Happy Juneteenth, CharterFolk.
Today we are delighted to share a Contributor Column from Dorsey Hopson, Partner at City Fund.
We provide a bio for Dorsey below.
Dorsey Hopson is a Partner at City Fund, where he works with local leaders to improve student outcomes, enhance K-12 ecosystems, and strengthen state and local conditions to ensure all students have access to high-quality schools. In his role, Dorsey draws on his extensive leadership experience to drive sustainable, community-centered educational reforms.
Before joining City Fund, Dorsey served as Superintendent for the Memphis City and Shelby County School Districts, leading the largest school merger in U.S. history. During his tenure, he prioritized early literacy, expanded high-quality school options, and fostered authentic community engagement. He also worked with the school board and philanthropy to grow the district’s non-profit school sector and develop reform-oriented policies. Under his leadership, the district managed a $100 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and launched the I-Zone, one of the nation’s most successful school turnaround models.
Earlier in his career, Dorsey served as General Counsel for multiple school districts, including Memphis City Schools, where he led a landmark funding lawsuit that secured a $57 million judgment for the district. He began his career as a corporate defense attorney in Atlanta, serving as lead trial lawyer and arguing cases in federal and state appellate courts.
Dorsey holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Memphis and graduated magna cum laude from the Georgia State University College of Law. He serves on the boards of several education organizations, including the Georgia Charter Schools Association and the Memphis Education Fund. Hopson lives in Memphis with his wife and children.
What Locally Led Change Looks Like in Alabama
In August 2025, a new public charter school opened on the campus of Stillman College in Tuscaloosa. This coming August, another will open in collaboration with Tuskegee University in Macon County. These are the first HBCU-charter school partnerships in Alabama history, and they are early evidence of what locally led change can produce.
When I was running Shelby County Schools in Memphis, I learned something that has stayed with me through every job since. The best ideas almost never came from the central office. They came from people who already lived in the communities our schools served — people who knew which streets the kids walked, which churches the families belonged to, which efforts had come and gone before. Outsiders can fund that kind of knowledge. They can connect it to other cities doing similar work. What they cannot do is manufacture it.
Last November, City Fund joined Bloomberg Philanthropies and UNCF on a $20 million initiative to support new public schools designed in collaboration with Historically Black Colleges and Universities. HBCUs have spent generations producing leaders despite chronic underinvestment, and their academic depth, cultural authority, and community ties make them natural anchors for K-12 schools. When kindergartners walk onto a college campus every morning, the path from their classroom to a bachelor’s degree stops being abstract.
I Dream Big Academy is a middle school of nearly 200 students currently in grades 6-8, operating as a lab school on Stillman’s campus with a pipeline for teacher development and early college and career exposure for its students. D.C. Wolfe Charter School, opening this fall through Tuskegee University, will be a conversion school serving pre-K through sixth grade in Macon County. Each campus will look different from the next because each community is different, and together they show what is possible when an HBCU anchors a full K-16 pipeline, from a child’s first day of school through their college diploma.
Tyler Barnett, CEO of New Schools for Alabama, and his team are central to why this work has taken hold. They have spent years building the foundation that helped make these partnerships possible — recruiting school leaders, navigating authorization, cultivating funders, organizing families, and pushing the work forward through every cycle of skepticism. National funding gave the effort scale and momentum, but the infrastructure was already in place because Tyler and his team put it there. Investments that take root tend to look like that.
The work didn’t come from any single organization or strategy. It came from layering community trust built by HBCUs over generations, advocacy and leadership pipelines built by New Schools for Alabama, families pushing for more options, and capital from outside funders coming in behind it all.
The demand for more great public school options in Alabama is real. Alabama’s public charter schools serve just over one percent of the state’s public school students, but they enroll more than 9,000 children across 19 schools, with another 2,000 on waitlists. Roughly three in four of those students come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and 81% are students of color. Those are the families our partners have been working alongside for years, and the communities most likely to benefit when an HBCU and a public school share a campus.
A statewide poll released earlier this year found support for public charter schools in Alabama outpacing opposition by more than 30 points, with backing across race, geography, and party. Two-thirds of voters say parents should have the right to choose where their child attends school, regardless of whether they can afford private school tuition. That kind of consensus is rare in any political environment.
It matters that this is happening in a state that posted the largest fourth-grade math gain of any state on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Alabama is moving, and charter schools are part of that progress, not separate from it. Public charters, district schools, and the partnerships now linking them to HBCUs are all part of the same public education system, accountable to the same families and rising together. The HBCU initiative builds on momentum that is already there, an accelerant for a state where leaders have been organizing around results across every part of the system.
Walk into I Dream Big Academy on a Tuesday morning and you will see middle schoolers learning a few hundred feet from college students, and a building that sits steps from Stillman’s School of Education. These are deliberate, structural choices made by people who live and work in Tuscaloosa.
In Alabama right now, children as young as kindergarten are walking onto a college campus every morning. Some of them will go on to attend Stillman or Tuskegee. Others will not. But all of them will grow up knowing what a college campus looks like, what college students sound like, what professors do — because that is the building they learn in. That is what locally led change can produce. The question now is how many more communities get to say the same.