The Governor has also maintained the YouthBuild programs in many of the state’s major cities, like Newark and Camden. The programs help low-income young people ages 16 to 24 work full-time for six to 24 months toward their GEDs or high school diplomas while learning job skills by building affordable housing in their communities. He’s maintained Municipal Safe Streets Initiatives, a comprehensive approach to dealing with gangs, youth violence and illegal guns, by improving the supports and services that keep children from becoming delinquent, targeting law enforcement’s focus on gang and street-level violence, and working to keep those released from prison from falling back into a life of crime.

Christie has also pushed a few pivotal crime reforms that some say may have a positive impact on recidivism. Last July, the state unrolled mandatory drug court in three counties, wherein drug-addicted offenders were not just advised but required to enroll in drug treatment rather than serve a sentence in jail. Until then, non-violent offenders could volunteer for the therapeutic programs. Now, judges can sentence certain offenders to drug court on a mandatory basis, whether they are willing to face their addiction or not. The program is now up and running in nine counties and beginning in July, will be operating in three more.

“Mandatory drug court has the potential to really dramatically improve the quality of life in cities, by getting addicted offenders into program,” Stout says. “We’re just beginning to roll it out, county by county, but I think it will be a very substantive change.”

The Governor also signed legislation requiring companies to wait until they have interviewed job applicants before asking if they have ever been convicted of a crime. The same month, he signed legislation reforming the bail system so that poor defendants charged with low-level offenses aren’t languishing in prison simply because they can’t post bail. A recent report by the Drug Policy Alliance found that as many as 40 percent of those awaiting trial are held because they cannot afford bail. The result was that defendants, many of whom are minority, wait for trial in jail for more than a year on what are sometimes petty charges, putting a burden on their families because they can’t work and costing taxpayers money.

But criminal justice experts warn that while bail reform and drug court help, community policing can have an even bigger impact.

It doesn’t make sense to “spend upwards of $40,000 incarcerating drug offenders while we allow our urban police departments to shrink,” says Stout.

Christie’s Record on Schools

Few of Christie’s actions as governor have been more controversial than his approach to urban education.

At the heart of the approach is Christie’s belief that urban schools need a vast remaking after decades of dysfunction, despite 40 years of court orders demanding expensive reforms and state takeovers under prior administrations that brought only scattered improvements.

Today, the school districts in Paterson, Newark, Camden and part of Jersey City are under state control. Christie hasn’t been afraid to use his authority, appointing new superintendents to Newark and Camden schools and keeping an iron watch over Paterson and Jersey City.

Paul Tractenberg, a Rutgers Law School professor and founding director of the Newark-based Education Law Center says the Governor has imposed a set of reforms that have brought more charter schools and fewer resources for the district schools.

“What I think is happening is that these racially, ethnically and socioeconomically isolated urban districts are being used as laboratories to experiment with education reform approaches that have little or no evidence of success,” Tractenberg says. “It’s kind of a win-win for Christie, because he advances his ideological agenda in a way that enhances his national and presidential aspirations.”

Christie visits a Camden elementary school. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

The fight over the state’s control has been a fierce one under Christie, with parent and community groups in Newark, where there are now more than 18 charter schools, filing a lawsuit against the state in 2012. They ultimately lost in state appellate court, but there was an irony to the state’s defense that intervention was needed when it was the state’s oversight that arguably contributed to the district’s problems.

“They’re blaming the locals for having terrible schools when in fact the locals have not had control over the schools for years,” Tractenberg says.

The charter school battles have not just been in the cities, either. Christie initially tried to expand the schools across the state, approving more than 20 new ones in his first year in office. Ultimately, the pushback came from the suburbs, where families maintained their district schools were already strong.

“The suburbs understood very quickly that if you have charter schools, you’re going to hurt the public schools system, and they just revolted,” says Julia Sass Rubin, a Rutgers professor and leader of Save Our Schools NJ, a pro-public schools organization. “The cities are not powerful enough to control their own fate.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie addresses students, teachers and parents at Mendham Township Middle School. The suburban public school was designated a 2014 School of Excellence by the U.S. Department of Education. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

But pushing a charter school agenda is not the only education battle under Christie, critics say. Since elected, the Governor has also underfunded state school coffers and in turn, local districts by about $6 billion, despite state law requiring him to put up more cash. In 2008, the New Jersey Legislature enacted a statewide school funding formula, the School Funding Reform Act, which calculated the amount of money per pupil that was needed to support the core curriculum program for every student, regardless of need. State officials then determine how much money the district can pony up itself, and the state must come up with the rest.

While he says the state can’t afford the full funding of the formula, Christie still maintains that overall state aid to education now is now the highest in New Jersey history – an accurate claim. But it is hardly consistent across the state, and three quarters of districts are receiving less than they did six years ago. Most are still recovering from deep cuts in the first year of Christie’s tenure, when he reduced aid by $1 billion upon the loss of federal stimulus funds.

Between fiscal 2010 and 2011, for instance, funding in Atlantic City fell from $21 million to $14 million. In Camden, it dropped from $282 million to $267 million. In Paterson, it went from $389 million to $366 million. In Elizabeth, from $288 million to $271 million. In Jersey City, it went from $418 million to $391 million, and in Newark, $715 million to $673 million. He wound up significantly restoring the aid to urban schools the following year, by more than $500 million, but only under order of the state Supreme Court, and little new aid has flowed to them since.

“He’s been able to use the economic crisis as an excuse not to fund schools,” says Tractenberg, of Education Law Center. “And we’ve been back in court multiple times over the issue of whether the economic crisis justified the state’s failure to fully fund its own education formula.”

Funding cuts have had a devastating impact on urban districts around the state, says David Sciarra, the current director of the Education Law Center. Districts that made substantial progress prior to Christie coming in are now in a holding pattern, he says.

“In 2011, the court ordered that money be restored, but only for the 31 Abbott districts. But for districts like Bayonne, Rahway, Carteret and Pennsauken, these urban communities did not get their cuts restored, and they’ve essentially been flat funded since Christie took office,” Sciarra says.

Sciarra had one word for the Governor’s urban educational policy: “disinvestment.”

“He has done everything within his power to make sure that not another nickel went to any of these schools. And I’m not talking about Newark or Camden. I’m talking about the 80, 90, 100 urban communities across the state that no one talks about,” Sciarra says. “The challenge facing the next governor and legislature is how to get the formula back on track and start chipping away on this big IOU Gov. Christie has caused.”

In places like Newark, residents have taken to the streets in protest. Mayor Ras Baraka, a former city council member and principal of Newark’s Central High School, was swept into office this past May largely by campaigning against state-appointed Superintendent Cami Anderson and her controversial “One Newark” school reorganization plan — which calls for a district-wide enrollment system that permits parents to choose their schools but has also seen the relocation and consolidation of one-quarter of the city’s schools, including some being transferred to charter operators.

In a letter to legislators and the media released last fall, Anderson defended her record, saying Newark Public Schools were chronically underperforming, families were leaving the system for charter schools, facilities were crumbling, and the district’s deficit was mushrooming as a result of charter growth and antiquated labor practices. In her three-and-a-half-year tenure, the district has experienced significant improvements in graduation rates and ACT scores, and has shown early signs of improvement in the lowest performing schools, she wrote.

Anderson, who declined to be interviewed for this article, wrote that the number of eligible families enrolling in pre-K has risen from 70 percent to 90 percent. While state assessments have gotten harder, third-grade reading proficiency increased by nearly 25 percent, from 38.7 percent in 2010 to 47.5 percent in 2013 (an increase of more than 350 students), according to the latest figures available. And the graduation rate has increased by 10 percent, from 55 percent in 2010 to 68 percent in 2013. Moreover, the percentage of students passing the graduation test has increased by 11 percent, and 500 fewer students have dropped out, she wrote.

On the educator front, the district replaced at least 50 percent of its principals, and negotiated a historic contract with teachers that more closely tied their pay to performance, including merit bonuses to the highest performing and those working in the toughest schools. Her office filed over 100 tenure charges — compared to 20 filed in the previous 10 years — and paid $2.8 million to its highest performers.

The strategy is working,” Anderson wrote. “From 2013-14 to 2014-15, the district retained about 95 percent of our good teachers while nearly 40 percent of our ineffective teachers left.”

Chris Cerf, Christie’s former education commissioner and arguably the chief architect of his reform approach, says great things are happening in Newark, but people don’t see it because the politics of education are so interest-group driven, they often ignore the objective facts. In 2009, 54.7 percent of students had a “proficient or advanced” test score in language arts. In 2014, that figure was nearly 80 percent. In mathematics, the number rose from 42.6 percent in 2009 to 53 percent in 2014.

“There’s been a level of lying and propaganda that has been fed into the communications stream from the union that are like nothing I’ve seen before, and I was deputy chancellor in New York City, and I’ve seen a lot,” Cerf says.

He points to a 2012 study by CREDO, an independent research group out of Stanford University, that found that charter students in New Jersey, on average, gain an additional two months of learning in reading over their public school counterparts. In math, the advantage for charter students is about three months of additional learning in one school year. In Newark, in particular, charter students gained an additional seven and a half months in reading and nine months in math, the study found.

And while Newark gets the attention — and the open protests — a more peaceful story at least is playing out for Christie in Camden, where in 2013 he announced the takeover of the district and installed Paymon Rouhanifard as its superintendent.

“One of the most important things Governor Christie did in the realm of urban education was to take over the Camden school system, which by any moral measure was catastrophically failing kids. It was mind-boggling,” Cerf says.

When the state took over Camden’s school system, it had one of the highest per student costs in New Jersey — Camden paid about $28,000 a year per student while nearby Cherry Hill paid about $15,000 — and yet had some of the lowest test scores and a $75 million deficit on a $393 million budget.

With no direct experience running a school system, the 33-year-old Rouhanifard started by going on a 100-day listening tour and building a five-part strategic plan. The plan includes improving safety, upgrading facilities, improving the quality of instruction as well as student service, becoming more family-friendly, and streamlining the bureaucracy of the central office.

“Our aim is to have a system of great schools and hold ourselves accountable through progress reports every three months,” Rouhanifard says. “We researched other districts and saw that most plans are seven to eight years and go beyond that superintendent’s [tenure]. We wanted our plan to be immediate and tangible and one the community could hold us accountable to.”

While it’s still early days, there are small signs of progress in Camden. There’s a new initiative called safe corridors, where there isn’t just a police presence in the school in the mornings and evenings but parents and community leaders help patrol the hallways. Police also patrol the routes children walk to school. There’s also been a 16 percent increase in pre-K enrollment.

“We went door to door, handing out fliers, going to bodegas. A lot of families weren’t aware that there is pre-K for three- and four-year-olds, for free,” Rouhanifard says.

But the state takeover isn’t without fallout; some parents and activists see it as an attempt to privatize or at least downsize the Camden school system, and some of their fears were confirmed last May, when deep budget cuts resulted in the layoffs of 206 teachers, 35 guidance counselors, nurses and other school employees, and 94 central administration employees. In late July and August, an additional 100 teachers resigned, leaving a district that already suffered from a high teacher absentee rate down 88 teachers in the first few weeks of school. One mother said her son had substitute teachers the first several weeks of school. One day, they didn’t even have a substitute teacher for his class so a school security guard filled in.

Rouhanifard acknowledges the challenges he faces in Camden are difficult to find in even the towns just next door.

“They had a teacher who literally didn’t show up this year, and we’re trying to track her down,” Rouhanifard says. “You just don’t see those type of situations in places like Cherry Hill.”

This article was produced in collaboration with NJ Spotlight.