Malcolm “Mike” Peabody

Founder and Board Member Emeritus of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS)

Mike Peabody was a pioneer in Washington, D.C.’s school reform landscape for more than three decades. Among his most notable contributions was founding Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS) in 1996, which later became the DC Charter School Alliance. The organization quickly became one of the most visible and aggressive voices in the city’s burgeoning charter school movement in the District, advocating for equal funding and fair access to city-owned buildings.

Mr. Peabody’s career combined a successful real estate practice with work in public service and charitable institutions.

After graduating from Harvard Business School in 1952, and a short stint with a small business in Boston, he became the executive secretary of the New York State Commission Against Discrimination. Later he moved to Massachusetts where he worked in civil rights and housing, both at the city level, where he worked for the Boston Redevelopment Authority as a specialist in minority housing, and at the state level, where he was the advisor to his brother, Governor Endicott Peabody, on civil rights and low-income housing.

In 1968, Mr. Peabody moved to Washington, D.C., where he served as deputy assistant secretary for equal opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in which position he launched HUD’s first trial of housing vouchers allowing HUD clients choice in housing. This experiment led eventually to the current Section 8 housing allowance, which currently funds over one million low-income families who would otherwise be located in public housing. In 1973, he started a real estate development business in Washington, D.C., which continues to the present time.

For two decades, Mr. Peabody devoted considerable time outside his business to developing the Washington International School, where he was board chair for 11 years until 1995. In that same year, he founded Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS), with the mission to establish the public charter school movement here in the nation’s capital.

Through FOCUS, he worked with others to pass the School Reform Act of 1996, which established the public charter school program in DC.

The original charter school law for DC had no provision for financing facilities for schools, so in 1998 he worked with the U.S. House Appropriations Committee to amend the act to add such financing, and later with the DC City Council to develop the funding formula that now provides over $3,000 per student, or over $100 million annually to the more than 39,000 charter students.

Later in life, Mr. Peabody was on the board of the D.C. Promise Neighborhood Initiative in the Kenilworth neighborhood, which saught to replicate the results of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City.

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Malcolm Peabody, housing and charter schools advocate, dies at 96