Word: morgane
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Born in Minneapolis to a jazz-guitarist father and a 14-year-old mother, Morgan was playing club dates in Los Angeles when he was still a teenager. He'd back up Billie Holliday or Josephine Baker at night, then go to high school during the day. By 17, he had himself a heroin habit. He received a stern lecture on the evils of using hard drugs from the Yardbird, who undercut his position by promptly sampling Morgan's stash. "Like it or no," Morgan says, "what he was saying was not nearly as loud as what he was doing...
...cafeteria at Chicago's Morgan Park High School was jammed, and tempers were rising. Only a week earlier, the school's new eleven-member, parent-led governing council had voted not to renew principal Walter Pilditch's contract. The move had sparked violent protests among students, parents and teachers, resulting in seven injuries and ten arrests. Now council president Calvin Pearce was gamely trying to get on with other pressing matters...
...many in the crowd would not cooperate. They demanded to know why principal Pilditch, a 21-year veteran, had been fired. When the council refused to discuss the reasons, Cheri Dybus, mother of a Morgan Park junior, rose and stormed out of the room. "They don't know what they're doing!" she said. "It's a political power trip. Pilditch has raised the scores of these children. These people don't represent...
...Morgan Park is one of a handful of schools that have been shaken by turmoil in recent weeks after principals were ousted by local councils. The dismissals were the first big test of a revolutionary decentralization scheme launched last fall by the city of Chicago. Under the plan, locally elected councils -- composed of six parents, two community residents, two teachers and an ex- officio member, the principal -- were put in charge of each of Chicago's 541 public schools. The aim was to shift authority from the city's bloated board of education to local neighborhoods. But giving parents...
...board of education has promised help but has been slow to deliver it, giving rise to charges that the central bureaucracy is not committed to change. "The concept is real good, but they have set us up to fail," says Leroy Johnson, whose daughter is a ninth-grader at Morgan Park High School...