From:
Joe Nathan
Date:
Oct 11 17:27 UTC
Short link
Dacia Toll (please see bio below) will be making a free public presentation
on the evening of November 13, at the Capri Theater on Broadway Avenue in
Minneapolis. We anticipate starting at 6 or 6:30 PM - (final details soon)
Her presentation is sponsored by the Hope Collaborative - a group of Twin
Cities area parents, community members and educators. The group previously
brought an outstanding district public school principal, a lead person in
the Boston Public Schools Pilot Schools program, and director of an
outstanding group of charter public schools in Pueblo Colorado.
Please see below for more info about Dacia.
Sincerely,
Joe Nathan
Dacia Toll is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Achievement First, a non-profit
organization which currently operates nine public charter schools in
Connecticut and New York. Dacia led the founding team and served for six
years as the Director of Amistad Academy, named Connecticut’s 2006
Distinguished School of the Year after posting the greatest performance
gains of any middle school in the state.
Under Dacia’s leadership, Amistad students – selected by lottery, 98%
black and Latino, 80% free/reduced lunch – consistently made dramatic
gains in student achievement, routinely scoring on par with students from
some of Connecticut’s wealthiest communities. The success of Amistad
Academy was the subject of a nationally-televised PBS documentary,
“Closing the Achievement Gap.”
Four years ago, Dacia co-founded Achievement First to replicate the
successful Amistad model and began opening additional schools in New Haven,
Bridgeport, and Hartford, CT and in Brooklyn, NY. Achievement First
currently serves more than 3,700 students. Achievement First Endeavor
Charter School, only in its third year of operation, was recently
recognized as the fourth highest-performing school in NYC out of nearly
1,100 K-8 schools on the NYCDOE’s 2008 Progress Reports. Within 5 years,
Achievement First will educate more than 10,000 students, proving that
Amistad’s gap-closing, life-changing student performance results are
possible at scale.
Prior to Amistad, Dacia worked as a teacher and management consultant.
After graduating from the University of North Carolina, she received a
Master’s from Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship and a teaching
certificate and a J.D.