$1M Global Teaching Award Given To MD Educator Who Champions For Kids

PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY, MD — A Maryland teacher has won the $1 million Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize 2021 given in partnership with UNESCO.

Keishia Thorpe, who grew up in Jamaica and came to the U.S. on a track and field scholarship, said her students were her years ago, which pushes her every day to be the best teacher she can be.

Thorpe teaches English to seniors at International High School Langley Park in Bladensburg. She was selected from more than 8,000 nominations and applications for the Global Teacher Prize from 121 countries around the world.

Thorpe escaped poverty and violence when she came to the U.S., but encountered racism as a Black immigrant. Hard work led her to graduate at the top of her class and enabled her to tutor at a nearby inner-city school, which spurred her interest in becoming a teacher.

All of Thorpe's students are English language learners and 95 percent identify as low-income. In order to reach them, Thorpe redesigned the 12th grade curriculum to make it culturally relevant to her students, who are first-generation Americans, immigrants or refugees from mostly Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and South and Central America.

As a result of her interventions, her English language learners have shown a 40 percent increase in their reading scores, which contributed to the school meeting its growth-to-target rate with a 10 percent increase in WIDA scores for 2019-2020 and the highest in the school district for ELLs.

Thorpe also spends a significant amount of time helping her students apply for college and obtain scholarships. In fact, her graduating students in the 2019 graduating class secured more than $6.7 million scholarships from 11 colleges and almost 100 percent of them attended tuition-free.

Along with her twin sister Dr. Treisha Thorpe, the women together founded U.S. Elite International Track and Field, Inc, a non-profit giving "at risk" student-athletes across the globe an opportunity to use their talents as a vehicle to access fully funded scholarships to U.S. colleges and universities. To date, she has helped more than 500 students earn full athletic track and field scholarships. U.S. Elite has seen more than 90 percent of its student members graduate college and approximately 20 percent pursued a master’s degree while 8 percent worked toward a post-graduate degree.

She also established an Annual Scholarship and Athletic Convention where college coaches and admissions and compliance teams inform economically disadvantaged student-athletes about college admissions and interact with them one-on-one, allowing many to get recruited on the spot.

Thorpe was honored with the Medal of Excellence from the governor of the state of Maryland for her work in influencing equitable policies in education and named the National Life Changer of the Year in the U.S. for 2018-2019, an award given to teachers who inspire and go above and beyond for their students, “exemplifying excellence, positive influence and leadership."

To hear Thorpe speak about her award, visit here.