The pathway to higher education brought me to Rutgers University-Camden in 1981, where I am now a professor and director of the Community Leadership Center. Enrolling there helped me build the social and political capital to establish LEAP Academy — Camden’s first charter school — in 1997. Since then, the school has grown from five trailers on an abandoned lot to a complex of transformed historic buildings along Cooper Street. 

Thousands of students have passed through our doors, and we have maintained 100% high school and college graduation rates. That has been our mission for 30 years. It is an ambitious goal, especially in a city like Camden, where nearly 30% of residents live below the poverty line and the district’s high school graduation rate hovers around 65%. Many young people in the city are left without a diploma and few opportunities ahead.

I am incredibly proud of what LEAP Academy has achieved for Camden’s students, families and educators. But K-12 education alone is not enough. Real generational change — especially for Black and Hispanic students — comes from obtaining a college degree and the financial support necessary to make that possible.

While a strong K-12 education provides essential groundwork, access to quality post-secondary education, career training and a broader approach to addressing systemic inequalities are all necessary to truly break the cycle of poverty.

This past June, I watched 160 students — all Black or Hispanic, many first-generation college-goers — walk across LEAP’s graduation stage. Each one took a step toward a degree, a career and a brighter future. For them, college is more than an academic achievement, it is a generational breakthrough.

So how does LEAP’s approach to college access work?

We set high expectations at an early age, remove financial barriers for families and challenge high school seniors to complete a full schedule of college courses.

At LEAP, getting ready for college starts in pre-K. With sponsorship from Rutgers University, young children can attend an early learning program that continues into LEAP’s K-12 school. Parents volunteer 40 hours each year, helping to make the school stronger for everyone. Even in the early grades, students at LEAP spend 10 more days in school than those attending neighboring public schools. We also serve as a community hub, opening our buildings at 7:15 a.m. for breakfast and keeping them open until 6:15 p.m. to provide students with additional instruction, tutoring, extracurricular clubs and intramural sports.

Each of our five buildings has a College Access Center. For students in K-8, center staffers  monitor their grades, explain how their academic progress connects to college readiness and update parents on how their children’s performance stacks up to college-ready skills. These services intensify in high school, as students prepare to apply to college. In addition, the team presents programs that introduce students to career possibilities in areas such as STEM, law, architecture, business and writing — all fields that can be pursued through college study.

In high school, students take real college classes taught by professors at Rutgers and Rowan universities. This helps these inner-city students build strong skills and feel more confident about life after high school. Graduate students from Rutgers-Camden, tutor LEAP students during the school day and after school when needed, for example, in tough classes like statistics.

Over 1,200 LEAP students have graduated with a full year of college credits, positioning them to finish college in three years and saving on tuition costs for families.

In addition, LEAP pays full tuition through the Alfredo and Gloria Bonilla-Santiago Endowed Scholarship for graduates who maintain a 3.5 GPA during their time at LEAP, have four or fewer unexcused absences during the year and need financial aid. Hundreds of students who maintain a 3.0 GPA at Rutgers University’s three campuses receive full tuition. 

An added benefit: As our students achieve college success, Camden receives a surge of intellectual capital.

Without an educated workforce, sustainable economic investment is unlikely. Companies will invest only if they believe they can find prepared, local talent. A city filled with college-educated citizens is not a dream — it is an economic imperative.

Today, Camden’s workforce is expanding, and residents are actively working to revitalize the city. From growing waterfront businesses to local hospitals and universities, LEAP graduates are shaping the city’s future while delivering valuable services to the broader community and helping to renew civic pride.

Yet troubling trends are emerging. Across the country, skepticism about the value of college is growing. One survey found that only have confidence in higher education. Another showed that believe earning a bachelor’s degree is important for getting a good-paying job.

This level of doubt is both misguided and dangerous. While some companies have removed degree requirements from job postings to demonstrate skills-based hiring, is still a criterion that managers use to determine whether a candidate brings the right skills to the table. College isn’t just about skills — it’s about learning to think critically, collaborate effectively and broaden perspectives. It’s where students meet peers from different backgrounds, build lasting relationships and expand their world views. Hiring managers compare job candidates against one another, and having a college degree weighs in favor of applicants who’ve earned one.

Undervaluing higher education risks breaking the very link that lifts up both students and cities. Disrupting the cycle of poverty requires year-round work and unwavering dedication. It takes educators who believe in their students, families who stay engaged and communities willing to invest.

Parents, educators and policymakers invested in K-12 education must never lose sight of what truly matters when transforming urban communities: helping every student envision a future beyond high school, and equipping them with the tools to reach it.

Ten years ago, Camden Prep became one of the first schools in New Jersey’s to attempt to resuscitate a chronically poor-performing elementary school.

That same year, Maurquay Moody started fourth grade at Camden Prep, in a classroom dubbed “The College of New Jersey.” Uncommon Schools, the nonprofit charter operator tasked with turning around Maurquay’s neighborhood school, names each classroom after a college in an effort to raise postsecondary expectations.

The state had recently taken control of K-12 schools in Camden, a city then-Gov. Chris Christie had called “a human catastrophe.” Barely 20% of students could read at grade level, and fewer than half graduated high school. Twenty-three of the city’s 26 schools were among the lowest-achieving in the state. 

Over the next few years, like many other urban districts beset by plummeting property values and spiking rates of poverty and crime, Camden welcomed several new public charter schools and turned over its most chronically failing schools to education nonprofits, which rebranded them as renaissance schools. 

Today, Camden is considered one of the country’s most innovative districts. More than two-thirds of students attend public charter or renaissance schools, enrollment is climbing and the city is steadily, if incrementally, closing performance gaps among low-income kids.

To be sure, the school system has a long way to go: The majority of students still don’t read on grade level, chronic absenteeism is on the rise and budget constraints present a serious challenge. 

But shows that low-income kids in Camden boosted their proficiency on state standardized exams by 21 points between the 2010-11 and 2022-23 school years. And in doing so, they closed a longstanding performance gap with peers statewide by 42%. 

Maurquay was among those who benefited from this evolution. And in a full-circle testament to just how far the city has come, in August he stepped onto The College of New Jersey’s real-life campus as a freshman – a first-generation college student with a full scholarship. 

Camden isn’t the only low-income city where students in charter or renaissance-like schools are closing learning gaps with their more affluent peers. 

A from the Progressive Policy Institute finds that over the last decade, low-income students in large districts that aggressively expanded public school choices have started to catch up to their peers statewide — and performance levels are rising in both charter and district-led schools. In fact, in the 10 districts with the highest percentage of students enrolled in charter schools, low-income students citywide closed the gap with statewide test score averages by 25% to 40%. (The analysis doesn’t include New Orleans, where 100% of district students attend charter schools.)

“We just wanted to … see if the impact was spilling over,” says Tressa Pankovits, co-director of PPI’s Reinventing Public Schools project. “We were really surprised by the amount of gap closure between students citywide and the statewide averages. It wasn’t just single digits. It was well into double digits.” 

The analysis examined data from cities across the country where a majority of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and where at least a third of kids attend a public charter or charter-like school. The researchers used average standardized test scores from third through eighth grade. 

The researchers underscored that the one-third proportion is not a guaranteed or proven tipping point, but that in nearly every case where those schools reached or exceeded that enrollment level, academic growth rose across the city for all low-income students.

“There has been slow but steady progress in Camden,”says Giana Campbell, executive director of the Camden Education Fund. “Sure, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, but when we look at where the city was 10 years ago, we’re really, really encouraged by the progress that we’re seeing across the city.”

“We knew a time in Camden where we didn’t have this diversity of school types and progress wasn’t what it is today. The proficiency scores in Camden in 2010 were just criminal. There wasn’t much lower we could go,” she says. “And so I don’t think it’s a coincidence that being one of the most innovative school systems, with all these different school types, that we’ve been able to see the progress that we have today.”

New Jersey is home to another standout in PPI’s report: Newark, where 35% of students are enrolled in public charter schools and the performance gap closed by 45% across the same 12-year period.

Missouri boasts two school systems making similar progress. In Kansas City, where 46% of students are enrolled in public charter schools, the performance gap between low-income students and all students closed by 31% between the 2010-11 school year and 2022-23. And in St. Louis, where 39% of students are enrolled in public charter schools, the performance gap closed by 30%.

Hannah Lofthus, founder and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman School, says the report’s findings reflect what she has experienced over the last 15 years in Kansas City, which offers enrollment in neighborhood schools; charter schools; “signature” schools, which focus on college preparation; and career and technical schools. Kauffman consists of two charter middle schools and a charter high school.

“We said, ‘How can we figure out what works for kids and then replicate that,’” she explains. The daughter of two public school teachers, she says collaboration among the various types of schools in the city has been key to the big gains posted by low-income students. “We have kids coming to us in fifth grade 15% proficient in reading and math, and they leave somewhere around 70% proficient.”

Pankovits cautions that the analysis shows correlation, not causation. And while the increases demonstrate significant academic growth, proficiency is still low for the majority of students in these districts. 

But Pankovits also says the report refutes that charters drain district schools of the best students and resources, to the detriment of those left behind. Instead, she argues, the increasing enrollment in charter schools creates “a positive competitive dynamic,” and that the report’s findings should bolster policymakers’ confidence in the potential for fixing underperforming schools for all students in low-income communities. 

Effectively, a rising tide lifts all boats: When looking only at traditional district schools in Camden, for example, low-income students closed 35% of the proficiency gap during the same decade-long window, versus 42% for the district overall.

Like Camden, Indianapolis has traditional district schools, charters and so-called innovation schools that it uses to drive its academic turnaround. The report found that in the city, where 58% of students are enrolled in public charter schools or innovation schools, the performance gap between low-income students and all kids statewide closed by 23% between the 2010-11 and 2022-23 school years.

“The report confirms what we’ve seen in Indianapolis for a long time,” says Brandon Brown, CEO of the , a nonprofit that supports the city’s charter and innovation schools. “And a lot of the evidence shows that the growth of high-quality charter schools does not come at the expense of the school district. It really tends to lift many of the outcomes for schools of all types.”

“I think we’ve shown in Indianapolis that it’s hard and it’s not a straight line and we don’t always agree, but when these systems work together, the chances that kids are going to benefit will go way up,” he says. “And I think we’ve seen that here very clearly.”

The report comes as America’s schools are still trying to chart a recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, which set students back academically and decreased enrollment. A from National Alliance for Public Charter Schools finds that over the past five years, charter schools gained nearly 400,000 students, while district schools lost 1.75 million. Hispanic and Black families are increasingly choosing charters, the report shows, with Hispanic enrollment growing 18 times faster in charters than in district schools. 

In Indianapolis, enrollment is on the rise, and at the highest point in more than a decade — a fact Brown credits to the public school choices that families have. For the first time, he says, parents from adjacent school districts are opting into the city system. 

“Large urban districts across the country that are facing massive enrollment declines should look at Indianapolis and see the collaboration to create high-quality options for families, and see it as a way to mitigate negative impacts on enrollment,” Brown says. “When system leaders can work together, it tends to grow enrollment, and that stands in stark contrast to a lot of school districts across the country.”

Correction: The former Camden Prep student’s name is Maurquay Moody.

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

“Camden is home to one of the most innovative school systems in the country,” Giana Campbell, Executive Director of Camden Education Fund (CEF), said in an interview. “We are proud to serve as an example of what an equitable modern school system looks like when we come together across sectors to ensure that we have the best educators, that all of our students feel supported, and that families feel welcomed to participate in their success.”

It is worth looking back at the evolution of this South Jersey city, just across the Ben Franklin Bridge from Philadelphia, which was once the subject of acalled “Apocalypse, New Jersey: A Dispatch From America’s Most Desperate Town.” Eleven years ago the NJ State Department of Education took over the district due to student to outcomes so dismal that 23 of the Camden City School District’s 26 schools ranked in the bottom 5 percent of the state, the high school graduation rate was 49 percent, and a total of three high school students scored “college-ready” on the SAT’s. Shortly after the takeover, the State Legislature passed the , which allowed three city school boards, Camden, Trenton, and Jersey CIty, the chance to approve nonprofit charter partners to act as “turnarounds”—take over failing district schools and transform them by providing whole-child learning and wrap-around services–with the district controlling enrollment. Newark and Jersey City declined to participate. The Camden board chose three charter operators: KIPP, Mastery, and Uncommon.

During this period student learning accelerated, first under the leadership of Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard and now under his successor, Superintendent Katrina McCombs, a Camden native and long-time Camden teacher and administrator. A  from Brown University, which analyzed state takeovers of districts from 2011 through 2016 for their effects on student achievement, found that in most students didn’t improve but in Camden they did. Research by  showed by 2017 all students—traditional, charter, and renaissance— were achieving roughly 85 days more of learning in math and 30 days more in reading. And according to a 2018 study by , after the state takeover, Camden high schools saw their average high school graduation rates increase by 17 percentage points while elementary school students doubled their proficiency rates in reading and math. 

Then Covid hit. Camden’s schools closed in March 2020 and, while younger students started returning in April 2021, the district wasn’t fully open until September, eighteen months after the initial closures. Like districts all over the country that primarily serve low-income students of color, proficiency levels plummeted. The gaps that had been closing pre-pandemic widened once again. 

Yet, as CEF’s report, “Can Camden Students Continue the Comeback?,” points out, while “Camden students fell behind at a rate similar to statewide averages,” they “are now catching back up at the same rate statewide,” unlike many other urban districts.

In addition, while much of the country reports declines in enrollment, “Camden schools have seen enrollment remain steady overall,”  with a 400-student increase from last year to this year. 

Here is what has changed: While enrollment in district schools has dropped by nine percentage points in the last five years, there is a ten point increase in students enrolled in renaissance schools. (Traditional charter enrollment is steady.)  Currently renaissance schools serve four percent more English language learners and students with disabilities than district schools.

Much work remains. Citywide, the chronic absenteeism rate is 51 percent. Social-emotional well-being looms large, with parents citing it as their second biggest concern, just after teacher shortages.(A non-profit called  is using a new grant from CEF to address middle school girls’ childhood trauma.). Student learning is still depressingly low: Improvements aside, four out of five students citywide are not reading at grade-level.  

Yet the story of Camden seems to offer a holistic model built around effective options for families that other city school systems can emulate:  When leaders recognize that the student outcomes are more important than which public school a child attends, when different sectors collaborate—supported with a district-run —to bolster academic success, all students benefit.  “Our collective efforts have demonstrated and revealed that all of Camden’s children, all of them, are valued, said  said Superintendent McCombs  at the reopening of the district’s Eastside High School. Or, as Campbell of CEF remarks, “We know that our students are gifted, our staff are dedicated, and our city is focused. By working together, we can ensure that Camden continues to rise.”

This analysis originally appeared at

Rosemely Osorio is swiftly becoming the educator that, years ago, she wished for.

When, at age 9, she and her family came to Rhode Island from Guatemala, Osorio recalls struggling academically as she navigated an unfamiliar system.

“When I came here and I started at the schools, I remember, I didn’t know how to speak any English. … I didn’t have a mentor who told me, ‘Hey, it’s really important that you work extremely hard in high school so then your GPA is good.’ I didn’t know what a GPA was,” she said.

In 2014, she graduated high school, the first in her family to accomplish the feat, but college remained out of reach because of finances and her immigration status — Osorio is a DACA recipient, the Obama-era program that provides deportation relief and work permits to undocumented residents brought here as children.

Now, years later as an adult learner in College Unbound and the Equity Institute’s TA to BA program, she’s just a semester away from earning her bachelor’s degree and teaching certification, key steps toward becoming exactly the role model she yearned for as a young person. At the same time, she works as a paraprofessional in the Central Falls high school she once attended, which serves a high share of Central American immigrant students.

“They see in me someone that they can count on,” said Osorio. “They’re like, ‘Oh, she knows how to speak Spanish. She looks Hispanic. So I can actually talk to her.’”

After only two years in operation, the teacher training program that opened doors for Osorio has scaled up more than six times beyond its original capacity and is launching cohorts in a second city, with talks underway to expand to a third, leaders say.

“The program has grown pretty tremendously,” said Carlon Howard, who helped launch the TA to BA fellowship and is chief impact officer at the Equity Institute. “There’s a lot of interest in initiatives such as these given that, across our country, schools and districts are challenged to find enough educators to staff their buildings.”

The Rhode Island program, which served 13 fellows in its inaugural 2020-21 class, will train 75 paraprofessionals this year. Two new, 10-student cohorts will launch in Philadelphia, where College Unbound already operates other programs, thanks to funding from the school district. Over 40 people remain on the waiting list, said David Bromley, College Unbound’s Philadelphia coordinator. In nearby Camden, New Jersey, the college is working with the teachers union to roll out programs there, too, he added.

“Investing deeply in our staff who already work closely with our students to bring them to the next stage of their career is a shining light of positivity in the midst of a difficult few years,” Larisa Shambaugh, chief of talent for Philadelphia public schools, said in an emailed statement to ����Ӱ��.

‘Untapped talent’

Many paraprofessionals are highly skilled educators with years or even decades of classroom experience, Howard said, but still may feel like they have a “glass ceiling above their head” because they lack college degrees and financial resources.

Participants in the fellowship often study tuition-free thanks to the Equity institute’s “last dollar” scholarships covering costs not offset by federal Pell grants.

“We target folks who already work with kids … and all we’re trying to do is help them realize their greatest potential,” Howard said.

TAs are an “untapped talent” pool from which to recruit and train high-quality educators, agreed David Donaldson, managing partner for the National Center for Grown Your Own educator pipeline programs.

Students take two College Unbound courses a semester, scheduled outside of the work day, plus a lab component specifically geared to prepare them to lead a classroom. Thanks to a process at the college for measuring and awarding credits for prior learning experiences, some students are able to take an accelerated path to graduation. Osorio, for example, will finish in under two years.

“It’s been a lot of work,” she admits, cramming in classes while also working full time and taking care of family responsibilities. “But I don’t regret it.”

Addressing diversity, combatting shortages

Educators like Osorio — those who reflect their students culturally and linguistically — are in short supply in Rhode Island’s schools and nationwide. Roughly 1 in 10 teachers in the Ocean State are people of color while 4 in 10 students identify as Black, Hispanic, Indigenous or Asian. Meanwhile, educators of color and those who speak multiple languages improve outcomes for all students, but provide a particular boost to students whose identities they match, research shows.

Classroom aides, on the other hand, tend to be much more racially and linguistically diverse than teachers. The positions generally do not require a college degree and can be more accessible to people from low-income backgrounds. All her fellow teaching assistants, Osorio said, speak Spanish and the vast majority are people of color, whereas the teachers at her school are predominantly white and speak only English.

“To be honest, everything we see is all these teachers in the classrooms with a bunch of Hispanic kids, but the teacher doesn’t speak their language,” said Osorio. “That’s what my biggest motivation was to apply and getting certified was that students need teachers in the classroom that they can relate to.”

David Quiroa is joining the TA to BA fellowship this fall and works as a paraprofessional in his home community of Newport, Rhode Island.

“So many TAs who are in the [Black, Indigenous and people of color] community already have been putting in the work for several years … and they’re never given the opportunity to pursue higher education,” he said. “With TA to BA and College Unbound, it really is showing these communities, ‘Look, we are here, we are federally approved, we have all of the accreditations, we have so (many) established connections here in our community. You guys have been doing the work. We just want to give you your proper salary.’”

Meanwhile, districts across the country are facing acute staffing shortages and going to extreme lengths — including tapping college students or dangling $25,000 bonuses — to entice new hires.

In this climate, the grow-your-own approach is “getting a lot of attention now,” Donaldson said, even though turning to programs that provide a work-based pipeline to train new teachers is a longer-term solution.

His organization recently announced that seven states with existing or emerging apprenticeship programs to train educators launched an all-new National Registered Apprenticeship in Teaching Network. It comes on the heels of a June announcement from Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urging states to invest in grow-your-own programs, including those that begin in high school and with apprenticeship programs.

“Missouri, like other states, is struggling to address staffing issues created by teacher shortages. The Teacher Apprenticeship is an additional, innovative model to help address this issue,” Paul Katnik, Missouri’s assistant education commissioner, said in a release after the network was announced.

The other participating states are California, Florida, North Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming.

‘We got you’

The relationship faculty build with participants is a secret to the program’s success in Rhode Island, and soon in the new Philadelphia cohorts, fellowship leaders and students say.

Osorio’s advisor “has played a big role in the way that I have been able to develop in this program,” said the College Unbound student. In addition to checking in academically and emotionally, the faculty member who runs her teaching lab class allowed Osorio to make up credits when she fell behind after a devastating miscarriage. And when Osorio was short on cash to renew her Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status and fearing she would lose her work permit, she again asked for help.

“Don’t worry about it. We got you,” was the response from College Unbound. “And they actually sent me a check home so I could pay for that application.”

That support is by design, said Howard, who explained that the program trains its faculty to uplift participants and be there for them. Even as the fellowship scales up, he’s confident the family-like culture among cohorts will remain.

The TA to BA leader believes it’s within the program’s reach to train 200 paraprofessionals into full-time teachers in the next three to five years. If all goes according to plan, he hopes to serve 500 by 2030 and may also add a high school teaching apprenticeship component.

Quiroa, the Newport TA, is “thrilled” about the expansion, he said, because there are “absolutely” others in his field who could benefit from the opportunity. “Having this organization, this program, thrive … I think is the best thing we can do to move forward and break a lot of these inequities.”

Osorio, for her part, can visualize the impact that seeing someone like her at the helm of a classroom could have for immigrant students. Hispanic role models were vital in her professional life after graduating high school, she said, and now she can finally pass on the favor.

“I get how important mentors are so now I can be that for those students.”

Camden has long been a place of tremendous need. For decades, the city was ranked as in America, and for years was among the . A range of civic reforms, including housing rehabilitation and a larger, revitalized police force that engages with local community watch groups, have put it on a more , but daunting challenges remain. About 28.6% of Camden residents had an income, which was 68% greater than the poverty level statewide.

There are roughly 15,000 students in public schools in Camden. Academic performance has historically been catastrophically low across many measures, including test scores and dropout rates. In an effort to reverse this chronic pattern, the state intervened in the Camden school district in 2013, and it remains under state control. Reform efforts are, however, starting to make a discernible difference.

One approach to changing the patterns in Camden is to offer parents more choice in where they send their children to school. In addition to its traditional public schools, the city now has five charter networks and three networks of renaissance schools — which have charter-like autonomy but serve neighborhood catchment areas. Both charter and renaissance schools operate independently of the Camden district. In many cities, competition for students and friction among these different types of schools would be a barrier to collaboration. In Camden, however, educators are cooperating to break down institutional divisions and to specifically prioritize improving outcomes for students with disabilities. This effort is being led by CEF, a funder with a commitment to student-focused education reform in Camden. The fund is marshaling its resources to foster the sharing of ideas and promising practices and drive systemic change, through a coordinated suite of elements including:

• Program grants: CEF awarded $1.23 million in grants last year, enabling a range of district, charter and renaissance schools to develop new supports for students with disabilities. For example, KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy, a renaissance school, is using fund resources to create a robust job and skills program for high school students with disabilities, including building a model apartment where students can practice independent living skills. Camden’s Promise Charter School is using the funds to provide individualized early literacy instruction to children with disabilities. Camden City School District is using CEF money to develop a farm-to-table culinary arts program among its life skills courses at Woodrow Wilson High School. Students will gain technical and soft skills to prepare for work in the agricultural, culinary and food service industries.
  
• Accelerating Inclusion Institute: CEF created this training program for special educators from the district, charter, and renaissance sectors. In this eight-session series, The institute will lead school teams through three content arcs that build and reinforce the critical skills, beliefs and practices schools need to ensure equity and inclusion for students with disabilities.  The arcs include lesson design in inclusive settings to meet the needs of all learners, data practices that drive instructional decisionmaking and effective resource allocation to meet the needs of all learners. Led by the national Center for Learner Equity, participants meet monthly and receive a stipend. 

• Camden Teacher Pipeline: CEF established a pipeline connecting local universities with Camden schools in need of new teachers. In partnership with Rowan University, Rider University and Relay Graduate School of Education, it is designed to attract new teachers to Camden, provide them with hands-on training and align their student teaching experience with schools that anticipate hiring for the upcoming year. The program has been in place for several years and now also features a special education track, focusing on recruiting special educators from Rowan’s Inclusive Education Program.

• RISE Award for Teacher Excellence: ln 2020, CEF initiated an award program to honor Camden’s Resilient, Inspirational, Solutions-oriented Educators (RISE). It asks principals from the city’s district, charter and renaissance schools to nominate three teachers, at least one of whom must be a special education teacher. Up to six winners are chosen each year for recognition and a $5,000 prize.

These programs foster collaboration and a sort of cross-pollination of ideas and best practices to better serve families and students, including those with disabilities. Taken together, these approaches break important new ground. While political barriers and divisions among different types of schools often preclude these sorts of coordinated citywide reform efforts, the theory of change at work in Camden is replicable in communities across the country. Wherever parents have school choice options, student need is substantial and there is a local funder committed to building bridges by fostering the success of all students, this model can take root. It is crucial work in service of equity and deserves close attention and support.

Paul O’Neill is co-founder of the Center for Learner Equity.

The program, dubbed , will be available to first- and second-year students on the school’s New Brunswick campus beginning in the 2022-2023 school year. Rutgers officials expect 7,600 students — nearly 20% of enrolled undergraduates — to qualify for the program. 

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The initiative is launching the same semester as Garden State Guarantee, a college affordability program signed into law by Gov. Phil Murphy aimed at helping third- and fourth-year students from low- and middle-income households.

If students from families with an adjusted gross income of $65,000 or less take advantage of both programs, full tuition and mandatory fees would be covered for four years.

For families with incomes between $65,001 and $80,000, the cost would be a maximum of $3,000 annually. The maximum cost would rise to $5,000 annually for families making between $80,001 and $100,000.

Students would still be responsible for meal plans, housing, textbooks, transportation, and other costs.

Scarlet Guarantee is expected to cost $24 million for the first year, with the state paying $10 million. It will be what’s known as a “last dollar” program, meaning it will kick in on top of other scholarships and grants.

“The Scarlet Guarantee program will help qualified students from across New Jersey realize their hopes, dreams, and ambitions and will help Rutgers become an even richer and more diverse university,” Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway said in a statement. 

The program is part of a nationwide movement to lower the skyrocketing cost of higher education. , which tracks trends in college pricing and student aid, reports the national average tuition at a public college stood at $10,740 for the 2021-2022 academic year.

According to the , the cost of college jumped 169% from 1980 to 2019.

For the  in-state tuition at Rutgers costs $12,536, while non-New Jersey residents pay more than $29,000. Room and board cost students another $13,400, and fees tack on an average of $3,268.

Tuition for 2022-2023 has not been set. 

A 2022 study by  found New Jersey is the fifth most expensive state for in-state college tuition, behind New Hampshire, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.

Students don’t have to fill out any extra paperwork to be considered for Scarlet Guarantee. Anyone who completes the FAFSA or New Jersey Alternative Financial Aid Application for Dreamers — undocumented students protected under DACA — are automatically considered.

Students must be full-time, enrolled in at least 12 credits per semester working toward their first bachelor’s degree, and meet academic progress standards. Students in their fifth year and graduate students are not eligible.

Rutgers  and Rutgers  already have similar programs providing free tuition to some families who earn less than $65,000, and reduced tuition fees for students from households that earn less than $100,000. Other schools across the Garden State, including  and , have expanded their financial aid to help cut costs for low- and middle-income students. 

New Jersey is also home to the , which offers free tuition to 18 community colleges for undergraduates from homes with incomes of $65,000 or less.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on and .

Clarification appended

“What skills or traits do you want a leader to have?” professor K. “Yawa” Agbemabiese asked her class. When students finished with this easy question, she upped the difficulty by asking them which skills leaders use to solve problems.

Agbemabiese is a professor of global social sciences at , and the online class was an introduction to Machiavelli’s The Prince, a college-level text. But the students getting their first taste of the 16th century political treatise, were high schoolers, participants in a new program called Camden Reach. Examining the differences between leaders they like and leaders who are effective was the first step of grappling with the book’s controversial theme that leaders need a certain amount of ruthlessness.

In this pilot, the latest early college effort in New Jersey, juniors from five Camden high schools take a college class each semester, in addition to their regular coursework. The goal is to offer classes to students who might not consider college, allow them to earn free credits and, maybe most importantly, let them prove to themselves that they can handle college-level work. About 45 students choose from two classes, the one offered by Bard’s Early College Program or an entry-level psychology course taught by faculty from Camden County College.

“We’re exposing them to what a college class could look like,” said Agbemabiese. “If they make it through, it might build their confidence.”

“It sends a signal to students,” said New Jersey secretary of higher education Brian Bridges. “You know what? I can do this. College is possible, and now I have a head start.”

The relatively small Camden Reach experiment is just one part of the state’s aggressive push to boost the proportion of residents with a college degree or high-quality certification above 65 percent by 2025. Though the number has risen from 50 percent in 2017 to about 57 percent, the effort is facing strong headwinds caused by the pandemic. Last fall, college freshman enrollment nationally , according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. In New Jersey, went to college last fall than the year before. Community colleges took the biggest hit, with enrollment dropping 13 percent.

Through April 30, federal student aid applications from high school seniors were from the previous year, according to the FAFSA tracker from the National College Attainment Network. In New Jersey, filled out FAFSA this year than at the same time as last year. That’s a 4.5 percent decline.

In response, Gov. Phil Murphy made permanent a program that allows students from families with an income of $65,000 or less to attend community college for free. His current budget proposal includes an additional two free years for those students at the state’s four-year public colleges and universities. New Jersey has a long history in helping low-income and first-generation students attend college; it’s Educational Opportunity Fund, started 50 years ago, gives these students academic and financial support to attend and finish college.

The state also began a pilot with nonprofit and three small, local colleges to allow students to take free courses at their own pace and earn credit if they pass an end-of-class test. This initiative is expected to help adults who are trying to earn a degree, especially at a time of high unemployment.

“Enrollment has taken a hit during the pandemic,” said Bridges. These programs “send a clear message” there is a way for low-income students to attend college. “We think New Jersey can be a model for the rest of the country.”

It is no accident that the first point in the state’s promises early exposure to college — statistics overwhelmingly point to the success of early college high schools, which came on the scene about 20 years ago. According to the , 94 percent of early college high schoolers earn transferable college credit, and 86 percent of these students who enroll in college persist to their second year, compared with 72 percent of all college students.

A 2020 study from University of North Carolina Greensboro found early college students were than classmates who had not attended such a program. The study examined 14 years of data, comparing students who were accepted into early college through a lottery against peers who didn’t get in. The early college students were three times more likely to earn an associate’s degree, and economically disadvantaged students were 4.5 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor’s. It took early college students two years less to earn an associate’s degree and six months less for a bachelor’s.

“There’s solid evidence supporting early college high schools,” said Elisabeth Barnett, associate director of Columbia University’s National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching.

While the Camden Reach pilot includes only 45 students, the state also has other programs that offer college classes to high schoolers. Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-Tech, is a six-year program in which students graduate with both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in a high-demand field. The state has . Bard also runs a decade-old , and with Brookdale Community College.

One key factor in the success of these programs is the extra support the high schoolers get to help them step up to college-level work. “Moving the timeline of college up two years is not a breeze, regardless of how well prepared you are,” said Stephen Tremaine, vice president for early colleges at Bard.

In Camden Reach, students meet weekly with counselors from , an organization that helps underrepresented students gain access to college. Students can learn everything from study skills to how to approach professors with questions to time management.

The , one of the groups that helped coordinate this pilot, is spending $50,000 to cover Camden Reach’s costs, from tuition to books. That includes the TeenSHARP counselors and Agbemabiese’s pay. No tuition is charged to students.

Early college programs “cost less than delivering the status quo,” said Tremaine.

In south Jersey, the status quo is far below Murphy’s aim. In Camden County, just 41 percent of residents have a college degree. If the state is to meet its 65 percent goal, it will need significant improvement from south Jersey.

“We always say the best way to prepare for college is to do college,” said Tremaine.

Clarification: Camden students pay no tuition for the Camden Reach early college program.

As our public education system continues to experience unprecedented challenges related to the pandemic, the Progressive Policy Institute’s David Osborne and Tressa Pankovits thought now would be a good time to offer a how-to guide on creating innovation schools.

In this 74 Interview, Osborne acknowledges that many districts are barely managing to operate — never mind innovate — during a crisis that also involves a collapsing economy and a national reckoning on race. But the author of 2017’s sees a not-too-distant future when a vaccine is widely available, the system has begun to return to some level of normalcy and education leaders will have to consider fresh solutions to the fallout.

“At that point, we’re going to have a lot of frustrated parents who have seen up close that their kids are not getting the kind of education they need,” Osborne said. “Hopefully, district leaders will be looking for ways to accelerate progress and help their schools catch up because their kids will have lost ground and have fallen further behind grade level.”

In Osborne’s and Pankovits’s recently released , the co-authors draw lessons from the experiences of “Innovation Network Schools” in Indianapolis, “Renaissance Schools” in Camden, New Jersey and other districts. They discuss key “success factors,” lay out implementation steps, and include model state legislation to allow and encourage districts to create such schools.

The common thread for innovation school is their ability to operate independently of the central office bureaucracy.

“The data on this is really clear. If we’re just talking about public schools in urban communities, the more autonomy they’re given — as long as it goes with accountability — the more effective they are,” Osborne said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: Your research indicates that innovation schools and zones have the flexibility necessary to create and replicate an assortment of diverse learning models. Why do you think this concept is important in our current education systems? 

Osborne: It’s important that in any education system, the people who actually run a school — principals, other administrators and often teachers— are usually involved in making decisions of the school and those same people need to be able to make the key decisions. They know the kids and they know what their needs are. Taking cookie-cutter approaches that come down from the central offices just doesn’t work for all schools. So, most people assume that a principal of a public school has a lot of power. The truth is they don’t. Typically in an urban district, they can’t pick their teachers. The teachers get assigned to them by the central office. Additionally, they can’t fire anyone who’s got tenure (which happens after two or three years teaching in some districts), affect the pay scale at all, reward anyone, or even change the length of the school day or the school year. If kids are falling behind, they can’t implement Saturday morning school sessions for them, and the list goes on and on. They control typically less than 1 percent of the budget. So they really aren’t managers, they’re administrators. When you have kids in front of you who aren’t going to succeed in the “cookie-cutter school”, which is often the case in the inner-city with low-income kids, the people running the school need data and they need to do things differently. If we continue on with the centralized, hierarchical, standardized approach that most urban districts take, we’re just tying those principals’ and teachers’ hands and frankly, they can’t be as effective as they need to be. And in return, the people who suffer are the kids. So it’s really an equity issue and a justice issue.

In your guide, it’s interesting that you recommended that education leaders should encourage teacher-run schools in their innovation schools portfolio. Can you tell us a bit more about how teacher-led schools contributed to student achievement overall? 

Researcher and professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Richard Ingersoll, has done extensive research on this and basically what he finds is that the more empowered teachers are to help run the school, the more effective the school is on average. In our research, I visited several teacher-run schools, some charter and some innovation schools. One of the best teacher-run schools I’ve visited is called the Denver Green School, a public elementary school in Denver, Colorado. There are now two of them because they have replicated. The word “green” in the school’s title means it has a significant focus on environmental education. The school is run by 10 teachers who basically make up a partnership team and the other teachers are essentially employees of the partnership team, but if they want to join the partnership team they can apply. It’s pretty much organized like a law firm where you have partners who run the practice and they also pick who’s going to handle personnel, the budget, etc. At Denver Green School, the partners assign tasks to different teachers and when I was there, they had two or three administrators who taught half time and worked half time on administration stuff. I’ve seen teacher-run schools where every teacher is equal and while they choose a few administrators to do the administrative tasks, they make decisions collectively.

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There are really no traditional symbols; there are just lots of different models. There are approximately 150 teacher-run schools across the country, where half or more are charter schools and the rest are district schools.

 Amid the global pandemic, education leaders, practitioners and stakeholders are having more conversations around re-imagining education. Moving forward, do you think more districts across the country will be amenable to implementing innovation schools? 

I think so. There was certainly some momentum before the pandemic where approximately 20 urban districts around the country were either deeply into this or experimenting with it in one form or another. It takes different forms in different places, depending on the local politics and the local leadership and so on. But the pandemic made it obvious to all of us and particularly the parents, that many public schools and public school districts were not able to pivot very quickly or very effectively to remote learning. It was a huge challenge to say the least. If you have a system where teachers and administrators were accustomed to not making many decisions or not being in charge and just following orders from the central office, they’re not going to be in the habit of rethinking how they could work quickly and effectively and the system won’t have drawn the kind of talent that likes to do that. If you want entrepreneurial people running your schools, you have to give them a lot of autonomy, and if you haven’t done that in the past, you’re not going to have those people in position.

Additionally, I recently saw a survey of charter school parents which indicated that on average, charter schools have responded more rapidly and more effectively to the shift toward remote learning than district schools, and that’s certainly what we’ve seen anecdotally.

On the flip side, are you afraid the pandemic and school closures could have a huge setback? Especially considering that many districts are presumably going to be focused on just reopening and delivering the basics, not necessarily looking to innovate or try something new. 

Yes, I think at the moment since March, discussions of sort of major structural changes in school districts that could have a real impact on student learning have been paused because the pandemic has been such a huge challenge. I think they will continue to be paused until a lot of the kids have been vaccinated and we can go back to some version of normal, but at that point, we’re going to have a lot of frustrated parents who have seen up close that their kids are not getting the kind of education they need. Hopefully, district leaders will be looking for ways to accelerate progress and help their schools catch up because their kids will have lost ground and have fallen further behind grade level.

The data on this is really clear. If we’re just talking about public schools in urban communities, the more autonomy they’re given — as long as it goes with accountability — the more effective they are. When you examine the districts that have improved the fastest in the last 15 years, statistically they’re located in New Orleans, Washington D.C., Chicago and Denver—all of them have done it through different kinds of autonomous schools. In New Orleans, you have all charter schools and in Washington, D.C. charter schools that make up 47 percent of the schools, but in Chicago and Denver, a lot of them are autonomous district schools, that are often referred to as innovation schools, contract schools or some other moniker. So, it’s not like there’s a debate about the data. We know that this works better for urban kids and hopefully more of our district leaders will be looking for what works better once this COVID era is over.

Can you talk about some of the challenges associated with the innovation schools model?

I would say the biggest challenges are political. The minute you say that school leaders, whether they are principals or a group of teachers, should have the power to hire and fire, the teachers unions will oppose it because they consider that one of their jobs is to keep any members from being fired and they typically fight any effort to remove teachers who have proven to be not competent.

On top of that, in any bureaucratic system, when you say to some of the units, we’re going to give you a lot of autonomy, the rest of the system typically reacts negatively. It’s a very human reaction, “What are we? Chopped liver? Those guys are special and we’re not?” Also, the central office almost always resists this because the people who work there have been trained and have developed over many years, a view that certain decisions should be made by the central office, and not by the schools themselves. So if they’re in the purchasing department, it’s their job to buy the textbooks and choose the textbooks. If they’re in the transportation department, it’s their job to do the bus schedules, which drives the length of school day. If they’re in the professional development unit, it’s their job to figure out what the teachers need and the way to predict professional development. When you give schools autonomy, they are able to make all those decisions and that both runs up against the mentality of central offices.

It also is inconvenient for the central offices because now they have two sets of rules. You’re dealing with the traditional schools with one set of rules and then there’s a whole different set of rules with the autonomous schools. For instance, in some cases, the money for things like professional development goes to the autonomous schools and they get to decide where they spend it. Suddenly, the central office loses some of its budget and it needs to respond to these school leaders and what they think they need. In places like Denver, San Antonio and many others, it’s been a struggle because it often takes years to convert the mentality of the central office and that process is still going on in those districts and others.

You argue that states should have both an intervention law (the stick), and innovation school legislation (the carrot). When implementing innovation schools, how can education leaders get buy-in from all stakeholders within their educational communities to avoid any pushback? Where have you seen this done well? 

So let’s talk about different stakeholders and let’s start with teachers. There are a number of ways to get teachers to buy into the innovation schools model, but I think the best way is through teacher-powered schools. For example, in Springfield, Massachusetts, which has an empowerment zone of 11 schools now, each of those schools has a leadership team of five teachers, one who is elected by the principal and four who are elected by the teachers, and they work with the principal on the plan for the next year, every year. They are part of the decision-making about the future direction of the school, and that’s attractive to educators. They also like autonomy because let’s face it, most teachers know that their schools are kind of in a bureaucratic, straightjacket and they would like more autonomy.

The other thing that’s been effective is that a lot of places use innovation schools just to turn around failing schools. In Indianapolis, you can also become an innovation school by being a strong district school where the teachers want to convert to innovation status because they want that autonomy. Last I counted, there were five out of 20 or 21 innovation schools that were conversion schools and now there are 26 innovation schools. From what I’ve heard, the teachers there are the biggest cheerleaders of this concept. They’re people who have been district teachers that were a part of the unions, so they have credibility with their colleagues. Innovation schools can be used to not only convert failing schools, but also for strong schools who are just converting with the same teachers into an innovation school status.

With families, I think the lesson that everyone has learned is that if you’re going to start an innovation school or close down a district school to reopen an innovation school in that same building, in any of those cases, you have to go to the community. It’s important to talk with families, document the problems with the failing school, and introduce them to the new leaders of the new organization that’s going to run the school. It’s also important for those leaders to make a tremendous effort to reach out to the families. If they come from an organization that runs other schools, the leaders should offer to take the families to those other schools to see what they’re like. That will open a lot of parents’ eyes very quickly. If they say, “Well, I’ve seen what my kid’s school is like and this school is three times better,” that’s exciting. You can win over parents. It’s not that hard, but so often in public education, I guess because of the traditions of school systems, we don’t do that. We don’t try. We’ve had systems that just assume the parents are passive and once their kids get assigned to school, that’s it. They have to show up. We have to break that habit and become much more proactive about really selling these new schools to parents on their merits.

Those are two really key stakeholder groups and then you can talk about the business community because they have a clear financial and material interest in having a better educated workforce. They are usually pretty easy to convince, especially if you have the data about improving student performance.

How do you perceive the incoming Biden administration and its educational mindset as either hurting or helping the innovative schools movement?

I don’t think it will have a lot of impact. If the Biden administration were able to fulfill his campaign promises to dramatically increase Title I Funding for schools with lots of low- income kids, that would help a lot because money is important. I doubt they’re going to be able to because our deficits are just higher than they’ve ever been in history even. Our federal debt as a percentage of GDP is higher than it was at the end of World War II. The deficit is going to be a huge constraint on the Biden administration, regardless, and I assume the Republicans will control the Senate, which means they will have some control over the purse strings. So I’m skeptical that we will get that infusion of big new money. The Biden administration could decide to push innovation schools, we’re certainly hopeful that they’ll consider that.

Ultimately, there’s not a lot of appetite at the federal level for repeating something like Race to the Top, where they were being very proactive and trying to lead districts and states in one direction or another. I think there was such a backlash against the Common Core and evaluation of teachers, using at least 50 percent [of student] test scores [in teachers’ evaluations], both of which were part of Race to the Top, or were encouraged by that program. I think that backlash was so strong that the Biden administration will probably be fairly careful and not that active in trying to push state and local districts in any specific direction. While I would love it, I’m a little skeptical that they will encourage innovation schools. The truth is our education systems are run at the state level and the federal goal is fairly recent and fairly minor, so the battle is really at the state and local level going forward when it comes to autonomy and accountability for public schools.

Of the , two were won by candidates who support the renaissance and charter schools. The third went to a candidate endorsed by the local teachers union, which ran candidates for all three seats. All three new members were sworn in Jan. 3.

. At the time of the state intervention in 2013, the Camden City School District was suffering from more than two decades of poor results, financial mismanagement, systemic inequity and grade-fixing scandals. Even though the district spends , some 23 of the city’s 26 public schools scored in the bottom 5 percent of schools in New Jersey. Fewer than half of students were graduating from high school, and even fewer were proficient in reading and math in elementary and middle school. With half of the district’s buildings constructed before 1928, students attended crumbling schools, some of which even lacked running water.

In 2012, the legislature passed the , which allowed the Newark, Trenton and Camden districts to partner with high-performing, nonprofit charter school operators to take over failing district schools without displacing students. Once under state control, , and today almost 4,000 of about 15,000 public school students attend 11 renaissance schools, operated by , and . Another 4,350 attend chartered public schools, and 6,800 go to district-operated schools.

As with charter schools, the state per-pupil funding follows the students to the renaissance schools, and the operators have significant autonomy to choose their staffs and define their educational programs. The renaissance schools get significantly more money per pupil than charters do, but the statute requires them the buildings they inhabit.

Seven years later, the results have been impressive. Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, called them “among the most significant and inspiring in recent education history.” The high school graduation rate has increased 20 percentage points, as the graph shows.

Test scores have also shown steady increases. Looking across district and renaissance schools (but not charters), 2018-19 PARCC results show an overall gain of 14 percentage points in English language arts (ELA) proficiency and 11 percentage points in math since 2014-15. The district tripled K-8 ELA proficiency and almost quadrupled math proficiency in four years.

Results at charter public schools can be found, and compared with renaissance and district-operated schools, in a from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO). On the accompanying graphs, the state average is set at 0; normally, performance in a poor city like Camden would be far below that average. The scale on the right side of the graph represents the approximate number of days of learning students enjoy each year compared with the state average — more days of learning for positive numbers, less for negative numbers.

As CREDO’s first graph shows, all Camden students, regardless of school model, have benefited from the reforms, though the city still scored below the state average in 2017. By that year, they were achieving roughly 85 days more of learning in math and 30 days more in reading than they had two years earlier.

The second and third graphs show that while Camden’s charter students usually perform better than the state average, renaissance schools produced tremendous growth in their first two years, from well below the state average to well above. District-operated schools — here called TPS for “traditional public schools” — also improved, but did so more slowly; they remain below the state average. Test scores like this normally bounce around a bit between years, so multiyear trends are more trustworthy than one year’s data.

New Jersey also has a , which measures district performance in five areas: instruction and program, fiscal management, governance, operations and personnel. In 2017-18, the Camden district improved its performance in all areas except fiscal management, where it lost ground. Once the district provides sufficient evidence to the state that the progress in those domains can be sustained over multiple years, it will be eligible to regain local control over those functions. The district will present its 2018-19 continuum scores to the state next month, and the state will respond in the spring.

Which brings us back to the recent elections. Bryan Morton is a board member of the , which campaigned for the pro-reform candidates. He called the outcome “historic” and a “major disruption in a city where — prior to state intervention — the school board was for decades controlled by the unions.”

There will be another election next year, and another the following year. (The rotating nine-member board serves three-year terms, so there will always be a school board election “next year” in Camden.) Morton believes that the renaissance school experience has left Camden’s parents with “very specific expectations about the reforms that are benefiting our students, and that is that they won’t be disrupted.”

Superintendent Katrina McCombs seems to have no intention of going backward. She served as , who led Camden’s turnaround from 2013 to 2018. He recommended that she succeed him, in part because she had attended district schools and had spent 25 years there as an educator, including stints as a principal and district director of early childhood development.

In her 2018 strategic plan, “,” McCombs emphasized her commitment to all students in all schools, regardless of the model. In a local , she made it clear that giving parents a choice of traditional public schools, charter schools and renaissance schools is critical to what she calls “a vital balance.” She said she intends to work collaboratively to “strengthen the partnerships among the three types of schools and create citywide activities … re-creating a neighborhood-school feel even if more students are choosing not to attend their local public schools.”

David Osborne is director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project. Tressa Pankovits is associate director of PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project.