About Bil Johnson
Bil Johnson was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1949 and grew up on Long Island, where he became “Mr. Bay Shore” at his high school after quarterbacking an undefeated football team and serving as captain of the basketball squad.
He graduated from Yale College in 1971 and, after a semester of substitute teaching at his old high school began a Master of Arts in Teaching program at Colgate University in upstate New York. After receiving his degree from Colgate, Johnson began his teaching career at the newly created Blind Brook Jr./Sr. High School in Rye Brook, N.Y.
Aside from teaching grades 7-12 at Blind Brook, Johnson coached basketball, tennis, and volleyball, as well as advising the school newspaper. Summers were spent coaching at basketball camps, studying at Harvard with Lawrence Kohlberg, and enjoying a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities at Yale. After 11 years at BBHS, Johnson left for Boston, to pursue his ambition as a writer
By the fall of 1984, Johnson was teaching English at Winchester High School (just north of Boston), serving as an adjunct history teacher at Hellenic College in Brookline, and bartending on Boylston Street. He also coached tennis and produced/directed the fall drama productions at WHS, where he won the “Golden Apple Award” in 1986. That summer he used a second NEH grant to study drama in New York City and decided to move to the Big Apple by fall of 1987.
Securing a job at Bronxville High School (12 miles north of Manhattan), Johnson became deeply involved with the Coalition of Essential Schools reform movement and began working with Ted Sizer. By 1991 he was on a National Reform Faculty and working at Brown University in the summers. This led to pursuing a doctorate at Columbia Teachers College and planning the creation of a charter school in Massachusetts, to open during the fall of 1995.
From 1994 to 2007 Johnson founded the Francis W. Parker Essential Charter School in Devens, MA, wrote two books for teachers, served as the Founding President of the Board of Directors for the Blackstone Academy Charter School in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and was the Director of Social Studies/History Education at Brown.
He also won the William McLaughlin Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2000-2001. During his sabbatical year of 2004-2005, he spent a semester in Fairbanks, AK, consulting and teaching at the Howard Luke Academy.
Johnson left Brown in 2008 to work in the Yale Teacher Preparation Program for a year before returning to New York City to teach high school. He finished his career in 2014, after working five years at the Urban Assembly School for Design and Construction. That October he married the Lovely Carol Marie Bjork, in Norwalk, CT, where they live, enjoying the arts in New York City, and painting, playing music and sharing their ideas about school reform with all who care to listen.
Right Time, Right Places: A Memoir
What does a late-1960’s activist do when it’s time to leave ivy-covered New Haven and start making a living in the real world? Idealistic to a fault, the only profession that would not compromise Bil Johnson’s working-class ethic was public service: in this case, teaching.
Right Time, Right Places chronicles the story of one teacher determined to reform public school education from 1969 to 2014. This book follows Johnson’s journey from the suburbs of New York through the wilds of Alaska, across Ivy League campuses, culminating in New York City’s public high school system.
The trek is daunting, amusing, informative, and always entertaining. The story provides insight into what it’s like to tackle the public-school monolith through the eyes of someone fully immersed in the school reform movement for the last half-century; someone who always found himself in the right places at the right time.
Bil Johnson was a public school teacher for 29 years and a teacher-educator at Brown and Yale for 13. At Brown, he won the McLaughlin Award for Excellence in Teaching. Johnson was a co-founder of the progressive Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Devens, Massachusetts, and was also the Founding President of the Board of Directors of the Blackstone Academy Charter School in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
He is the author of the two-volume Performance Assessment Handbook as well as the Student-Centered Classroom Handbook. Johnson enjoys playing the guitar and piano and currently lives in Norwalk, Connecticut with his wife, the Lovely Carol Marie Bjork.
SUPPORT THIS BLOG
You can support this blog by:
- Using our Amazon Affiliate link.
- Subscribing to our YouTube Channel.
- Subscribing to our podcast through your favorite podcast app.
- Making a donation of $1, $2, or $5.
- Subscribing to our newsletter. We send one email every Sunday with a summary of the week.