Camden next on school help list?

Gov. Christie has devoted considerable attention to the failing school district in Newark, the city of his birth.

He went on The Oprah Winfrey Show to accept a $100 million matching grant for Newark schools from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and he was instrumental in the hiring last week of a highly touted superintendent from New York City, Cami Anderson.

Could Camden's school district - which by many measures is in worse shape - be next on the governor's to-do list?

"The [acting state education] commissioner and I have been spending a lot of time talking to stakeholders in South Jersey . . . about actions that we are proposing to take in Camden," the governor said last week in response to a question at a news conference.

Neither he nor the acting commissioner, Christopher Cerf, specified what those actions might be, but both said they had talked with Camden Mayor Dana L. Redd about their plans.

In the next few months, Christie said, there will be announcements of "initiatives that we want to pursue in Camden that I think will have significant community support."

Two Camden school board members say the district is in such disarray that they hope the state takes it over, just as it has run Newark schools since 1995. A review of the district by the executive county superintendent of schools, expected after May 20, could provide Christie the basis to intervene.

A team has been visiting schools, interviewing principals, and observing classes in order to respond to the district's recent quality single accountability continuum self-assessment. The district gave itself high scores in every category, including a perfect score for personnel.

If even one category in the new review is scored at less than 50 percent, a "partial state intervention" could bring in "highly skilled professionals" for oversight.

If the district fares worse, a full intervention could be implemented, allowing the state to appoint a new district superintendent and relegating the school board to an advisory role.

Christie has other options. He is an ardent advocate of charter schools and school-choice measures that would let students in failing districts go elsewhere, including to privately run religious schools.

He has an ally in the most politically influential person in South Jersey, George Norcross 3d, a Democrat who also has advocated for school choice. Norcross, chairman of Cooper University Hospital, declined to comment for this article. But he has said that Cooper University Hospital or his family's charitable foundation could become involved with charter schools.

One site for such a school could be next to the medical school Cooper is building in downtown Camden - a property now slated to become Lanning Square Elementary School. Though houses have been removed through eminent domain and millions of dollars in state money has been spent, the public-school construction project recently was put on hold by the Christie administration.

That school could be replaced with one operated through a public-private partnership, according to a person involved in the discussions.

Norcross is scheduled to speak at the graduation next month of an alternative school run by school-choice activist Angel Cordero, who has been among the most vocal critics of Camden public schools.

"I think he should take complete control of Camden public schools," Cordero said of Christie. "With his strong leadership for urban children stuck in failing schools, we could turn Camden around in no time. And we don't need $100 million to do it."

Camden has a worse graduation rate than Newark, according to state records, and its two comprehensive high schools, Camden and Woodrow Wilson, were named the worst in the state last year in an analysis by New Jersey Monthly magazine. In the 2008-09 school year, 61.3 percent of Camden 11th graders whose scores were released failed the state math test, and 41.6 percent failed the literacy exam.

Christie, whose parents moved him from Newark to leafy Livingston, has said that Newark children today have no chance to become governor because of the inferior schools.

He says the vast sums spent in poor districts ($16,850 per pupil in Camden last year) are wasted, and he has declared 2011 the year of education reform. Among other changes, Christie wants to allow districts to pay teachers more if they work in struggling schools.

"Our children are being sentenced to a life in poverty with no hope for their dreams, and Christie will set us free," Cordero said.

In a further indication of the governor's interest in the issue, he is to appear this week in Washington with President Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, and Geoffrey Canada, who leads what is considered the most successful urban educational program in the country, the Harlem Children's Zone.

Previous efforts at tweaking the system have not worked as planned. When the state takeover of Camden ended last year, the Legislature gave the Mayor's Office powers to appoint most of the school board members. But Redd missed the statutory deadline for announcing her appointments last month.

Her administration offered no explanation. And the school district's state fiscal monitor, Mike Azzara, said the state did not know whom the mayor was considering. "It's been very secretive," he said.

School board member Sean Brown said he had been unable to secure information from the district about how the graduation rate is calculated and how newly funded police officers would be assigned in the schools.

"There's been no improvement in high school graduation in many years, nor are there many initiatives to address that issue," Brown said.

"What happened in Newark is exactly what needs to happen in Camden," Brown said. "The difference between some of the school board members and school administrators and me is that they believe that poor, minority students can't do any better than this."

Phone calls and an e-mail message to the superintendent's office were not returned Thursday or Friday.

After years of interim administrators, the district is finally on track, according to school board president Susan Dunbar-Bey. She said she was confident that test scores this year would show significant improvement.

"I don't really think the governor needs to get involved in the Camden schools," she said.

The situation "declined over a period of years, and a lot of the time people's expectations are unrealistic. I believe this year we'll have forward movement in terms of test scores and grades. . . . It's not something that's just going to turn around overnight."

In calling for a state takeover, departing school board member Jose Delgado said the schools had worsened during his more than two-decade involvement.

"The Camden school system is a complex, interlocking human-relationship machine," Delgado said.

"You have to appoint someone who comes in and sees the Camden school district as a human enterprise, and find out what is happening, and what is not happening."