Last week’s Camden School Board meeting featured a noticeable change in both tenor and strategy of activists that have opposed the Camden School District’s move toward “No Excuses” charter management organizations such as KIPP, Uncommon and Mastery. For more than 18 months, residents have been taking the school district at face value. When the district said it was on a “listening tour” (words that can’t be said with a straight face in the city anymore), people came and tried to convince the school district of things. After the recent school closures, that has changed. Convincing is out, legal challenges are in.
I counted four separate legal challenges referred to by speakers at the meeting. One was about the legality of changing special needs Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) by the District. Another was the attempt to put the nature of the school board on the ballot — with the end goal being to return it to an elected board. A third potential challenge, seemed to focus on civil rights (a Title VI case). And finally, the New Jersey Education Association (i.e. the Jersey teachers union) challenged the conversion of four schools to Renaissance schools, and closure of another, arguing that the Camden School District did so improperly and illegally.
These issues each deserve their own analysis, but they also represent a wider trend. When Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard was first appointed, Camden County NAACP president Colandus “Kelly” Francis told me the only way to stop the ensuing changes to the district (read: more “no excuses” charter schools and a weakened public system) would be legal challenges. He told me courts would be the last resort, because Camden residents had been stripped of any other rights; the school board is appointed and advisory, and the superintendent is appointed by the governor. Charter applications, and approval of Renaissance schools, go to the state commissioner of education who is, you guessed it, also appointed by the government.
In other words, there are few checks or balances on the system.
Kelly Francis told me that, historically, this wasn’t unusual for minority communities. Historically, these communities been denied rights to vote and participate, and it was the role of the courts to ensure their protection. I was skeptical that we’d see such a legal strategy in Camden, and I shouldn’t have been. Kelly was right, and now we’re seeing these legal challenges crop up to confront an unaccountable democratic system (note the irony: an unaccountable school district is pushing an “accountability” agenda focused on test score improvement).
Today, I got my hands on the NJEA legal challenge, which makes 4 arguments that the school closures were illegal. These are dense arguments, and I’m not a legal scholar, so I’m going to try to explain them (not all today) and do some brief policy analysis on them. The first claim is that these school closures violate the priority school provisions included in the No Child Left Behind waiver.
First, a little backstory. No Child Left Behind is federal legislation, passed in 2001. Most states have applied for waivers from this law, because the law set up steep punishments for failing to meet performance goals. Most notably, by 2014 all states were supposed to have 100% proficiency across schools. Never a good idea to set 100% as a goal.
In New Jersey, that waiver included the “priority schools” clause above. The key section, in terms of the challenge by the NJEA is this:
All Priority Schools will receive the targeted interventions as determined by the RACs and agreed to by the LEA for a three-year period.
The brief goes on to argue:
The schools… were not given necessary support and assistance, and were not given the opportunity to demonstrate improvement. Among other things, under the terms of the waiver, all five schools were required to receive targeted interventions by Regional Achievement Centers. It is undisputed that that did not occur, and indeed there was no Regional Achievement Center for the Camden School District for at least the last two school years of priority status.
And this, ultimately, is the heart of what it means to be trying to improve your school in Camden. In the face of bad policy (like NCLB’s requirement for 100% efficiency), you are forced into the latest policy fad (in this case, Regional Achievement Centers) because of low test scores. Then, before that policy fad can even be implemented, someone else is in power (in this case, Governor Christie), appoints a new superintendent, with a dictate to apply the latest policy fad (“no excuses” style schools and schooling). Suddenly, the priority schools went from an entire overhaul led by the Regional Achievement Center, to an overhaul by new district leadership which insists schools use Mastery/Uncommon/Kipp materials, as well as “ed reform” staples like the book Teach like a Champion.
It’s not clear that three years is enough time to know if the Regional Achievement Center reforms were showing progress. But, to move from RACs to the district’s new favored “reforms”, then to be have it announced your school would be taken over before even getting the 3rd year test scores shows the true intention of the school district. Schools were not given an honest chance to improve, they were given a fragmented set of instructions then declared to be failing.
Too often, teachers toss their hands in the air and tell me that they are making gains despite these types of fractured reforms, rather than because of them (of course, their schools are closed anyway). There is no way to know if these reforms are showing progress when they are barely implemented before a new policy is initiated.
I’m not a legal scholar, and I have little idea if this complaint will stick, but this legal challenge puts a face on a major issue many educators have with these school closures. Schools are jerked around from policy fad to policy fad, from RACs to No Excuses. To make matters worse, when new staff comes into the District, they may not even know about the last reform, the NJEA brief shows how the District team did not even address basic requirements of the NCLB waiver.
It’s also the embodiment of a broader Camden problem that I’ve written about over and over again. Camden is in need of continuity. Too often, the city is at the whim of the governor (because of its chronic budget deficit), or the federal government (in cases like NCLB). At the family level, continuity is challenging because poverty pushes families from house to house (and, often, school to school).
Amidst this type of turmoil and uncertainty, schools have an opportunity to be a bastion of consistency and community, not just from day to day, but from decade to generation. Parents, who work long hours and have trouble making it to schools for events, depend on links to teachers they know and even the teachers they had while in school. They depend on an alumni base in their neighborhood to keep them connected. They depend on schools to bring stability. But that stability just isn’t a priority in the district, and the haphazard nature of reforms in the city reflect that.
From a legal perspective, I have little idea how these challenges will play out. But from a policy perspective, it’s hard to believe that these schools were given the stability they needed to show improvement. And barring a dramatic reversal from the state or the district, these schools will no longer have the opportunity to provide that stability to their students.
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Prior to RAC interventions, I was a teacher in a priority school in Camden. At my school, which received lots of federal funding – the principal rarely came out of her air conditioned office, students straggled in hours after the bell rang, Math and Literacy Coaches didn’t have time to teach because they distributed snacks or performed mundane tasks like announcements for hours every day. Because of the federal funding, we had scads of money to purchase supplies and implement enrichment programs to motivate kids to improve their reading and math skills – but that money was spent on trips and snacks instead by order of the principal. Teachers who volunteered for extended day, Saturday Program, and the Summer Adventure Program complained because so much time was wasted on ‘Extended Snack’, and ‘Basketball Adventures’ (not to be confused with organized sports teams coached by experts. Instead, sweaty tired kids were herded into the gym or onto the playground for half the instructional time, and supervised by teachers in the absence of a plan and materials). Three years have passed since RAC was implemented and I have made several trips to Camden to deliver donated instruments and books to former students. My students lament the current situation – where teachers are still supervising cafeteria and playground in the absence of staff, and middle school students are still singing/playing the songs they learned in elementary grades. The graduation rate at Creative Arts hovered around 46% in 2013 – I suspect it hasn’t improved much w/the addition of non-instructional RAC personnel.
I think Christy got his nose in the tent by citing correctly, corruption in both the CBOE and the NJEA. But the only change has been the money passing from their coffers to his – bypassing the kids and teachers.
It is comforting to now have so many people articulate the fact that the NJ DOE strategy has always been the eventual destruction of the public school district through implementation of a Portfolio Management strategy. For years I felt like I was the only person on earth that had taken the time to read the NJ DOE document that clearly outlined this goal and the manner in which it was to be carried out. Though secret when first developed by the NJ DOE’s Portfolio Management Office (the very existence of such an office speaks volumes) it was made public through a Courier-Post article.
The plan articulated a process that would establish the “state as the primary actor, pulling multiple levers at one time (closures, new charters, Interdistrict Choice, Takeovers, etc.).” It went on to emphasis that, “The district [would be] solely a school operator, not the portfolio manager.” The document resembles an invasion and occupation plan developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Of course there are a few incorrect assumptions. For example, when addressing “Governance Issues” it anticipated that “Legislators would be in favor; Mayor likely would not.” This error can be attributed to a belief that any Mayor worth their salts would resist given their responsibility to protect an important institution such as the public schools. They were unaware that Mayor Redd is merely a political operative answerable first to Democratic Party Boss George Norcross.
The author(s) could not have anticipated the affects that the Urban Hope Act (UHA) would have on the scope, timing and impact on the overall plan. The UHA was passed and amended years later. The addition of the so-called Renaissance Schools, among other things, increased the number of Charters and as a result additional public and existing charters would be closed. Thus the “Portfolio Management In Camden Plan” underestimates the number of charter schools and the devastation that this will have on the district’s local school budget.
The state’s agenda has never been to improve the local schools. Take for example, the August 9, 2012 directive, in which Commissioner Christopher Cerf instructed the BOE to “conduct a national search for a superintendent with prior success in reforming an urban school district with persistently low student achievement.” Yet, immediately after officially taking over the district, they appointed a gentleman with just two-years of classroom experience as Superintendent. This followed the plan’s script that “a leader that is in favor of this agenda” be appointed superintendent. The need for educational training and professional expertise went out the window.
The underlying fact is that the people of Camden were never consulted by anyone about what Governor Christie and the NJ DOE intended to do after they took over the district. What we are witnessing is the undemocratic destruction of a school district composed almost entirely of black and Hispanic youngsters. This is not an accident, it is policy. Just check out the other districts that have been taken over. The fact that they have the cooperation of political operatives that look like the invaded community doesn’t make it all right.
The legal system is the only avenue to pursue. The supt. & board of education have their own agenda & they negate the democratic process. They intend to divert funds & eliminate the “public school system.” The people have spoken publicly & do not want the charter schools. I heard one speaker state that $150 million has gone to the charter schools. It was upsetting to hear how Pyne Point School has been segregated by the charter school getting money for improvements while the public school didn’t. How much can these public endure? Where is the transparency?