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Today, American Public Education gets a history-making vote of confidence. And I must say, it is well-deserved.

Sometimes events that alter history are easy to spot and we immediately understand their significance. Apollo 11 and the fall of the Berlin Wall were understood by everyone to have changed their world forever.

Other changes in history are much more subtle. Few people see them, and fewer still understand exactly what they are witnessing. Did Rosa Parks realize her refusal to surrender her seat on the bus would have an impact on American society that resonates to this day?

When Alexander Fleming invented penicillin, did he appreciate that he just helped humanity subdue diseases for the better part of a century?

When the U.S. military created a mechanism to communicate via computers, did they comprehend that they had just invented “the internet” upon which most national economies and social lives would be based?

These moments appeared at the time to be footnotes; something the participants would go home and mention to their families as “part of their day”. But history decides for itself who will take center stage. And today, though few may notice as it happens, history has chosen again.

In 1969, to keep the violence of that time out of Philadelphia, Charles W. Bowser and a group of concerned citizens worked to replace rage with opportunity. They created a new structure of high school education that would later be called the “career academy.” This “school-within-a-school” is created when a group of students share the same teachers, and those teachers deliver instruction of the core subjects in the context of a career area. The first academy used the electronics industry to make the learning experience more authentic for students. It provided disadvantaged youth an entry point into college and the workplace.

This event made 1969 a seminal moment in history for education that nobody at the time recognized. So too, was 1981 when academies were adopted by California and began their spread to all 50 American states. They have even spawned larger, more diverse movements like small learning communities and the small school concept.

We are fortunate to stand at a critical juncture in history. The Denver-based National Educator Program announces that, through collaborative efforts with the Afghan-Canadian Community Center (ACCC) and member organizations of the NEP Alliance, academies are expanding beyond our borders. Today we welcome the International Business Academy in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Most of the students at the ACCC are females. In this former capital of the Taliban, it can still cost you your life to educate girls. Acid and poison gas attacks are alarmingly common against school girls, their teachers, and their families. But all of us together are working to help academies grow throughout Afghanistan because the bottom line is, when we include girls in the educational process, we civilize societies.

American educators have been beaten over the head with accusations by self-proclaimed “experts” that Europe and Asia are doing a better job educating youth than we are. That has never been true. European and Asian teachers have much to teach us, but American teachers have much to teach them as well. One is not superior to the other and each has earned a seat at the global table of our profession.

Against a backdrop of violence and uncertainty, when this brave group of Afghans decided to bet their future on an educational model, they looked to American schools, and chose career academies, developed by hard-working educators throughout the United States. Now this model is not only a fundamental shift in the way secondary education is delivered to American youth; it is the hope for a future of peace and prosperity for humanity.

As always, history has decided for itself who will take center stage. Today, history again says it’s career academies. American Public Education, take a bow.

Mark A. Thompson of Denver is director of the National Educator Program.