<p>Graduating seniors considered "college ready"=THREE</p>
<p>Camden</a> schools chief reports from his 'listening tour'</p>
<p>Ok, as a nj resident of over 50 years, this makes me cringe.
I knew Camden was bad but this bad? I had no idea!</p>
<p>I was raised in central Jersey and have lived in northern nj for over 3 decades.
What is described in this article could be a different planet from my experiences.
How can one district in our smallish state be soooo underperforming vs most of the others?</p>
<p>The statistics are now a matter of public record in the media. What this should/will do is generate a meeting between Gov. Christie (who may or may not have aspirations for higher elected office) & the Southern NJ Political powers broker(s) who want this issue addressed and a plan formulated to fix the situation. This isn’t a bad thing, since now with focused attention something positive may occur.</p>
<p>I am also a NJ resident - born in central NJ residing in northern NJ for the past 20 years.</p>
<p>And this is news how?</p>
<p>Camden City has been a critical condition patient for years. Campbell Soup Company essentially abandoned the town. The Aquarium and the USS New Jersey Exhibit really haven’t put much of a dent in Camden’s woes. I think the circumstances faced by Camden’s young people are awful, but the politicians haven’t shown any real motivation to address those problems.</p>
<p>The owner of Philly.com is the South Jersey political broker. He is also getting in to the charter school business. He happens to be branching out from the insurance business- he sells health insurance to municipalities. For some reason they purchase plans from his company even though the State Controller has documented that if said towns purchased their health care coverage through the State insurance plan they would save millions.
The urban schools in NJ are going to be sold off to the 3 or 4 main power brokers in NJ through Charter schools.</p>
<p>“The statistics are now a matter of public record in the media. What this should/will do is generate a meeting between Gov. Christie (who may or may not have aspirations for higher elected office) & the Southern NJ Political powers broker(s) who want this issue addressed and a plan formulated to fix the situation. This isn’t a bad thing, since now with focused attention something positive may occur.”</p>
<p>And what exactly is it that you want Christie to do? Thanks to the New Jersey Supreme Court (which continues to cling to the discredited notion that lack of money is the core of the problem in the inner city schools), Camden already spends almost $24,000 per student–$5000 more than the state average. </p>
<p>The performance of the students in simply a byproduct of the collapse of civil society in Camden more generally. I wish I had some ideas about how to fix that problem, but I don’t.</p>
<p>The results are getting even more skewed because many of the kids in cities who have more involved and more educated parents have transferred their kids to charter schools. The charter schools in many cities have not been showing great results, but they do offer the feeling of a safer environment. One of the reasons is that they are often smaller than the city public schools and easier to oversee, and because the worst troublemakers and most transient students usually don’t apply to attend the charters.</p>
<p>Camden is a really small, dysfunctional place surrounded by larger, well-functioning suburbs. I doubt that anyone lives there by choice. It actually has some decent institutions – Cooper Medical Center and its new medical school, Rutgers-Camden University, a pretty nice waterfront – and it has excellent public transportation from Philadelphia and the surrounding New Jersey suburbs, so that no one working at or visiting those places has to spend more time than necessary in Camden. Population-wise, it doesn’t even control its own county. Everything about it is pretty screwed-over; the big news would be if somehow the schools weren’t.</p>
<p>I guess the State does deserve credit for trying to correct the situation with a take-over of the Camden Public Schools. But academically, the record of the NJ State government’s control of dysfunctional school districts is quite…so so. The best that can be said is that the State tossed out the outright crooks who used school district procurement contracts as their own private expense accounts. Improvement in actual educational achievement is another matter entirely.</p>
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<p>I believe the folks living in the very next towns to Camden feel the same way.</p>
<p>$23,000 per student ??? Public school in Camton? </p>
<p>Private school, with granite countertops and a-la-carte cafeteria charges less in our neighborhood.</p>
<p>[Third</a> of N.J. districts in area top state average in per-pupil spending - Philly.com](<a href=“Inquirer.com: Philadelphia local news, sports, jobs, cars, homes”>Inquirer.com: Philadelphia local news, sports, jobs, cars, homes)</p>
<p>We have more school districts than we have municipalities in NJ. We should move to county run systems with significantly less administration staff and schools with an enrollment number that has been determined to be a combination of cost effective and educationally efficient.</p>
<p>While there is no question that the school systems in New Jersey suffer from massive inefficiencies. However, the link was posted to document my claim about the per pupil expenditures in Camden. And the fact remains that the massive increase in spending in Camden (where, by the way, they can’t even afford to have a police department) as well as other urban school districts in the state is a direct result of the decisions by an arrogant Supreme Court that decided that vastly increasing spending would significantly improve the performance of disadvantaged children in the face of the data which contradicts this assumption. (I’m not even going to get into the question of the court’s view of what passes as “legal reasoning.”)</p>
<p>The district should close. Any money saved should be given as vouchers and these children should get to choose a neighboring district to attend. This should be law. It is criminal to make these kids suffer.</p>
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<p>And how exactly will this affect the neighboring school districts?</p>
<p>Sax, I appreciate your sentiments but do you realize that existing law in NJ permits the type of transfer options you envision (unless the rules have changed since I last investigated the situation)? I doubt that many parents were able to exploit that option because of the lack of enthusiasm from neighboring districts to accept such “refugee” students. Even with NCLB, few spaces have been made available for students seeking to enroll in better districts in NJ.</p>
<p>Seems to me that if it wanted to, the state supreme court could rule that the state constitution required other school districts to accept transfers from a failing district as a remedy for the failure of the state to provide an adequate education in Camden. I know there is no provision saying that in the state constitution, but that has never stopped them before.</p>
<p>There may be others, but the only school district that I am familiar with that has a substantial program for bringing in kids from other districts is Lexington MA, which has participated in the “Metro Plan” to bring in Boston City pupils for 30 years.</p>
<p>It’s a grand idea but I understand that some Lexington parents (probably led by Abigail Thernstrom, the critic and Harvard professor who lives in Lexington) aren’t fully supportive of the project. But it’s still going strong, last I heard.</p>
<p>Emm1- the Abbott case was an easy one for the court. You can not make the case that money does not matter in education and have wealthy districts spend boat loads of money. The attorney representing Abbott districts said if money does not matter why are the excellent districts spending x yet these distressed cities can only spend y even though they face an overwhelming number of issues the wealthy districts do not face.</p>
<p>There is a solution NJ should fund all schools equally on a per student basis through the income tax. Do you know why we will not because the rich districts will see cuts and they will not tolerate it.
Middle class districts like Woodbridge, Edison, Brick, Bloomfield and Toms River will do okay but rich and poor districts Newark/Milburn,or Trenton/Princeton will in most cases see cuts.</p>