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Today in Black History, we take it to the White House! Meet David Johns, The Obama Administration recently named Johns as the Executive Director of the White House Initative on Educational Excellence for African Americans!

 

via The Urban Daily

David Johns

Place of Residence: Washington, D.C.

Why He’s a Game Changer: The Obama Administration recently named Johns as the Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans. It’s a position that carries significant weight– given the achievement gap facing Black students, particularly Black males– and the criticism that President Obama did not do enough to directly address the challenges facing Blacks in this country during his first term.

Johns’ job is to identify the best practices to improve African American student achievement and then use those findings to dramatically improve outcomes across the country via the integrated powers of the federal government.

“Educational excellence is not often used in the same sentence when talking about African-American student achievement,” Johns told McClatchy Papers. “Traditionally, and in popular conversation, particularly in the media, whenever black kids are talked about with education, it’s negative. Or we will have infrequent moments where we will celebrate exceptions, but we sort of highlight them as exceptions.”

Johns is a good fit for the job. Growing up, Johns’ mother, whom he calls his first and most important education advocate, insisted that he travel a great distance to attend school in a better district than the one where he lived in Los Angeles. Johns went on to triple major at Columbia University, gain a master’s degree from Teachers College and work as a teacher. Before being tapped for his new job, Johns was a senior education policy advisor to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

He has adopted #teachthebabies as a hashtag on Twitter.

-DJ Dimepiece “The Mixin’ Vixen”