has obtained the White House's Race apt the Top Commencement Challenge

As the Mississippi River rises in Memphis, an team of students and teachers are distracted by some good newspaper.

Their school, Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis, has won the White House's Race apt the Top Commencement Challenge, the White House announced Tuesday.

Vice President Joe Biden cried the school's principal Tuesday to proclaim their selection. The school blow five other public high schools that were finalists in the competition to showcase the best ways to arrange students for college and their future professions.

"This namely an unbelievable moment because our students, staff, and the all BTW community," Principal Alisha Kiner said. "Since this process began, we have been humbled by this experience and the overwhelming outpouring of adore and advocate from the metropolis of Memphis."

In a expression, President Barack Obama said, "Booker T. Washington High School proves what tin be achieved while students, instructors, parents and supervisors come together to support completion in the study-room. I'm looking along to conveying the commencement address at this extraordinary school soon."

The presidential discourse is the award for conquering. According to the school's website, the graduation rite will be May 20.

The school has high teen pregnancy and HIV/AIDS rates and a history of violence. But the school's graduation rate has risen from 55% to almost 82% in the quondam four years.

"Even although they live in the poorest ZIP code in the city, the educational outcomes that they are producing are in the highest in the city," Memphis Schools Superintendent Kriner Cash said.

The inner-city school has a student body that is 100% African-American with 98% of students eligible for free alternatively dwindled luncheon. They had a "culture of failure," along to Cash.

Then, three years antecedent, the school system adopted a menu of reforms.

The principal at Booker T. Washington put in location numerous of the proposals, including gender-based classes for freshmen; assigning the best teachers in the essence subjects of English, numbers and science; and increasing the number of Advanced Placement lessons offered to the students.

AP courses are thought a good way to prepare students for the rigor of college.

The school now has the lowest digit of serious violence episodes and the highest presence rate of always of the Memphis tall schools.

This is the second annual of the White House's Race to the Top Commencement Challenge. Last annual, Kalamazoo Central High School in Michigan won the contest. The initiative is part of the administration's challenge for the United States to have the most college graduates in the world by 2020.