THE WASHINGTON INFORMER
Op-ed: Thurgood Marshall's Vision Alive in Anacostia
By George Brown
Thursday, 30 July 2009
Now that the test scores for D.C.'s public schools are out, I want to share one of the District's public school success stories with Washington Informer readers. Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter High School in Anacostia scored top among every public high school in D.C. that is open to all students regardless of academic ability. The test scores show that as the highest performing non-selective public high school in the city, Thurgood Marshall Academy is providing a high-quality public education in one of D.C.'s most underserved neighborhoods.
As Chair of the Board of Trustees at Thurgood Marshall Academy, I am more than a little proud of the school's achievements. Named for the first African American U.S. Supreme Court Justice, who was the grandson of a slave, son of a railway porter, and a product of the public schools, our school believes in the value of a quality public education for every child.
Thurgood Marshall Academy serves a student population that is 100 percent African American and in which three-of-four students are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunch.
In three short years, Thurgood Marshall Academy has seen a gain of 40 percentage points in math proficiency and a gain of 30 percentage points in reading proficiency. Our students are three times more likely to be proficient in reading and math than their peers in the neighboring high schools.
We have an 88 percent high school graduation rate and 100 percent of each of our five graduating classes has been accepted to college. Our students are half as likely to drop out of high school as their peers in the city-run schools, opening up a whole new world of opportunities for students who would otherwise fail to finish school.
Thurgood Marshall Academy's law theme extends much further than our name. Partnering with some of the most prestigious law firms in the nation's capital, our students' lives are enriched by being mentored and tutored by District attorneys who take time out of their busy lives to help our students realize their educational goals.
Our school's association with the law informs so many of our achievements and activities, such as the national and international success of our student debate team.
At Thurgood Marshall Academy, students are taught to begin planning for their adult lives at an early age.
Located in a neighborhood in which one in two adults is functionally illiterate, cut off from society's mainstream and denied access to so many opportunities, the building blocks for life, that our school provides, could not be more important to our children. One in two children in the community in which our school is located lives in poverty. One in five is born to a teen mom. A quality public school education is, as recent visitor to Thurgood Marshall Academy U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently said, “the only sure path out of poverty.”
We are proud of our record in dramatically raising the proficiency of our students in reading and math. More than that, we are meeting the more challenging and ambitious benchmarks set out for our nation's public schools by the federal No Child Left Behind legislation. This nationwide school accountability law has set the target for all students in the nation to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, stipulating the progress that each public school should achieve each year to reach this goal.
Amid our success, we should not forget that Thurgood Marshall Academy would not exist at all without the public charter school reform that arrived in the District 13 years ago. Starting in a church basement before renovating the beautiful building the school now occupies in Southeast, our school was a pioneer in the movement to create strong D.C. independent public schools that are free to innovate and are held 100 percent accountable for student performance.
Thurgood Marshall Academy is committed to not only building on our own success, but also sharing our practices with other public high schools across the city. By doing so, we hope to help move the District closer to the point at which every D.C. child can get the quality public education that Justice Thurgood Marshall rightly believed to be their birthright as Americans.
George Brown is the chair of the Board of Trustees at Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter School.