Josephine C. (Jo) Baker is a native Washingtonian, born in 1931 and christened at Asbury United Methodist Church. She is known as a pioneer in the DC Public Charter School Movement having been elected the first Chairman of the DC Public Charter School Board shortly after Congress authorized it in 1996, and then having moved on to the position of Executive Director Of the organization in 2002. An exceptional educator, she is the product of parents who moved to DC from Mississippi in the Great Migration, whose own commitment to education was so strong, her mother is also a college graduate. Ms. Baker is a music lover who studied as a child at the Howard University Junior Department of Music, and eventually attended Howard University as an undergrad. However,she was so set against teaching as a career that when her mother declared she could only major in music if she chose music education, she switched to sociology and planned to be a social worker. Along the way she met her future husband , Isham Baker, at Asbury and then sang alongside him in the Howard Choir where he attended the School of Architecture, eventually becoming one of a true minority: an African American Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.