Before becoming academic dean of Codman Academy Charter Public School in Malden, Thabiti Akil Brown was the school's founding humanities teacher. In this role, he developed an internship program in which students visit Boston's Huntington Theater twice a month to watch professional theatrical productions such as A Raisin in the Sun, then interact with performers, learning about stagecraft and writing their experiences in journals. At the end of each semester, students in the program produce their own play. Brown's partnership with the Huntington has dramatically improved academic achievement. Each one of his tenth graders passed the English/Language Arts portion of the high-stakes Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), including several students who had entered the ninth grade reading below the 25th percentile. One hundred percent of Codman students have been accepted to four-year colleges.
