Last year, Koprowski founded Opportunity Dallas, a policy and advocacy group that works on affordable housing and segregation issues. Recalling the famous Molly Ivins line, Koprowski says he may not have been born on third base, but certainly on second. So that he could better help kids in the district. That’s why, in January 2017, Koprowski left DISD. He read the growing field of research that confirmed a landmark 2010 study titled “Housing Policy Is School Policy.” And he came to believe that without changing the composition of the poor neighborhoods around the schools-without income integration-school reform likely wouldn’t work. He looked at the network of organizations working on school reform-United Way, The Commit Partnership, dozens of others-and saw no such local leadership on housing issues. But to an outsider, I just saw this map and realized the unbelievable segregation that exists within the system.”Įven as Koprowski helped establish lauded programs (Public School Choice) and innovative schools (Solar Preparatory School for Girls), he couldn’t stop thinking about that segregation. People in Dallas are just used to this now.

“I said, ‘So, it’s a separate school system, in the middle of this other school system?’ It was unreal to me. That hole, of course, was the Park Cities. He’d seen district politics chew up smart, young, ambitious people, and he wanted to explain the lay of the land. The district’s veteran spokesman at the time, Jon Dahlander, asked Koprowski to come to his office. It was 2014, and Koprowski, who had just turned 30, was a Harvard-educated whiz kid hired by Dallas ISD to run its new Office of Transformation and Innovation. Mike Koprowski had just begun a new job when he realized how broken Dallas is.

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