Our Staff

Dixie Bacallao comes to Phoenix Charter Academy from reDesign where she served as the Director of Instructional Coaching. In this role, she led a diverse team of coaches as they worked with school leaders and teachers in some of the nation’s largest districts, including New York City, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Detroit. Dixie has worked nationally and internationally with schools to implement competency-based education as a lever for transformational change that puts students at the center of the learning community.

Throughout her career, Dixie has been committed to holding schools accountable to being more inclusive to, supportive of, and effective for under-served students. Early in her career, she did so as a teacher of migrant students and the facilitator of an enrichment/recuperation program for what the system termed “minority students.” Later, as a principal, she led the successful turnaround principal of one of NH’s lowest-performing high schools, moving them from to bottom 5 in the state to the top quartile in performance and reducing the dropout rate to zero. She also served as K-12 Academic Coordinator for Social Studies in Lawrence, MA, leading the District’s efforts to regain accreditation. With more than 30 years of experience in teaching, school leadership, and instructional coaching, Dixie brings a unique ability to bridge the gap between innovative design and successful implementation of new models, with a strong operational and systems-building skill set. Dixie holds an M.Ed. and an A.B.D. from Florida State University.