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.