It's been quite a week. The Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday came with the historic bonus of the inauguration of the nation's first African American president the next day. To see Barack Obama take the Oath of Office on the west side of the Capitol Building, built in part by slave labor, was a sight that many District residents thought they would never see. This milestone reminds us how far the nation has come. Yet other realities remind us of how far we have yet to travel.
While Robert Kennedy's 1961 prediction that an African American would ascend to the presidency in a few decades has come true, the promise of the Civil Rights Movement has yet to be realized in one key area. In D.C., as in many of the nation's other great cities, African American public school secondary students are half as likely to score advanced or proficient at reading tests as their White peers. The hope that so many now have for the White House has been slow to arrive in the public schoolhouse. But some District public schools are ahead of the curve.
Publicly funded, nonselective and independently run, D.C.'s public charter schools are helping bridge the reading proficiency divide that still bedevils the District. The share of African American students scoring advanced or proficient in reading tests is 20 percent higher in D.C.'s public charter schools than in the city-run public schools.
D.C.'s economically disadvantaged African American secondary students in charter schools are twice as likely to score advanced or proficient in reading as their counterparts enrolled in traditional public schools. No wonder the District's public charter schools are educating more than three times as many African American students in secondary schools to be proficient readers as the public school agency created for this purpose.
In some parts of our city, public charter schools have achieved amazing results. Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter High School in Anacostia sends 100 percent of its students to college. Their students are three times as likely to score advanced or proficient in reading as their fellow students in other Anacostia high schools.
Fulfilling the promise of civil rights means that every District child should have the opportunity for a decent public school education, which is their birthright as Americans. In a city in which one third of District residents lack the literacy skills they need to earn a living wage, fully engage in civic affairs, access information about health and safety issues, or wholly exercise their legal and civil rights, that landmark has yet to be reached.
Every District resident who cares about our city should remember that children who are not proficient at reading at age 15 are just a few short years away from joining the wrong side of that divide, assuming they don't drop out of school before then.
Of all the divisions in our city, that which divides those who are functionally illiterate from entering the world of words is perhaps one of the sharpest. This skill is essential for any member of our society. How much more important, then, is it for those whose brothers and sisters have felt the sting of discrimination and whose ancestors were denied the benefits of living in a free and open society?
The implications of illiteracy in adult life from employment and earnings to looking after oneself and one's family are life changing. Tackling this challenge is essential if we to end the age-old burden of intergenerational poverty and with it the ills that beset so many vulnerable communities.
Let's resolve to take the next step for civil rights, so that every adult can fully join civil society. The District has been the home of so many civil rights landmarks from Brown vs. Board of Education and the passage of the Voting Rights Act to the March on Washington almost 100 years after the District of Columbia Emancipation Act.
Previous generations have struggled to win for our children the end of segregation and the first critical steps toward Home Rule. For 12 years, D.C.'s public charter schools have led the way to the next step: empowering every child to fully take part in the society of which they are an equal part.
Charters' success deserves to be encouraged, built upon and shared with traditional public schools so that every D.C. child can benefit. This historic election won by an African American who knows the value of education in his life reminds us all in the nation's capital that it's high time that we taught all of our children to read.