A decade after a state takeover, has the Camden school system made progress?

In 2013, the Camden City School District was deemed the worst-performing in New Jersey, and then-Gov. Chris Christie said it would be “immoral” not to place it under state control.

Declaring South Jersey’s largest school system at a breaking point, Christie initiated the first state takeover since 1995, following Newark, Jersey City, and Paterson.

“This system is broken, and we need to take responsibility to fix it,” said Christie. “Each day it gets worse, we’re failing the children of Camden.”

Camden’s performance numbers were abysmal: Only half its students were graduating high school, and the dropout rate was 20 percentage points higher than the state average.

Christie, a Republican, deemed intervention the only way to improve the grim statistics. The city’s Democratic leaders agreed, and its embattled school board reluctantly approved the takeover without a legal battle, saying it was in the best interest of students.

Under the takeover, Christie tapped a new, state-appointed superintendent, Paymon Rouhanifard, the first outsider and youngest person to run the district. The school board was stripped of its authority, designated merely advisers.

Rouhanifard laid off staff, relocated the central office from the Camden waterfront, and turned over five schools to outside operators. There were student walkouts and pushback from teachers and the community.

“It was not without its challenges,” Rouhanifard recalled in a recent interview. “The question for all of us to answer was what was the best path forward?”

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No timeline was given for the takeover to end. It took decades for the three other takeover districts to regain local control, and some critics say those North Jersey districts have shown little improvement.

More than a decade after the state takeover, the district has made modest gains in graduation and dropout rates, sidetracked partly, officials say, by the pandemic. Camden schools were among the last in the region to reopen after the shutdown.

How the state lists student performance data has changed over the years, making it difficult for apples-to-apples comparisons, but back then, less than 20% of fourth graders were proficient in language arts, and only 28% of 11th graders were proficient in math. Three district schools were the lowest-performing in the state.

For the 2022-2023 school year, the latest available results, 10.8% of all Camden students met expectations in language arts, compared to 51.3% statewide, and 10% overall met expectations in math, compared to 38.2% statewide on the New Jersey Student Learning Assessment. Not all grade-level scores for language arts and math for the 2022-23 school year were made available by the state, which cited privacy concerns.

Here’s where big gains are visible in Camden: In 2011-12, the graduation rate was 49% — 37 points below the state average — with a 21% dropout rate, compared to the state average of 1.2%. In 2022-23, Camden’s graduation rate was 64.7%, and the dropout rate was 10.2%.

Current Superintendent Katrina T. McCombs, the second state-appointed superintendent, said Camden students suffered learning loss during the pandemic, and officials caution against measuring the district solely based on test scores. There have been other gains, such as reducing chronic absenteeism from about 40% during the pandemic to about 27% in 2022-23, although that still exceeds the state average of 16.6%. A $133 million new Camden High complex opened, and plans are in the works to break ground next year for a new Eastside High.

“There are significant signs of progress,” said McCombs. “We’re in a better position today than we were a decade ago.”

McCombs, who began her career as a kindergarten teacher in the district, said the state intervention brought needed attention to Camden and was an “impetus that kind of shook things up a bit.”

In her latest annual report to the state Board of Education in March, McCombs said the district was trying new intervention strategies to boost student achievement and increase attendance. There is also more tutoring and small group instruction, she said.

“We know that we have work to do,” McCombs said.

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The educational landscape in Camden looks largely different today than it did when the state took control 11 years ago and enrolled almost 12,000 traditional public students.

Since the takeover, the district closed 11 traditional schools, and enrollment has dwindled to 5,969 students.

In the meantime, Renaissance school enrollment exploded in the city as an alternative.

Renaissance schools, opened a year after the takeover with the passage of the Urban Hope Act, are public schools, like charters, but guarantee a seat to every student in the school’s neighborhood. They receive 95% of per-pupil costs from the district, and more than half of Camden’s $349 million budget this year went to Renaissance and charter schools.

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Renaissance schools in Camden, the only New Jersey city with these types of schools, now enroll 6,792 students. Charter schools, which enrolled 3,640 before the takeover and rose to around 5,000 students at one point, now educate 3,342.

Domingo Morel, an associate professor of political science and public service at New York University who has studied state school takeovers, said closing traditional public schools and approving more charter schools is a typical outcome of interventions. New Orleans school system was converted to an entirely charter district after a state takeover, he said.

Morel believes takeovers are ineffective because they exclude stakeholders — parents and community leaders — and seldom produce the results promised by the state.

“It leads to policies and a culture where productive, healthy education systems cannot thrive,” Morel said.

Critics say the takeover has essentially dismantled the traditional public school system and drained funds and resources. They contend the intervention has been politically and racially motivated in districts that predominantly enroll economically disadvantaged students.

“Was a takeover warranted? Of course I’m going to say no,” said Reuben Mills, who was the district’s interim superintendent at the time of the takeover. “We were moving in the right track, but politics took over.”

Said Camden Education Association President Keith Benson: “I don’t wish state takeover on any district.” But he acknowledged that the state action yielded some positive outcomes.

The district must score at least an 80 in the five areas of the state’s monitoring system. So far, Camden has met that benchmark in personnel, governance and fiscal management, but not for instruction and program and operations.

But the state Board of Education ultimately will determine when the district has met state requirements and is ready for a return to home rule.

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McCombs, whose contract expires in 2025, said the district will focus on meeting state standards to regain local control, mainly by improving academic achievement, a key area. The district launched a truancy campaign recently to encourage students to come to school and a door-to-door push to get students enrolled in preschool.

“I want to be here to shepherd the district to sustainable local control,” she said. “I do believe that we will get there. It won’t take 30 years.”