a life of spirituality- or pious religiosity with no deeds is just as hollow as a life with deeds that have no spirituality.  Of course we know people who lack spirituality and do nothing (in the US we call them couch potatoes) By metaphor, we are thus called to be like the herb with taste and smell.

I was nearly the only rider on the local #1 bus to the Old City from the terminal downtown in Jerusalem.  Two stops later the bus filled with the Hassidic-Orthodox Jewish men leaving worship gatherings.  They have long curls at the temples and big fuzzy round hats and long black coats that look like satin bathrobes.  I was the only one of me!  It was funny but I learned to say “Hag sameya” (phonetic..sorry) for ‘Happy holidays” and they alerted me to my right stop, so I wouldnt ride on into the night…remember the song?? Help get Charlie off the MTA!

Salaam/Shalom.

In case I missed you at the IAC showcase in Springfield… It took me two days to get home as a result of the massive ice storm! I hope to hear from you regarding performances and residencies for 2007-2008 . I’m ready to go to work on our grant proposals (due at IAC mid Feb). Here’s what’s been going on with me.

ORIGINS WINTER 2006.

THE ORIGINS OF MUSIC RESIDENCIES, WORKSHOPS & COMMISSIONS
News from David Stocker at Dijeridoo Productions

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Thanks to sleuths at Baker who helped me locate my missing conch shells. I knew from Frank’s info that the conch shells must have stowed away home in an unusual container…lo and behold the shells are now recovered from the depths of my studio where they had been packed with…oops! Chordophones!!!. Luke and I trumpeted for an hour that eve, we were so happy.

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Ian and I are making an overland trek to FLA this winter and will pick up still more conch shells as many friends and teachers have expressed interest in acquiring conchs and other instruments. These will become part of the new WORLD MUSIC BASKET offered to classrooms this year. (more info at www,davidstocker.net) The Florida tour includes a concert at KOA Sugarloaf Key on Dec 26 & 28 and a house concert in ORLANDO on New Years Eve with Haitian songwriter Jan Sebon! An early September tour with ONE DRUM took us to Duke University and Summit School in Winston Salem, NC. We also returned to the International Day of Peace Celebration with 700 student musicians on Sept 21.

These last weeks I wrapped up fall term residencies at Schiesher School in Lisle, Tibbott School in Bollingbroke, and Baker Demonstration School in Evanston.. where we built almost a thousand instruments with our own hands this Autumn. Interestingly, these residencies and performances were return events at each of these schools. I worked with some kids I’ve known for six years now. I logged 5000 miles on my minivan. It was an intricate 10 week dance moving parts, tools, the Sound Exploratorium and myself between three locations. Special thanks to point people Heather Ampel, Lisa Olsen, MIke Gnutek, Nancy Staszak, Arlene Leonard, Linda Kotalik, Anna Wilson and Doris Jackson. These events do not happen without special dedicated people on task many months ahead of the game. Parents, teachers, administrators, students, I have enjoyed meeting and playing with all…seeing us grow. Now I come up for air at the end of a million sequential details that were these weeks. With your feedback, each year this Origins of Music residency gets a little bit tastier and more fun for all. I’m grateful to have been with you again. “Sound izzzzz vibration!!!!”

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A short residency returning to St Edwards School in Racine, WI takes me into December and my 8th annual Holiday Program with the teens at Dolan Education Center in Durand, IL. Early in the Spring, I will be spending time building a music curriculum and 400 instruments at Valeska-Hinton Early Ed Center in Peoria and will spend a month at Hinkley & Big Rock Schools also with an Origins of Music residency. I will finish out the school year with a return to Spring Creek School in Rockford and Beaubien School in Chicago. These residency programs throughout the year receive significant Illinois Arts Council co-sponsorship as I enter my tenth year with state funded grant partnerships.

It is now open courting season for 2007-2008 grants till mid February. If you or anyone you know has an idea for a school assembly event, workshop or residency and wish to include my Origins of Music programs with the IAC grants, PLEASE GET IN TOUCH SOON.
You can download grant application pdfs at:
www.state.il.us/agency/iac

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This month, work is complete on the Hopewell Panpipe commission for the Field Museum in Chicago. This was an amazing project to recreate a 2000 year old flute based on an artifact that was discovered in a burial mound in Ohio in 1893. Friends started collecting turkey bones for prototypes just over a year ago. The journey took us to Kewanagh Penninsula in Northern Michigan where our Native American ancestors have been mining and annealing glacial float copper for more than 6 millennia! The flute replication made of Heron wing bones and hammered copper along with sound recordings that emerged these past nine months will be part of the new Ancient Americas Exhibit at the Field Museum opening March 2007. The opening ceremonies will include a March 10 kids workshop with me on making panpipes. As part of the opening, ONE DRUM will present a concert on May 26. These events are open to the public. I hope to see you there! I am booking guided school tours to the Ancient Americas exhibit at this time.

Endings…Beginnings. You are remarkable communities of beautiful people in this remarkable and beautiful world. I am more and more aware of how the years fly by us all. Peace.

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David

www.davidstocker.net www.onedrum.net 815-519-7599 DIJERIDOO@AOL.COM

I wish the war were over. I wish you would stop it. You could, you know. Every time I see another photo of a dead child, dead by our bombs…every sad twisted story of our army… another army gone wrong…I think: Today, there will be even more people who hate us in the world. I want all those people in Palestine and Iraq and everywhere to know that I don’t like what you are doing. It is near impossible to trust you and most of your associates in government. Your vision is not one of democracy. It is not even one of fairness or kindness. Our ancestors are dishonored. Our children’s lives will be burdened with repairing this mess.

We would all be better off if you had sought treatment, had never run for office, had not thought yourself good enough, had not seized power, nor assembled your greedy team and ordered all this killing. How will you take responsibility for all the hatred and sorrow you have brought into the world? Other dictators are being brought to justice, who stole elections, who persecuted, who ordered massacres, who let children be murdered, who lined their friends’ pockets with the people’s gold, who lied and misused the terrible power of armies. You too will face judgement.

You want us to believe your vision is still good. It is rotten. The money wasted in warfare will never be spent on education, healthcare, and environmental reforms needed to sustain and improve human life on this planet. The victims of global weather catastrophies struggle, the meaning of 9/11 is ignored, children are bombed, the rest of the world begs us to stop… meanwhile, your friends at Halliburton, Raytheon, KBR, Bechtel and Carlyle line up again and again to suck the marrow from our nation’s bones. I can see that we have become the real evil-doers. We build the bombs, we blow it up, we rebuild it, we build more bombs, we blow it up again…endlessly, shamelessly, repeating. AND at every turn of the wheel, the American people must pay these friends of yours.

So may your friends also stand and face judgment in this horror.

Rice: oil tycoon, co-owner of Exxon, wealthier with every gas increase.

Cheney: greedy energy cost manipulator, war profiteer like no other in history.

Rumsfeld: avoided military service, arms trader, Saddam’s old friend, lied to start war.

Gonzales: author of the writs of torture, presiding over mass deportations

Wolfowitz: architect of the war, destroyer of world economics. et al…

Do not wave the Holy Bible in our face any more. Decent people are offended by your smug smile, by your jokes, your media cheer leaders and your apologists. We feel sorry for you. Watching you on live TV, it is painful to see your thoughts jam and hear your words falter and…a pause… You search for the most appealing yet insubstantial words to say, to a soldier without legs, to the homeless of New Orleans, to elders, to America’s urban poor. In another part of your mind you are busy dropping bombs, cutting taxes for the rich, denying benefits, slashing pensions, and choking education. Your liar’s pathology will not let you be so glib about what you are up to. Your mind is also seeing the images of poverty, death and destruction. In those searching seconds of silence, decent people all over this planet see the distance between good and evil in your soul, as the leader of the free world unmasks a terrible insanity.

And as the proportion of dispossessed, widowed and wounded grows in our land, you are your own undoing. Only 28% of our nation is still in the denial that allows them to support you. The other 72% are people of different economic backgrounds, ages, colors, and spiritualities. Yet we form a group of likeminded people. You see, we believe that it is not human to turn away from other people’s suffering, not human to ruin the air and the water for corporate profits, not human to preside over the destruction of innocent peoples’ lives and livelihoods here or in other lands. We feel there is something wrong with the accumulation of private wealth that exceeds the GDP of some nations. We think the dream of America has been hijacked as surely as planes on 9/11. Daily we pray together as one. We pray for our deliverance from vicious extremists like you.

I wish the war were over. I wish you would stop it. You could, you know. You could have an amazing epiphany, like John Newton the slave trader, and you could turn this ship around! It would be the single most momentous event in the history of humankind.

Are you there? Hello…?

David Stocker
Is a musician in Illinois
dijeridoo [at] aol.com