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.