I'm learning ATK through the demo project, you can login and see the code for yourself.
In lesson 1, each employee entity/node has a "notes" attribute, you don't see that "notes" attribute in the list of records. When you edit a record you do see it however..
I've added a field "foo" (INT) to the table and you do see that showing up in the record-list, and also in the edit-screen.
I've tried renaming the notes field in the DB, doesn't work. The tutorial also says nothing about this.
Add a statement to the policy function like:
$policy->get("notes")->removeFlag(AF_HIDE_LIST);
I suggest you check both the atk forum at http://forum.achievo.org and the atk wiki at http://www.atk-framework.com/wiki/ATK and submit questions via the forum.
See http://www.atk-framework.com/wiki/Attribute_Flags for a list all the attribute flags
ATK Framework does not show MySQL "text" fields in the record-list view. This is logical because we potentially might not have the room for this in the record-list view.