CAMDEN, N.J.—Five years ago, a stranger arrived in one of America’s most benighted cities and made a humble promise that sounded radical.

Paymon Rouhanifard, then 32 years old, told parents here he believed he could make Camden’s public schools better places for their children to learn.


It would have been hard to make them worse: All but three of Camden’s schools were considered among the worst in New Jersey when Rouhanifard became the city’s school superintendent in 2013. That year, only three graduating seniors were considered college-ready.

Camden’s parents, accustomed to disappointment and disenfranchisement, were suspicious. Rouhanifard had just two years of classroom teaching experience and had never set foot in Camden before his appointment. He came with a state takeover of the city’s public schools, another outsider in a city that had lost control of its most essential services over the preceding half-century. And he would be the city’s 12th superintendent in 20 years, after several of his predecessors were forced to resign over financial scandals or grade-fixing. There was little reason to believe that the new boss would be different.

But Rouhanifard, who left his post last week, has made good on his promise.

The district’s graduation rate is up 17 percent, and the dropout rate has been cut in half, to 11 percent. Suspensions are down by more than 50 percent. State test scores, while still quite low, are rising steadily. Rouhanifard has not fixed Camden’s schools; the system still has gaping weak spots and years to go until it is fully functional. But the downward trajectory of 40 schools once considered irredeemable has reversed during his tenure, and that’s a big deal.

So is the fact that Rouhanifard is one the few school superintendents in the country who is ending his tenure with more allies than when he began.

For the past decade, in cities from Washington, D.C., to Newark to Chicago, high-profile superintendents have resigned under duress or watched their careers stall after finding themselves on the wrong side of the teachers union, the parents or the school board.

But where these school chiefs tended to shun politics and take an all-or-nothing approach toward major aspects of education reform—the expansion and then shrinking of charter school sectors, the addition and then subtraction of funding for social services in schools, and the advance and then retreat from standardized testing—Rouhanifard tested a different strategy. He took note of political pendulum swings and avoided the extremes of zigzagging educational trends. He became a student of what failed in other school systems, and plucked the best ideas from competing education playbooks. He didn’t ignore parents or demean public schools. He didn’t go to war against anyone with the power to derail his work. And he deftly played the political game that Camden’s distinctive local politics required.

In practice, that meant closing some long-suffering public schools only after months, and sometimes years, of warnings. He championed new charter schools, but only ones that have to play by the same rules as district schools. He added social services to schools in desperate need of them, but insisted that services alone would not boost schools academically. And he groomed a native Camdenite as his successor, rather than searching for a young promising reformer in his own image from outside the city.

The national education reform sector—smarting from their losses in this year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in California, 2016’s pro-charter ballot initiative defeat in Massachusetts and the dramatic rollback of reform policy in New York City—has taken notice. Though Rouhanifard is leaving Camden, his rare middle-of-the-road approach could model a new, and savvier, path forward for education reform. As Derrell Bradford, vice president of the national pro-charter organization 50CAN, told me, “Education reform people tend to manufacture messiahs. Messianic bents are not real or sustainable.”

Camden didn’t need a messiah. It needed a pragmatist.



***

When Rouhanifard was a toddler, his parents came home to find their house in Shiraz in southern Iran ransacked and empty. They’d been targeted by the new Islamic regime for practicing the Baha’i faith. Facing torture and execution in their home country, the Rouhanifards fled by truck to a refugee camp in Pakistan before moving to a small town outside of Nashville, where Rouhanifard’s father, who had been an engineer in Iran, pumped gas.

It’s a story Rouhanifard often recounts to Camden’s parents, who are raising their children in some of the most adverse conditions in this country. His past, he told me, helped convince residents here he wasn’t just “a random suit from New York.”

As Rouhanifard and I walked through the quiet streets near the school district’s headquarters in a relatively stable part of the city that resembles a run-down slice of suburbia, it was clear how much of the city he’d won over. Every block or two, Rouhanifard stopped to shake someone’s hand or wave hello from across the street. Tall and trim, with close-cropped dark hair and ears that stick out at nearly perfect 45 degree angles, he rarely wears a jacket and tie together and refers to people as “good dudes” and “buddies.” Parents walking on Camden’s narrow sidewalks, students passing between classes and security guards stationed at the entrances to schools were invariably pleased to see him.

But in the summer of 2013, Rouhanifard was still an outsider—coming off a stint as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, and high-level positions in New York City and Newark’s occasionally messy reform efforts. That year, New Jersey’s then-governor, Chris Christie, was in the market for someone to lead Camden’s schools after a state takeover of the system. In Rouhanifard, working at the time as a deputy superintendent 90 miles north in Newark, Christie found someone who was eager to take on a job that was known for spitting out its occupants—and someone who was willing to operate within the political conditions created for him.

That required, first and foremost, an alliance with George Norcross III, the insurance executive who oversees South Jersey from his perch as the region’s unelected Democratic Party boss. Norcross has spent the past several years trying to keep Camden from descending into catastrophe—and he personally ensures success or failure for everyone else trying to reform the city.

Rouhanifard knew that he needed to be on Norcross’ good side to get anything done. Indeed, after Rouhanifard was appointed, Norcross knocked down political roadblocks that might have made the new superintendent’s job more challenging. He brokered peace with the powerful state teachers union, the New Jersey Education Association, which Rouhanifard then strengthened by reversing some teacher firing decisions and, with Norcross’ input, declining to go after a much-debated law that requires districts to lay off teachers according to reverse seniority. Norcross saw to it that every lever of Camden’s local politics, from City Hall on down, was situated to support the new superintendent.

The compulsory alliance offered a lesson in pragmatism. Mainstream reform philosophy, as personified by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, holds that government is a hindrance, and almost never an asset, when it comes to schools. “I was more or less trained to believe that local politics is this odious scene that one should stay away from,” Rouhanifard said. But this time, it worked to his benefit. And while the alliance wasn’t always popular among Rouhanifard’s staffers, some of whom said Norcross was overly involved, Rouhanifard told me the party boss never asked him to hire a teacher or a vendor against his will. He said their relationship was clear-cut: “I felt it was critical to keep George in the loop.”

Open lines of communication proved especially valuable as Rouhanifard set out to implement a piece of Norcross-led legislation that became the centerpiece of the superintendent’s reform efforts.

In 2012, Norcross, his brother, state Senator Donald Norcross, and Christie leveraged their combined influence to ensure that a bill called the Urban Hope Act passed the New Jersey Legislature. Embedded in that law was a radical experiment, known as Renaissance, to determine whether publicly funded, privately run charter schools can take on the formidable task of actually acting like public schools.

Few districts in the country had tried anything like it before.



***

On a sunny Monday afternoon in March, Rouhanifard parked his bright blue Jeep outside Camden Prep, a Renaissance school that sits in a part of town untouched by the slow creep of gentrification surrounding the city’s waterfront. The school is ringed by a semicircle of squat townhouses, many of them boarded up, some with awnings collapsing. That day, the street was silent and empty, save for two men sitting on a stoop.

Inside the building, Rouhanifard stood in a hallway watching a young girl walk along a piece of blue tape on the ground as if it were a tightrope. The tape was there to mark which part of the hall the school’s students, clad in matching forest green polo shirts, should follow as they shuttle between classes.

“What happens if she steps off that line?” Rouhanifard asked an administrator for Uncommon Schools, the charter school network that operates Camden Prep. “You guys expel her?”

It was a cutting joke, but the whole school was in on the punchline. Camden Prep and the city’s 10 other Renaissance schools are among the only charters in the country that accept students via geographical zone rather than random lottery—which means they can’t act like traditional charter schools.

Camden Prep can’t use suspensions and expulsions as a tool to send troublesome kids back to their neighborhood school in pursuit of higher test scores, because Camden Prep is that neighborhood school. Unlike traditional charters, Renaissance schools also can’t charge uniform fees, must fill empty seats in every grade throughout the school and must foot the bill when a student with disabilities needs a private school placement because the Renaissance school can’t accommodate them—all rules mandated by to the Urban Hope Act. As a result, Camden Prep and other renaissance schools have higher special education rates than Camden’s district schools. In Camden Prep’s so-called Penn State classroom, 12 students with special needs get individual help and attention from a teacher and a paraprofessional.

Though Renaissance schools present some pedagogical challenges that traditional charters don’t, they come with a built-in perk: They serve as a foil to the caricature of the no-excuses charter school, with their draconian discipline policies and barking teachers. Chicago’s Noble Charters, for example, made news for not allowing female students to use the bathroom during their menstrual cycles. A video of a teacher at New York’s Success Academy berating a young child for not understanding a math problem went viral and has become the enduring symbol of the charter network. Charters with strict discipline are falling out of fashion with the progressive wing of the education reform movement, which has been eager to distinguish itself from DeVos’ politically toxic genre of charter support.

For his part, Rouhanifard tells his fellow reformers that charters need to evolve in order to survive, and Renaissance schools symbolize the direction he thinks the sector should move in—one in which equity for vulnerable students and academic excellence are not in conflict.

So far, the experiment seems to be working. Camden’s Renaissance schools are driving the district’s overall gains: 23 percent of Renaissance students were considered proficient in English according to state test scores, compared to 12 percent in district schools. Three years ago, 3 percent of public school students passed state English exams; today, at Camden Prep, 35 percent of students are passing.

Still, Rouhanifard has cautioned that Renaissance schools are not a “panacea” for the system’s many ills, which he identified as “institutional racism which begat poverty.” Instead, he said, “it’s the most we can do in the least amount of time possible.”



***

The Renaissance school model may also collapse the great chicken-and-egg debate of national education reform: Should cities focus on fixing schools before fixing poverty, or vice versa?

That question is endlessly litigated by leaders of warring education factions across the country, each side armed with a fiefdom to proves its position. Teachers’ union brass and defenders of traditional public schools argue that poor students’ basic needs have to be met before their test scores can rise. They often lead pilgrimages to Cincinnati’s community schools, which have services like mental health clinics and food pantries.

In the other corner are the reformers who cringe at the idea that schools in which only tiny percentages of students can read or do math at grade level should be worrying about things like dental clinics. They argue that a truly excellent school can triumph over poverty—and they hold rising test scores and graduation rates in New Orleans and other mostly charter school districts as proof.

Here in Camden, though, the schools need a bit of both approaches.

In a gleaming new Renaissance school, KIPP Cooper Norcross, Rouhanifard was sitting in an immaculate classroom with the school’s principal, Drew Martin, doing back-of-the-envelope calculations to see how the school could afford an army of new counselors and therapists.

In a single recent week, the school staff said, a kindergarten girl had shared a specific plan to kill herself, and one of the school’s brightest boys, a fifth-grader, had fondled a female classmate shortly after his father was arrested for pedophilia.

Martin taught in and ran charter schools in the South Bronx and Newark’s poorest wards for a decade, and thought he knew his way around troubled school districts. Then, when he moved to Camden, he ran into problems that neither a great teacher nor a thorough curriculum could solve. In Newark, over 90 percent of students in Martin’s school had qualified for free or reduced price lunch, the federal proxy for poverty. When KIPP Cooper Norcross opened in 2014, every single student was eligible for free—not reduced—lunch.

“I just didn’t know that cities like this existed in the United States of America,” he said.

When Martin and his team moved into KIPP Cooper Norcross after a $60 million renovation facilitated by a state law that incentivizes Renaissance school growth with facilities funds, he soon realized the building, modeled after KIPP schools in Newark, wasn’t built to serve the kids who were showing up.

Soon, with Rouhanifard’s backing, Martin started “moving around walls” to create smaller special education classrooms, a new mental health clinic and rooms for therapy to accompany the highly structured academic environment the charter network is known for. And he wants even more: For the students who are constantly jolted by crises, the principal wants therapists who will accompany children from class to class, and even to their homes. It would cost $1 million to staff therapists in each of KIPP’s five Camden Renaissance schools, and that would still only reach 40 kids.

That’s a relatively small ask for a school in a major national charter network, but the billionaire financiers who have made expanding charters their communal legacy project have not yet begun to dole out millions for expensive social services that might not show results for many years. Social service work also relies on government agencies, which some libertarian-minded funders tend to find displeasing.

“Rich people support one-time stuff,” Rouhanifard said, pausing to look at the numbers. “People don’t understand the long game.”

Rouhanifard considers KIPP’s blend of social services and high academic expectations a prime example of what Renaissance schools can offer and a crucial piece of evidence that neither side of the education reform spectrum has it all figured out.

John White, the superintendent of Louisiana’s schools, appreciates his friend’s candor about the limits of both district and charter schools.

“There’s a hyper-reactive ideology in the traditional camp and a hyper-dogmatic ideology in the reformer camp,” White said. “Neither reformers nor traditionalists should claim there are no costs to the things they support, and Paymon is willing to talk about opportunities and costs in unvarnished terms.”

***

Renaissance’s successes have not altered the brutal fact that change is coming much more slowly to the city’s traditional public schools.

Rouhanifard said he learned quickly that Camdenites see their neighborhood schools as anchors in a city beset by chaos. So he made it clear to families, over and over, that he wanted “fewer comma better” traditional public schools. “That was a really hard thing to say out loud,” he told me.

It’s also been hard for the city to hear. During his tenure, Rouhanifard oversaw the closure of eight of the city’s public schools, seven of which were turned into Renaissance schools; the eighth was merged with a magnet school.

The first round of closures in particular invited furious pushback.

At a 2015 parent meeting about the closure of McGraw Elementary School, which was taken over by the Renaissance school provider Mastery Charter Schools, parents took turns screaming at Rouhanifard, who stood with his hands by his sides. “Don’t look for me to be your friend, we’re at war!” one yelled. “Why come here and discombobulate our home?” shouted another. At similarly raucous monthly school board meetings, Rouhanifard typically betrayed frustration with only a high-speed fluttering of his eyelashes and with his occasional insistence that everyone “play with the same facts,” as he said at one recent meeting.

But in a city where disenfranchisement is the norm, that can be difficult, which explains the prevalence of conspiracy theories here. One activist told me that Rouhanifard had personally engineered the bursting of pipes in century-old school buildings this winter as part of a grand scheme to destroy the city’s traditional public schools.

Rouhanifard insists he is a champion of the city’s traditional public schools, and said every closure decision represented a last-resort option. In fact, he said, his thinking about how to close struggling schools has “evolved” since his time running the New York City Department of Education’s office of portfolio management, which was responsible for closing district schools and replacing them with charters.

When he arrived in Camden and saw its history of a revolving door of school superintendents, decrepit school buildings, entrenched poverty and a dysfunctional school district office, Rouhanifard decided it wouldn’t have been fair to expect major test score gains in a year or two. Worshipping the golden calf of standardized test scores would have, in Rouhanifard’s view, “presumed easy solutions” and “encouraged perverse incentives.”

And so, in Camden, Rouhanifard embraced the idea that district schools need time to improve—an opinion not shared by some of education reform’s most devoted acolytes, who have often repeated the mantra that kids can’t wait years for their schools to get better.

Even when test scores began to inch up in district and Renaissance schools, Rouhanifard held a somber news conference to declare the work was just beginning. “Today is not a celebration, but a public accounting,” he said. “There are no balloons, or a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner.” He also rolls his eyes at the notion that test scores should dictate how much public money poor school districts should get. Students in Camden’s traditional public schools are some of the best-funded in the country, at about $25,000 per head a year. It still may not be enough. “We don’t know how much right now it costs to educate a student in poverty living in Camden,” Rouhanifard said.

Still, no school leader in America has cracked the code of how to improve long-suffering, underperforming public schools without closing them or having a charter school take them over. Rouhanifard doesn’t have the solution, but he has an idea, one that was on display in Woodrow Wilson High School, a big, hulking public high school here, in March.



***

“Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, to Wilson!” Larry James, the school’s brand-new principal shouted as he sashayed through its hallways, his voice echoing off the walls. Wilson is in Stockton, a mostly Hispanic part of the city, and James, who is black, wears an orange name tag advertising his fluency in Spanish.

The school is plagued by gang problems and violence; a student recently threatened to kill a classmate and a teacher, then ran out of the school, where he picked up a knife from the bushes outside before he was stopped.

But there are also signs of hope: The graduation rate rose 20 percent over the past five years, and suspensions have fallen by nearly 90 percent over the last few years. Chronic absenteeism, which can afflict large high schools, is dropping too.

James, who took over Wilson last year, believes he can do even better. He led us to a stairwell landing he calls his “lookout spot.” In the mornings, before first period, he peers down from the landing to see which students are hanging out in the abandoned home across the street. Once he determines who’s out there, he skips across the street and ushers them back into the building. “I call the children here diamonds in the rough,” James told me over the gospel music playing in his mood-lit office.

Rouhanifard hopes James’ competence, enthusiasm and hands-on approach will breathe new life into a school that has not done right by kids for years—and other schools like it. Wilson’s former principal operated at a comfortable distance from the students in the building, Rouhanifard said, and kids were either bored in class or took advantage of the fact that no one was watching them.

Three years ago, Rouhanifard made a similar leadership change at Brimm Medical Arts, a high-performing district high school housed in a squat old Bible factory in Whitman Park. When the new principal, Hye-Won Gehring, realized some of her recently graduated seniors were dropping out of college during their freshman years, she brought in a personalized learning program aimed at developing time management skills and fostering independence. After Rouhanifard spent an hour quizzing groups of Brimm students about their workloads, the books they were reading and their college scholarship applications, he was optimistic that the school was doing a better job of getting its kids ready for college than it had when he first arrived.

To bolster the new leaders like James and Gehring, Rouhanifard created new support structures using ideas borrowed from the charter sector: Traditional public schools now have operations managers, deans of culture, and climate, and family coordinators. He has enrolled 25 principals and assistant principals in a leadership program run by the education graduate school Relay, a prominent destination for charter teachers and principals to brush up on skills.

Rouhanifard also sought to shrink central office bloat that can make educators’ lives frustrating, another favored tactic of more mainstream reformers: There were 380 central administrators when Rouhanifard started; there are now 183.

There’s promise in the idea that Camden’s district schools can improve with the help of reform-minded leaders and renewed efficiency in the central office, just as there is in the notion that children in the city’s Renaissance schools are benefitting from district-like equity. But Rouhanifard has made it clear that Camden’s turnaround can’t be declared a success until its district schools are as functional as its Renaissance and charter schools.

Now, he is handing that task to someone who knows the city’s district schools better than he does: Katrina McCombs, a daughter of Camden with 25 years of experience in the school district, will take over as superintendent this fall. (Rouhanifard and his family are moving to Boston, where his wife, a scientist, got a new job, and where he plans to work on a fellowship. He said he doesn’t want to be a school superintendent again “indefinitely, maybe permanently.”)

Sitting in a narrow office in the old school building that now serves as the district’s headquarters, McCombs told me her plan to boost the city’s district schools requires consistency, which may in turn require one final upheaval: the return to local control. Rouhanifard said he believes the district will be stable enough to let residents run their schools again within the next year.

When parents feel more ownership over their schools, McCombs hopes they’ll believe her when she tells them: “We’re not going to leave you behind. We can raise our children here, we don’t have to flee.”



***

In this city of 74,000 people, it’s not unusual to walk or drive for blocks without seeing another person. Intersections are marked by empty lots and patchy sections of grass. When you look up, you mostly see telephone lines and sky.

That’s why it was startling when, as Rouhanifard walked down Broadway, the driver of a garbage truck rumbling by loudly honked his horn. Grinning, the driver turned and waved eagerly at Rouhanifard, who waved back.

Rouhanifard is very good at listening to the people he serves, a skill that education reformers who have experienced backlash to their plans in cities across the country are now realizing they might have overlooked. He deployed his patience and charm to turn many skeptical Camdenites into allies, or at least into non-enemies. The protests that marked Rouhanifard’s first two years in office have quieted down considerably; his final board meeting in May was attended by only a handful of people, and was one of the shortest of his tenure.

Sitting in a corner in Camden’s only Starbucks, Rouhanifard was interrupted by Samir Nichols, a lanky 22-year-old graduate of Camden schools who wanted to catch Rouhanifard up on a new arts organization he’d created. Four years ago, a few months into Rouhanifard’s tenure, Nichols had organized a citywide student walkout to protest Rouhanifard’s firing of 200 teachers, who were cut amid a $75 million budget shortfall. The young activist had stood outside the school district’s central office and led a chant of “no more politicians” into a bullhorn. When Rouhanifard emerged to try to calm the crowd, everyone booed.

Nichols later told me that he and Rouhanifard have since made peace. “You go through stuff, but the reality is at some point we’re still family, that’s how me and Paymon are,” he said.

A few hours after Rouhanifard ran into Nichols, the superintendent was sitting on a top floor of Camden’s City Hall, an Art Deco building surrounded by heroin addicts bumming cigarettes, in a drab carpeted office suite decorated with Philadelphia Eagles jerseys. Rouhanifard was telling Camden’s mayor, Frank Moran, about his son’s recent 4th birthday party. All the toddlers were delighted when Scott Thomson, Camden’s police chief, brought over the department’s police dog.

Rouhanifard and Moran shared notes on how they might drum up more school funding by appealing to Gov. Phil Murphy. “I will do whatever I can in terms of picking up the phone,” Moran said, before shaking Rouhanifard’s hand. Moran, once skeptical of Rouhanifard, is now a partner.

And Rouhanifard enlisted the help of students in his quest to change their schools.

Last year, after some negotiating with his wife, Rouhanifard started coaching the Camden High School basketball team, a six-day-a-week side gig that required two-hour evening practices along with games. Ethan Tarte, one of the team’s best players, said the team was used to having several coaches throughout the year who just “popped their heads in,” and assumed Rouhanifard would be more of the same. He was startled when Rouhanifard, an avid basketball fan, showed up at practice having already calculated Tarte’s 3-point shot percentage and started sending him YouTube clips of Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry’s jump shot, so they could deconstruct how Tarte’s could improve. Now, Rouhanifard and Tarte talk every day, via text message, and Tarte was a guest at Jonah’s birthday party.

Rouhanifard also wrote a weekly column in the local paper, the Anointed News Journal, turned down almost all national press inquiries until his final months on the job, and assiduously avoided the national education conference circuit.

By staying close to home, Rouhanifard discovered that Camden’s unique needs demanded an unusual hybrid of solutions.

And by acting as much a politician as an educator during his five years here, a quorum of parents, advocates and actual elected officials are invested in maintaining his agenda even after he leaves.

On a meandering walk through the city on a bright morning in May, I asked Rouhanifard what he makes of the idea, espoused by DeVos and embraced by some reform leaders, that education chiefs shouldn’t try to win “popularity contests,” and instead try to trample over politics and bureaucracy to defeat the educational status quo.

Rouhanifard paused.

“Actually, that’s how democracy works,” he said. “You need followers.”