As a Colorado real estate broker in the heady 1990s, Todd Dickson, MA ’02, was successful, but he knew something was missing. “I was making a lot of money, but I wasn't making a difference,” he says. “I knew there was more for me to do.

All that changed when he started mentoring six-year old Jeremy at the Tennyson Center for Children in Denver. Abandoned by his parents, Jeremy had been in and out of foster care the previous year, his anger issues too much for any household to handle. Dickson took him under his wing, spending up to four hours a week playing football, reading books, helping with homework, and just plain shooting the breeze with his young charge.

“I loved experiencing how a genuine, heartfelt relationship with someone who had very few positive relationship models in his life could be a really transformative experience for both of us,” he says. “I found myself looking forward to my time with Jeremy each week more than anything I was doing at work.” The experience helped Dickson crystalize his life’s calling: to go into education to help low-income students rise above their circumstances

At age 30, Dickson chucked a booming business and moved to California to enter the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP). With a previous master’s degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University, he decided to focus on science education. “The subject matter, while fascinating and engaging to teach, was really just an avenue for me to connect with kids,” says Dickson, who completed his student teaching in physics at Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, CA.

Steeling themselves for a more economically humble life after the heady days of real estate, Dickson and his wife Heather, a kindergarten teacher, decided to first take posts at the private International School of Lisbon. “While it wasn’t the population that I was aiming for, it still affirmed that I had made the right decision to go into education,” Dickson remembers. After three years working with elite students there, however, he headed back to California to the newly created Summit Preparatory Charter High School in Redwood City. There, he joined several other Stanford graduates to become part of an ambitious effort to prepare the school’s diverse student population for success in four-year colleges.

An Unexpected Opportunity

When the charter’s founder and director, Diane Tavenner, MA ’00, called Dickson into her office one day and asked him to take over the school, he was stunned. “I didn't feel ready,” says Dickson, who had been happily teaching physics at Summit for just a year. “But my long-term goal was to open my own charter school, so I realized this was a huge opportunity and I took the risk.” The rookie suddenly found himself the school’s executive director at age 34.

The choice has proven to be a good one –– both for Dickson and the Summit community. Under his leadership, the charter school was named the 118th best public high school in America in 2008, and the 76th best public high school in 2009. In 2010, Newsweek honored Summit as one of the top 10 transformational schools in the country.

And it's no wonder. A full 100 percent of the school’s graduates exceed the entrance requirements for the University of California/California State University system, and 96 percent of the four graduating classes have been accepted to at least one four-year college –– more than three times the rate of similar students in high schools in California. Moreover, for low-income students (more than 40 percent of Summit’s student body), the charter prep sends almost eight times as many students to four-year colleges as similar schools in California.

“Summit is built around the ideals reinforced for me in STEP,” says Dickson. “Our underlying philosophy is that everyone is capable of graduating ‘college ready.’ We’re diverse, we don't separate kids into ‘tracks,’ and we are principle-based rather than rules-based. We get to know our students really well, and we aim to create a physically and emotionally safe environment for them. In short, we want them to thrive, no matter what their background.”

Back in 2008, the school captured the attention of Davis Guggenheim, the award-winning filmmaker of An Inconvenient Truth. Guggenheim's team filmed Dickson and followed one prospective student through the high-stakes lottery process for acceptance at Summit, along with student hopefuls at four other charter schools. The result, Waiting for ‘Superman,’ a documentary released in 2010, analyzes the failures of American public education. “I learned a lot about filmmaking in the process, namely, that four hours of interviewing generally boils down to about 20 seconds,” Dickson laughs.

On the more serious side, he notes that the film has become a lightning rod for the polarized debate over the role of charter schools in American education. “Some think charters will change public education; others insist that we must fix our current public schools and that charters are actually hurting them,” he explains.

An Invitation from Nashville

Dickson’s own loyalties remain firmly in the charter camp, so much so that his next adventure will be a leap to start his own charter management organization in Nashville. “This is been a dream of mine for some time now,” Dickson says. While he originally intended to pursue that dream in California, a chance visit last fall by Nashville Mayor Karl Dean to learn why Summit was so successful as a high-performance school changed all that. “I gave them a quick tour and mentioned in passing that I eventually wanted to run my own charter organization. The mayor said I should come to Nashville to do it,” says Dickson.

While being courted and wooed by the city to “come on down,” Dickson learned that Nashville was actually widely considered as one of the top places in the country to start charter schools, due to the creation, among other things, of the Tennessee Charter School Incubator, a $30 million fund designed to support such efforts. As a senior fellow with the Incubator starting this July, Dickson will head the effort to create a charter management organization that will open eight to ten schools over the next ten years.

“Although I hesitate to leave the orbit of Stanford, which Summit has partnered with regularly to train student teachers, I'll take with me the valuable lessons on how to lead schools from STEP as well as from the Principal Fellows Program,” Dickson says, referring to his participation in the Stanford initiative aimed at strengthening exceptional, early-career principals. He adds, “I plan to work with the excellent education schools in Nashville to create a collaboration like the one we had with Stanford that can serve as a model for how universities and charters can collaborate to create better outcomes for kids.”

As Dickson prepares for his new journey ahead, he reflects back on the young student he mentored who started him on his education path some fifteen years ago. Today, Jeremy is now almost 21. “We are in touch with each other all the time,” Dickson says. “He is like a little brother to me. I am very proud of the man he is becoming, and how hard he has worked to lead a positive, purposeful life even with all the obstacles placed in his way. In many ways, Jeremy is reflective of many of the young kids that I am so passionate about guiding. More than anything else, they need people to believe in them long enough and with enough certainty and love that they eventually begin to believe in themselves and their goals.”