Success, it turns out, is quiet. It’s a sunny and warm spring Thursday at Thurgood Marshall Academy in Anacostia, one of the poorest areas of Washington, D.C. The halls are hushed, and students walk by wearing maroon polo shirts embroidered with the school name. They smile and greet teachers respectfully. There are no jangling PA announcements, no clanging bell to mark the end of class, no metal detectors at the front door.
It’s quiet too inside teacher Joshua Biederman’s AP history class as Jeremiah Garland, a tall junior, wraps up his opening argument in a mock trial of Lt. William Calley, the officer behind the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. In the art room down the hall, it’s downright peaceful as students put finishing touches on their portraits in pastels, while a three-paneled mural honoring the life of the school’s namesake rests against a nearby wall.
But make no mistake: These almost Rockwell-esque scenes represent a genuine revolution, a triumph of a two-decade-long education reform experiment that has turned the nation’s capital into ground zero for an ambitious overhaul of its failing schools. Thurgood Marshall—and dozens of other public charter schools that range across a wide variety of teaching styles and program themes—are the result.
It’s a success that’s seen in student lives: At Thurgood Marshall Academy, 100 percent of the school’s graduates are accepted into college. And two-thirds of those students finish college, a rate that is higher than the national average—and about eight times the rate for D.C. students in general, says principal Alexandra Pardo.
Keep in mind that about a third of TMA’s entering ninth-graders start off at or below a fifth-grade level of proficiency in math and reading, and come from 50 to 60 different middle schools across Washington, Pardo adds.
This, the academy’s leaders explain, is charter schools done right.
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The nation’s capital is perhaps an unlikely place for education reform to take such firm hold. Its school system had long been regarded as a failure; for years it served as Exhibit A for congressmen and U.S. Department of Education bureaucrats who pointed to their hometown as the poster child for underperforming schools. D.C. schools graduated just 48.8 percent of its students in 2006; only one in twenty students who started high school earned a college degree. Nearly a third of D.C. residents tested as functionally illiterate. Even as late as 2011, years into a massive reform push, D.C. still boasted the worst graduation rate in the country: 59 percent.
The city’s schools were—and still are—deeply segregated. Many white parents sent children to local elementary schools and then pulled them out for high school, leaving many D.C. high schools overwhelmingly black and Hispanic.
Congress, in instituting the District’s Charter School Reform Act of 1995, sought to remedy some of the deepest problems, but it wasn’t until the election of Mayor Adrian Fenty in 2006 and the appointment of Michelle Rhee to lead the school system that the city really committed to reform. For many of the years in between, charter schools and a few limited-entry magnet schools, were the few shining lights in the city’s education system; the reform efforts since 2006 have in many ways accelerated and compounded that growth and success.
The latest push for education reform has also come—not coincidentally—as the downtown has undergone a dramatic transformation, with an explosion of restaurants and nightlife. New condos and gentrifying neighborhoods have brought tens of thousands of residents back into the city. While the city’s charter schools ran independently of Rhee’s efforts to reform the public school system, the slow improvement in the schools overall paralleled the city’s growth—as the city’s population grew over the last decade, more parents chose to enroll their children in the city’s school system, creating pressure for better schools and more schools.
Nationally, charter schools got started in 1991 as an answer to a failing traditional public school system. Although they are also publicly funded, they generally run independently of the local public school system, giving them autonomy in hiring and firing, more flexibility to make changes and a much greater likelihood of being shut down if students don’t enroll or make significant progress once they’re there. Since the first authorization in 1991, 43 states and D.C. now allow charter schools and 2.3 million children in the U.S. attend charters, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Charter schools have been seen as a way to give parents in low-income areas a choice in schooling much like what more affluent families have always had by moving into a better school district or putting their children in a private school. Instead of attending the school in their district, charter school students might go to school on the other side of the city.
D.C. today stands out because a whopping 44 percent of all its public school students—36,565 young people in 112 schools—are enrolled in charter schools, the highest state percentage in the nation. It’s a number that has grown rapidly, increasing more than ten-fold since the 1998 school year. It’s a figure that also stands out because D.C. charter school students consistently score higher on tests than those at traditional public schools in the capital.
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, in an October 2014 report monitoring the health of public charter schools in terms of growth, innovation and quality, ranked D.C. number one in the nation. Its top ranking stems from a variety of factors, says president and CEO Nina Rees, including its substantial growth, its broad array of educational options and the higher test scores. According to the Office of State Superintendent of Education, 2014 marked the eighth year in a row that the number of charter school students who are proficient in multiple subjects has increased—and that number continues to exceed the state average.
Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, a membership group for charter school administrators, says, “What’s so powerful to me as an educator of 45 years is that some of these schools are having stunning success with the students that so many are concerned about. Students of color from impoverished backgrounds are doing dramatically better in charter schools in D.C. than they are in the traditional public school system.”
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The ecosystem of D.C. charter schools that has evolved over the last two decades represents a cornucopia of creative and nontraditional approaches to education, in addition to fairly traditional college-prep schools.
Two Rivers Public Charter School uses what it calls an “expeditionary learning model,” or hands-on learning. Yu Ying Public Charter School is a Chinese language immersion school, with children alternating between Chinese and English-language days for instruction. Sela Public Charter School is a Hebrew language immersion school, which also divides its instruction into English and Hebrew. The Maya Angelou Public Charter School is specifically designed for students in the juvenile justice and foster care system, with a heavy emphasis on mental health care. The St. Coletta Special Education Public Charter School serves students with intellectual disabilities and autism. The SEED School is a college prep boarding school. Monument Academy, which will open in the fall, is a weekday boarding school, grades 5-12, for children in the foster care system. Roots Public Charter School is an Afro-centric school for children through eighth grade. Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School immerses students in both English and Spanish in a “self-directed learning environment” typical of Montessori schools.
Even among a host of high-performing programs, the KIPP chain of charter schools stands out. The Knowledge Is Power Program runs 162 schools across the country. In D.C., 15 schools—its 16th is set to open this summer—serve students from early childhood through high school. Of the top-ranking charter schools named by the Office of State Superintendent of Education, two are KIPP.
KIPP was founded on a “no excuses” philosophy, which argues that students’ backgrounds should not serve as a hindrance to their achievement. Susan Schaeffler, executive director of the program’s D.C. schools, says that KIPP schools are also noted for a longer school day and a focus on sending students to college. “KIPP is very intentional in talking about college from age of 3 to the day they go to college,” she says.
That focus is clear at KIPP Lead Academy in Shaw, a changing neighborhood on P Street NW, north of the downtown core, with a corner bodega selling candy and cigarettes behind barred windows next to rows of townhouses, some gentrified and restored, others shabby with weed-filled front yards. The school is one of three KIPP schools covering grades from pre-kindergarten to middle school in the former Scott Montgomery public elementary school, which had closed down in 2010 because of a dwindling enrollment. KIPP had shared the location with the public school before that.
Today it’s a cheerful place with lime green accents on the walls, wooden cubbies lining the halls, and bulletin boards outside each teacher’s classroom. Each classroom is named for the teacher’s alma mater.
The children—called “scholars” by principal Mekia Love—wear one of three Lead school tee shirts, in blue, gray or green. Love wears a dress in white, blue and green matching the school colors.
Inside one third-grade classroom, the scholars are reading E.B. White’s classic, Charlotte’s Web. Love offers to demonstrate the school’s instructional process. “When I say go,” she announces to the class, “open the book to page 55.” There is no sound as the students hurry to open their books. When they want to express approval, the children silently waggle their hands and wrists in the air.
Love got her start teaching reading at Key Academy, the first KIPP school to open in D.C. in 2001. “We want this to be a place where it’s cool to be smart, and you’re smart by working hard,” Love says.
Another key element is parent involvement, she says. Parents are asked to pick up children at the end of the day inside the classroom. The school also has special family days, including Donuts with Dad, Muffins with Mom, and Granola with Grandparents. “I like alliteration,” she says. As silly as the names may be, she says, the events help tie family into the success of their children, and it boasts a “really strong” level of parent involvement.
College is a focus from the first day. Each teacher’s homeroom is named after the teacher’s alma mater; college pennants hang proudly on the walls and the students adopt the alma mater’s name for the year. One teacher, a graduate of Moravian College in Pennsylvania, has a sign on his wall inspiring his students: “Moravians finish strongly.” Love says the students start visiting colleges in the third grade. Such a sustained focus is meant to shift students—many of whom come from backgrounds where higher education isn’t a given—to believing that college is all-but mandatory.
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The success of schools like KIPP and the D.C. charter school model more broadly hasn’t been matched everywhere. Nationally, scholars have found mixed results in trying to determine whether charter school students outperformed peers at traditional public schools. A 2015 report from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford did find that urban charter schools show “significantly” higher levels of improvement in math and reading each year, compared to traditional public schools.
Even so, that difference is still not huge: in some regions of the country, charter schools outperform traditional schools in math and reading, while in other areas, traditional schools do the best job, says the CREDO report.
A 2009 report from the RAND Corporation did find evidence that students in Florida and Chicago who attended charter schools had a higher probability of graduating from high school and attending college than traditional public school students.
But the research has generally been inconclusive. One of the difficulties of comparing results between charter schools and other schools is what to measure, says Ron Zimmer, a professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt. “Traditionally, charters are about doing something different,” he says. That different approach might not translate into great advantages in the sorts of things that traditional tests measure, he says.
In particular, traditional tests miss non-cognitive skills like perseverance, the one thing that might mean a student makes it to and through college, Zimmer says. Charters “may be instilling grit or conscientiousness in students,” he says. “That’s not necessarily fully captured by test scores.”
One reason that D.C. has seen potentially more of an impact from charter schools than other city’s is the system’s strict oversight regime. Since Congress voted to open up D.C. to charter schools in 1994, the road to any particular school succeeding has been rocky. Just one-third of charter school applications are approved each year. One out of three charter schools that have opened have been shut down because they make no academic progress, fail to meet health and safety requirements or simply lose enrollment.
The District of Columbia Public School Charter Board, the governing body for charters, evaluates each school every five years, and if they don’t make significant gains in things like math and reading scores by year 15, they are shut down. Some schools get closed even faster than that—particularly if there are infractions with their funding, which happened to the Dorothy I. Height Community Academy Public Charter School earlier this year.
Mainly, though, the charter board shuts down schools for poor performance, not meeting their stated goals, a lackluster enrollment rate, or a big drop in re-enrollment. In fact, the charter board has closed 12 charter schools in the last three years for poor academic performance.
Charter schools in D.C. are rated on a tier system, with Tier 1 schools meeting or exceeding their goals, Tier 2 meeting minimum performance standards, and Tier 3 falling short. By the end of this school year, the board had shut down all but two of the remaining Tier 3 schools.
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The schools that do thrive under such oversight—and, in turn, transform the futures of their students—combine strong curriculums with strong leadership. Thurgood Marshall Academy almost didn’t make it past its first five years, but today it stands as one of the crown jewels of the D.C. charter system.
Founded in 2001 by a couple of Georgetown Law School graduates who modeled their approach on the law school’s “street law” program to bring legal principles to high school students, the school focuses on a law-themed education, critical thinking and setting students on a path to complete a college degree. Founder Josh Kern, who came up with the plan while still a Georgetown Law School student, says career educators told him, “Opening a high school to any student and have them prepared to be successful in college wasn’t something we could do.”
For the first year, he says, “every day felt like the school wasn’t going to make it.”
The school had problems finding a location, starting out in first in what was then the annex to Congress Heights United Methodist Church in Anacostia. Finally in 2004, the school found a location in the former Nichols Avenue School. The Nichols Avenue building had been empty for years—a haven for pigeons, says board member Andy Rosenberg.
It also cut a deal for the renovation of the adjacent public school, Savoy Elementary. The renovation of both facilities and the building of a new gym for both schools to use was “the first and only partnership between DCPS and a charter school,” says principal Pardo.
Leadership was another moving target. The school had five principals in five years and, current principal Alexandra Pardo says, was “pretty abysmal.”
Finally, the new location and new leadership brought the pieces together—and the original concept has worked. TMA graduates have gone on to—and graduated from—Bates, Temple, the University of Vermont, the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin and dozens of other universities.
The school has had the highest test scores among open-enrollment public schools. Selective public schools like Benjamin Banneker, Schools Without Walls and McKinley Technology High School sometimes hit higher numbers, but Thurgood Marshall outperforms public schools like Wilson High School in D.C.’s wealthy Ward 3.
TMA’s high school graduation rate is 76 percent. A little over a mile away, Anacostia High School has a graduation rate of 38.5 percent.
Yet the kids who come to TMA are not those who test into a magnet like Banneker or happen to live in a posh area of the city. The one thing they’ve got going for them is that someone encouraged them to apply to the common lottery for charter schools and to pick Thurgood Marshall as a top choice.
When they get to TMA in ninth grade, many of them are years behind grade level in math and reading. They come to Anacostia from all over the city, although they’re heavily concentrated in Wards 7 and 8, the poorest areas of Washington. Three-quarters of them qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, a marker of poverty.
When they show up for that first day of summer school for entering ninth and tenth graders—recommended but not required—they are enlisted into a high-performing culture that seems to work.
First, someone—and probably more than one person—takes an interest in them each day. It might be a teacher, it might be one of the school’s three deans who sit at the front door every day to look in their faces and ask them how they are, or it might even be the school principal.
Carlos McKnight, 17, who graduated from TMA last month, says that when he and his mother first heard about the school, they were impressed. But what impressed McKnight even more was that after visiting the school for a tour, Pardo greeted him by name.
“Me and my mom looked at each other and we said, ‘How do you remember me?’” out of all the other students she met at school fairs and open houses. “That was a tipping point,” he recalls. With just 400 students in grades 9-12, it’s virtually impossible for students to be lost in the crowd.
The teachers tend to be veteran educators. “I love programs that bring teachers into urban schools, but our kids can’t be the guinea pigs,” Pardo says. TMA’s teachers average about seven years of teaching experience, and 80 percent of them have graduate degrees, she says. What that means is that teachers bring a sense of confidence and tested strategies to the classroom.
Much is expected of the students. To bring students up to speed, ninth and tenth grade students are given 90 minutes of English and math a day, twice the regular amount that public school students are given.
Each student presents a portfolio at the end of the year, a collection of work completed, grades, community service, and reflections on various activities, to a panel of faculty, staff, administrators and parents. The portfolio is a long checklist of tasks—academic projects, legal skills, volunteer work—they must complete, with the final hurdle having to explain what they’ve done orally. Some students, especially the ninth graders, find the process intimidating at first.
Eleanor Lewis, a retired Commerce Department attorney who volunteers at the school and has served on the panels, says that the oral presentation is a big step for many of these students. “I’ve been there when kids have fainted,” she says. But by the time they’re seniors, they’ve developed a confidence that can carry them far. “They all get up and can talk about what they’ve done,” she says. Panel members ask them questions, talk about where they’ve made errors and how they fixed those errors, she says.
Beyond that, students can get homework help and tutoring every day in the school’s library, including some from tutors who come from the Coast Guard, whose new headquarters are nearby on the grounds of a recently redeveloped St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.
While these things are markers of a strong school, what really distinguishes the school named for the first African-American Supreme Court justice is its unique focus on law. Every class in the school brings in some element of five legal skills: critical thinking, research, advocacy, negotiation and argumentation. Even the science classes might offer a lesson about patenting inventions.
In particular, the history classes offer students a chance to take a thorny legal issue from the past and argue it in a moot court. Each year, for instance, 11 th grade AP history students take up the Vietnam-era case of Army soldier William Calley, found guilty of slaughtering unarmed villagers in the town of My Lai. The students not only learn about the Vietnam War in depth, but they grapple with questions like what it means to follow orders, explains history teacher Joshua Biederman. “It’s powerful to see them have an opinion and then actually back up those opinions,” he says. Especially for students who might struggle academically, this project gives them “a chance to shine,” he says.
On the day the trial starts, volunteer lawyers, faculty and staff members serve as a judging panel. Michael Mazer, a retired lawyer who has been volunteering at the school for four years, says that some of the students will bring up arguments in a moot trial that he and the other judges never thought of.
The effect is electric. “There’s something about being in that room—you get goosebumps before it starts,” Biederman says.
Thurgood Marshall students also get law experience outside the classroom, visiting local law firms for a law day program that gets them inside a professional environment. Laura Foggan, a Wiley Rein attorney who has run the law day program for her firm for the past 13 years, says students spend half a day talking about the law. The goal is to present themes that might resonate with the teenagers, such as a mock trial they call “the Jilting of Jasmine” about an imaginary girl whose prom escort broke the date. She sued for the cost of her dress.
“The day is as much about learning to present things persuasively and being exposed to new ideas as it is about teaching legal substance,” Foggen says.
White shoe law firm Latham & Watkins also hosts students for a day. Firm associate Rami Turayhi says the lawyers who participate try to take a kind of Socratic method approach as if the teens were law students. “When we ask them a question, we don’t take the first answer,” he says. “We want them to think about how you develop that thesis and push them a little bit harder than they may have been pushed to date.”
Even with this wealth of learning and support, not every student is receptive to the culture of Thurgood Marshall Academy or initially buys into the work-hard, go-somewhere ethos of the place.
Keosha Lamberson, a 2010 graduate, says the only reason she enrolled was because her mother and grandmother insisted. She wanted to go to Bishop McNamara High School in Forestville, Maryland, but a negative recommendation from one of her middle school teachers at Assumption Catholic School put the kibosh on that plan.
When she came to Thurgood Marshall, she was full of attitude, she says. Her grades suffered. Halfway through her ninth grade, she announced that her progress didn’t matter because she planned on transferring out. But on a service trip to the Gulf Coast to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, she says she had a change of heart. She said she saw that people there didn’t have much, but that they stood together as a community. “When I returned I said, ‘I got to get myself together.’ I wanted to go to college.”
Her attitude about TMA also changed thanks to the interest in her from a woman who became a kind of mentor—her computer science teacher Stacey Stewart, now the director of student affairs. Stewart, she says, sang to her and made her smile every day. “Eventually it got into me,” she said. She thought, “I guess you’re not going to give up.”
When during Lamberson’s 11 th grade year, her mother was in a hit-and-run accident and had to have her leg amputated, she started thinking she wanted to stay close to home. But counselor Sanjay Mitchell pushed her, saying she needed to experience her college freshman year away from home.
She enrolled at Delaware State University, a historically black university a couple hours from Washington. “I thought I knew myself going into college,” she says. “I came out a whole new person.” She graduated in 2014 with a degree in psychology and hopes to go to grad school next year for a master’s in secondary education. Her goal is to work on curriculum development for a school system.
It’s not an uncommon story for TMA students, but it’s also not an achievement the school could tout in its beginning years. After the first TMA class graduated in 2007, only about 25 percent of the TMA alumni who went to college were finishing, says Pardo. “We failed because we didn’t prepare you to finish college. We stepped back and said, how do we navigate and support you in that process?”
Entering college and not finishing in four or five years is a national problem. Nationally, the college graduation rate within five years is about 55 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. For African-American students, that drops to 35 percent.
But today TMA graduates go on to finish college within five years at a rate of 65-68 percent, says Pardo.
One huge reason is the school’s alumni office. “From the very beginning as you walk in, the very expectation is that you’re going to go to college,” says Mitchell, director of college and alumni programming. “And then the expectation is that you’re going to be an alumni of Thurgood Marshall.”
A year-long seminar helps seniors prepare for college, focusing on the intricacies of the application process, applying for financial aid, writing personal statements and narrowing down the range of colleges. The course also includes topics like budgeting and student loans—and even long-term goals like taking out a mortgage. Occasionally, seniors will visit college campuses and talk to TMA alumni who are enrolled at the colleges.
The counselors don’t let go once the students get to college. Many face a severe case of culture shock. “Many have never been on an airplane before, or never even been outside southeast D.C.,” alumni program manager Emma Levine says. Meanwhile, they’re going to school with cohorts who write their college application essay about a service trip they did to Costa Rica.
The counselors stay connected through emails and phone calls. They send care packages filled with snacks and notes from their former teachers. And about 7 to 10 times a year, the counselors pay a visit to a Thurgood Marshall Academy graduate at college, focusing in particular on students who might be having a rougher transition and those whose families may not be able to visit. “They show us around,” Mitchell says, “and it allows them to feel proud about the school they’re going to.”
Mitchell and Levine take the students out to dinner and maybe even pay a visit to the local Walmart to fill in supplies that they might need, paying for that with an emergency fund the school sets aside.
Back inside the walls of TMA, signs dot the walls: “Keep calm and do the math,” says one. Another says, “Want to know about Newton’s laws of motion? Ask third-period and honors physics students.” And one more announces, “English teacher zone. Your grammar may be corrected at any time.”
On one wall, a giant map of the United States pinpoints the college destinations of last year’s senior class. Tiny pennants mark cities and states across the nation, reminding students just how far they can go.
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Today, the reverberations of TMA’s success extend beyond the school’s brick walls. While a charter school in a neighborhood does not necessarily guarantee an economic boost, it seems to be making a difference in the neighborhoods previously marked by abandoned buildings.
Nearby is Cedar Tree Academy, an early childhood charter school. A few blocks down Martin Luther King Boulevard is Anacostia Playhouse. Plans are in the works for the 11 th Street Bridge Park, a renovation of an old, unused bridge that would create a park and bring new foot traffic across the Anacostia River. “You have a whole section of commercial development that has evolved,” says Thomas Nida, a regional president at United Bank who has helped several charters with financing. Charter schools in DC “are becoming a major catalyst for economic development,” Nida adds. Inspiring schools are anchors that help attract new residents back into run-down neighborhoods.
Ramona Edelin of the DC Association of Chartered Public Schools says that charters’ renovations of vacant school buildings bring jobs and life to a community. “When you do bring a building up to the standards that you’ll see in a community where something had been totally dilapidated, there are tremendous economic impacts for the community,” she says.
Possibly the biggest charge against charters is this: Not everyone gets in. While there are no admission criteria and no preference for students who live in the ward where a school might be located, the demand in D.C. for a spot in one of the top charter schools far outstrips the seats available.
The 2010 documentary, Waiting for Superman, illustrated this heartbreaking narrative, following the stories of a handful of public school children, including some in D.C., hoping to win a very public lottery for a spot in top charter schools. The documentary raised the question: What happens to the children who were denied a spot? Even today, more than 8,000 students are on a waiting list for spots in the top-tiered D.C. charter schools.
That argument, in D.C. at least, has a rebuttal. Charter school proponents believe competition is good for all schools, and that having a network of popular and high-achieving charter schools encourages improvement in the public schools as well. Ramona Edelin, head of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, says, “We certainly think that the perceived competition with charter schools has improved D.C. Public Schools.”
While it’s hard to prove cause and effect—D.C.’s own test scores still fall below the national average—test scores reported by the Office of State Superintendent of Education show growth from 2007 to 2014 in reading, math, science and other subjects, a period that also marks the city’s broader commitment to education reform by schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, Mayor Adrian Fenty, and their respective successors.
Scott Pearson, head of the D.C. Public School Charter Board, the governing board for D.C. charter schools, thinks that the charter movement had some role in creating the conditions for D.C. public schools to improve. But improvement also came from changes within D.C. Public Schools, he says, including “the willingness to do things, to listen to parents, to invest by the city and to be more responsive.” As he explains, the years of failure and the rise of charter schools meant the regular schools “were facing an existential threat.”
In fact, after years of declining enrollment and school closures, D.C. Public Schools announced in March that it would open four new schools next year.