A Maryland public school teacher and Howard University graduate on Wednesday was named the winner of a global teaching prize worth $1 million — the biggest such award for educators in the world.

       Keishia Thorpe, who teaches 12th-grade English at the International High School at Langley Park, in the Prince George’s County public school system, received the Global Teacher Prize at the Paris headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Her students mostly come from immigrant and refugee families.

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       Thorpe was awarded the honor from a field of more than 8,000 educators from 121 countries, many of whom work in impoverished and conflict-ravaged communities.

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       “This is to encourage every little Black boy and girl that looks like me, and every child in the world that feels marginalized and has a story like mine, and felt they never mattered,” Thorpe said Wednesday after the announcement was made by French actress Isabelle Huppert.

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       In an interview afterward, Thorpe said she would use the money to expand projects she has started to help disadvantaged students attend college without debt and to provide other services for immigrant children and families.

       Students and staff at her Bladensburg, Md., school watched the presentation’s live stream and began to shout when they learned the news.

       The Global Teacher Prize has been awarded annually since 2015 by the London-based Varkey Foundation — the philanthropic arm of GEMS Education, a company that owns and operates private K-12 GEMS schools in a handful of countries, including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates — in partnership with UNESCO. The award has been dubbed the “Nobel” of teaching, in an effort to show the importance of teaching in societies around the world.

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       Thorpe was born and raised in Jamaica by her grandmother, and she and her identical twin sister, Treisha Thorpe, won track-and-field scholarships to attend college in the United States. She graduated from Howard in 2003 as a pre-law and English student.

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       She said in a recent interview that she came to the United States from an impoverished country thinking, “Oh, my God, the land of milk and honey.” But while tutoring at night during college at a D.C. charter school, Thorpe said, she realized the inequity in the U.S. public education system and decided to skip law school and go into teaching instead.

       “I didn’t understand the American system and how it works, and how some of the schools were flourishing and some schools had students who were not making the grade. And so that really had an impact on me,” she said.

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       Thorpe, who began teaching more than 15 years ago, also co-founded, along with her sister, the nonprofit organization U.S. Elite International Track and Field, which provides athletes from impoverished backgrounds a chance to compete internationally. Through an international scholarship program, she said, the program has helped hundreds of student-athletes attend college without debt.

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       In addition, Thorpe established an annual scholarship and athletic convention, where disadvantaged student-athletes can meet with coaches and admissions officers to learn about recruitment and college acceptance.

       She won the 2018-2019 National Life Changer of the Year award, which is given by National Life Group, a collection of financial services companies, to teachers and school administrators who make a difference in the lives of students.

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       Thorpe began teaching at the International High School at Langley Park in 2018 and was charged with redesigning the 12th-grade English curriculum to give it “a global perspective and a culturally responsive lens,” she said.

       She assists her students with college applications and also helps them obtain scholarships. In 2018-2019, she helped them win about $6.5 million in scholarships to 11 different colleges, she said.

       Thorpe is the second American to win the Global Teacher Prize. Its first awardee, in 2015, was Nancie Atwell, the founder of the Center for Teaching and Learning, a nonprofit K-8 demonstration school in Edgecomb, Maine.

       Last year’s prize went to Ranjitsinh Disale, who teaches girls at a village school in western India.