Atlanta Public Schools system works the way it works because it is our habits of mind to have it work that way.

Welcome!

My platform is my New Reality Framework for education in our Atlanta Public Schools (APS).  It offers a new level of thinking, a paradigm of continual learning by all vital stakeholders--School Board, Superintendency, principals, teachers, students, staffs, community.

Experience teaches that allowing for new levels of thinking poses challenging changes, for it requires democratic leadership committed to removing obstacles and barriers to human learning and development rather than management obsessed with autocratic governance of human performance, achievement, and success.  In short, it requires freedom. 

The New Reality Framework will lead to ending the practice of burdening elementary school children with academic reforms intended to pay off in improved test scores later in middle school and in high school.  This practice has not worked and, indeed, cannot work.  “Later” simply is too late, except for the school-to-jail track.

The idea of coming down on children who do not achieve the required academic "skills" by the end of third grade misses entirely education’s aims to love and protect children and to continually advance all children’s learning curves from where they happen to be.  And the idea of APS emulating the supposed "best practices" of only certain systems simply because the systems are demographically similar to APS is but an idea for spreading the challenges and ills of such systems to APS.

However well-intentioned, these ideas and similar other habits of mind produce obstacles to freedom, peace, civility, and citizenship, hence to civil rights, human rights, and spirit quality.

I shall humbly appreciate your support to bring the New Reality Framework to our APS by electing me to serve you and our children from the District 9 At Large Seat of the Atlanta School Board.

Sincerely, I am

Ed Johnson

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