Dirk Tillotson

Dirk Tillotson is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Great Schools Choices, which supports community-based charter school development and increasing access for underserved families. He has worked for over 20 years supporting mostly charter community schools in Oakland, New Orleans and New York City, and he’s even consulted on education issues in the Middle East. As a child, his parents moved their family to a high-performing school district where they were the first Black family on the block. The challenges of that experience embedded in him a desire to create academically high-quality schools where students don’t have to check their identities at the door. Dirk currently resides in Oakland, California, and blogs at Great School Voices.

Posts By Dirk Tillotson

California

America Promises Equal Opportunity But It's a Complete Lie

Schools are where we're supposed to find equal opportunity. Instead we find a sorting system that magnifies inequality. In fact, schools ration out opportunity to predictable top dogs and underdogs,...

student achievement

Teachers, You Never Know What Students Are Going Through Outside The Classroom

This guest post is by an anonymous, Oakland-based educator. One time my mom tried to kill me. She chased me with a knife, cackling like a witch. It was hide-and-seek—but it wasn’t, it wasn’t a game....

California

Why I Feel Like 'The Spook Who Sat by the Charter School Door'

I am the fly in the school reform buttermilk. An outsider, now marginally on the inside, trying to plot the revolution. Young, gifted and Black, I founded a charter school support organization in...

California

What The Atlantic Got Wrong About Charter Schools and Segregation

George Joseph’s article, What Betsy DeVos Didn't Say About School Choice, claims that charter schools “have pushed more low-income, minority students into even more racially segregated schools.”...

California

Don’t Talk to Me About ‘Privatization,’ Because Your ‘Public’ School Is Hardly Public

In Oakland, one of the highest achieving schools in the city is Hillcrest Elementary. It’s a “public” school that is 5 percent free and reduced-price lunch, 2 percent English-language learners, 8...

Special Education

It’s Never Been Harder to Be a Teacher and That’s Why We Need to Train Them Better

Teacher training in the U.S. has been a crapshoot. Because when you're hiring first year teachers, sometimes you say “crap” and other times you say “shoot.” Kidding...kidding. There are a myriad of...

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