Response: The Real Story in Camden, N.J.
Guest post by Laura Waters
This post is in response to a July 5th post by Julia Sass Rubin, "Charter School Networks and Shady Political Dealings: The Camden, N.J. Story"
Every day in Camden, New Jersey, students wake up with just over a 50 percent chance of earning a high school diploma.
This is reality. It is negligence on the part of a school system that has failed families for decades. It has to change.
For decades, though, it hasn't. Ten years ago, Governor Jon Corzine's Education Commissioner, Lucille Davy, declared, "I can't get past [Camden's] third- and fourth-grade reading and math scores, which are horrible." In the same article David Sciarra, Executive Director of the Education Law Center and chief advocate for New Jersey's poor urban students, explained that "the woes in Camden point to a serious leadership problem. The state [Board of Education] has also lacked the capacity and will, until the last four to six months, to exercise its responsibility to step in and take control."
But over the past year—for the first time in decades—there is real cause for hope for Camden's students. The State of New Jersey has finally lived up to its moral obligation to take action and appointed a new district leader in Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard. A child of Iranian immigrants who fled to this country to escape religious persecution, Rouhanifard has unveiled and begun to deliver on a bold and aggressive plan—The Camden Commitment—to dramatically improve the quality of education for all students in Camden.
As part of this strategic plan, Rouhanifard has also worked to bring some of the best nonprofits in the country to Camden to provide immediate new school options to parents and families under the auspices of the Urban Hope Act. For example, KIPP, which already runs a high-achieving consortium of schools across the country, will open this fall the KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy, eventually planned for K-5, with guaranteed enrollment for all children in the Response: The Real Story in Camden, N.J. - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher: