New Newsworks Column: Camden Public Schools' Turnaround And Community Engagement

It starts here:

The statistics are grim in Camden City Schools: according to just-released state data, only 21 percent of children in grades 3-8 can read, write, and do math on grade level, compared with 50 percent of children in similarly impoverished districts. Twenty percent of 11th-grade students pass the state basic skills tests in math and only one out of two students graduates from high school. 

Yet Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard, on the job just more than a year, is hopeful that the district can be transformed after "decades of dysfunction," primarily because of a new strategic plan that places great emphasis on community collaboration and engagement.

Read the rest here.