Stevie Van Zandt’s TeachRock Launches Artist Council With Sheryl Crow, Norah Jones, Common & More: Exclusive

Though he’s best known as a founding member of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, for years now Stevie Van Zandt has devoted much of his time to TeachRock, the free educational initiative he launched in 2006 geared toward K-12 educators and students.

He’s about to get help with the program from some of the biggest names in music. TeachRock has formed an Artist Council that includes Erykah Badu, Common, Sheryl Crow, Peter Gabriel, Norah Jones, DJ Khaled, Skip Marley, Darryl McDaniels, Melle Mel, Margo Price, Rapsody, Gina Schock, Marty Stuart and Taboo.

The musicians on the Artist Council will participate in lesson plans and work directly with students and educators using the curriculum. Additionally, they will engage with their fans to spread the word of TeachRock’s mission. They join Bono, Jackson Browne, Martin Scorsese and Bruce Springsteen, who are members of TeachRock’s Founders Board.

“This Artist Council is the culmination of the outreach we’ve engaged in since establishing the Rock and Soul Forever Foundation and its TeachRock.org  program over 10 years ago” says Van Zandt in a statement.  “The Artist Council is an important step toward our long-term goal — keeping the arts a vital part of public education by creating and distributing an innovative, transformative, and effective methodology for new and future generations, ultimately leading to drastically improved high school graduation rates. Our dream is that one day every artist will take the opportunity to visit a classroom, whether locally or on tour, anywhere in the world, and participate in a lesson plan using our curriculum. By adding the 14 talented musicians making up the Artist Council to our network of 60,000 teachers and 19 partner schools, we have made a significant step toward making this dream a reality.”

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop and Black Music Month, TeachRock has launched an initiative including the above clip featuring McDaniels, DJ Khaled, Melle Mel and Taboo. As “professors for a day,” the artists shared their first-hand accounts for The Roots of Hip-Hop classroom resource built around the half-century anniversary of Kool DJ Herc’s 1973’s Back to School Jam party. The lesson plan will be shared with more than 60,000 teachers globally.

TeachRock includes hundreds of lesson plans and musician bios. Its Rock and Soul of America high school history course is taught in several states, including California, Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.

According to TeachRock, more than 60,000 educators in over 30,000 schools in all 50 U.S. states, England, Spain, Norway and elsewhere are registered with the nonprofit.

TeachRock’s Partner School program includes collaborations with the Connecticut State Department of Education, New York City Department of Education, Los Angeles Unified School District, Chattanooga, Tenn., public schools, as well as with individual schools in Chicago, Cleveland and Milwaukee.

Van Zandt started TeachRock after a group of music education activists approached him concerned about cuts in arts funding in schools following the passage of the No Child Left Behind legislation.