I am interested in learning more about what happened yesterday in Camden, New Jersey. The school board there turned down four charters. Is this the beginning of public awareness, or local politics?
Here is the news from a reader:
Please check out what happened in Camden NJ yesterday. The Mayoral appointed BOE turned down all proposals for Renaissance schools that were being proposed under the Urban Hope Act, a bill aimed at privatizing schools in urban areas in New Jersey, but requires BOE approval to work. The Camden BOE even voted down the KIPP proposal put forth by the godfather of Camden George Norcross – who sees himself as the city’s savior. The Board had the wisdom and courage to vote down these proposals because of the amazing energy and dedication of a handful of residents who have been to every meeting, held meetings of their own and stood in fearless opposition to money and corruption. Inspiring!
http://www.courierpostonline.com/article/20120926/NEWS01/120926001?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
THANK YOU! You are truly amazing!
From: Diane Ravitch’s blog Reply-To: Diane Ravitch’s blog Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2012 03:17:28 +0000 To: Deborah E Cornavaca Subject: [New post] Camden, NJ, Says No to Charters
WordPress.com dianerav posted: “I am interested in learning more about what happened yesterday in Camden, New Jersey. The school board there turned down four charters. Is this the beginning of public awareness, or local politics? Here is the news from a reader: Please check out wh”
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yes it is true the boe in Camden has stood up. We know this is not over and we anticipate a veto of some sort..however we will not back down and next year we will be in control of our school board once again. The time has come for all in Camden to stand up and to stop allowing our children to be sold out to the highest bidders. These are our children. The tip of the iceberg is melting and they have seen nothing yet. We will stop the metro police take over, we have already secured non partisan elections, and finally we taking the election next year and we will control city hall and give it back to the people who rightfully deserve to have someone in office that does not try to silence their voices but have a vested interest in the people they were elected by.
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“Won’t Back Down” takes on a new meaning in New Jersey. Love it! Maybe we should co-opt this title in our fight against rheeform.
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Diane, here is a post with links to give some background on this:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/09/george-norcross-isnt-gonna-like-this.html
Deb, keep fighting that good fight!
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State Senator John Thrasher in Florida is very supportive of the current wave of education “reforms.” He is extremely supportive of charter schools. Oh, that is unless they want to come to his legislative district. He says that the school district in his legislative district is very high performing and does not really need them. However, that isn’t “free market.” That’s like saying that a town already has a successful Walmart, so it doesn’t need to give Target or Big Lots a permit to build. Double standard? (This county/district is south of Jacksonville, FL).
http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2012-08-26/three-profit-charter-schools-apply-st-johns-county-baffling-thrasher-who#.UGQeVbTAddw
At least one of the schools has withdrawn its application.
http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2012-09-25/tampa-charter-school-withdraws#.UGQeKLTAddw
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More detail on the Camden Board rejection of the four private charters:
Camden board rejects four privately run schools
http://www.philly.com/philly/education/171459811.html
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A lot of what Gary Frazier says is made up propaganda. When you are living in your mother’s basement & have nothing else to do what would you expect. Gary stop kissing butt if you have something to say say it directly not like a punk on facebook.
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INSPIRING!
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What the powers that be dont understand is that there is young leadership being established in our city that they thought would never happen. Our young people are breaking the chains of deciet,misguidance and lies. GAME OVER
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We have young leaders too who don’t think highly of you. You guys are a bunch of mitt romneys
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A city in ruins thank to the corrupt political Machine
Camden, New Jersey, with a population of 70,390, is per capita the poorest city in the nation. It is also the most dangerous. The city’s real unemployment—hard to estimate, since many residents have been severed from the formal economy for generations—is probably 30–40 percent. The median household income is $24,600. There is a 70 percent high school dropout rate, with only 13 percent of students managing to pass the state’s proficiency exams in math. The city is planning $28 million in draconian budget cuts, with officials talking about cutting 25 percent from every department, including layoffs of nearly half the police force. The proposed slashing of the public library budget by almost two-thirds has left the viability of the library system in doubt.
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Tent Camp
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Chris Hedges
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Camden is where those discarded as human refuse are dumped, along with the physical refuse of postindustrial America. A sprawling sewage treatment plant on forty acres of riverfront land processes 58 million gallons of wastewater a day for Camden County. The stench of sewage lingers in the streets. There is a huge trash-burning plant that releases noxious clouds, a prison, a massive cement plant and mountains of scrap metal feeding into a giant shredder. The city is scarred with several thousand decaying abandoned row houses; the skeletal remains of windowless brick factories and gutted gas stations; overgrown vacant lots filled with garbage and old tires; neglected, weed-filled cemeteries; and boarded-up store fronts.
Corruption is rampant, with three mayors sent to prison in a little more than two decades. Five police officers, two of whom are out on bail and three of whom have pleaded guilty, have been charged with planting evidence, making false arrests and trading drugs for information from prostitutes. County prosecutor Warren Faulk has had to drop charges against some 200 suspects, including some who’d spent years in prison, because of the misconduct. The city is dominated by an old-time party boss, George Norcross III. Although he does not live in Camden, his critics contend that he decides who runs for office and who does not, who gets city and state contracts and which projects get funded. Tens of millions in state funds have been used for city projects, from an aquarium on the waterfront to a new law school to an expansion of the Cooper University Hospital and construction of a medical school. In 2002 the state approved a $175 million recovery package to save the city, but according to a yearlong investigation by the Philadelphia Inquirer, only 5 percent had been used to combat crime, improve schools, provide jobs or bolster municipal services. Those who oppose Norcross insist he has turned the poverty and despair of Camden into a business. His critics charge that the new medical school, for example, was approved because it was part of a back-room deal Governor Jon Corzine cut with Norcross in Corzine’s failed re-election bid. When I met with him, Norcross dismissed the allegations and defended his huge infrastructure projects as crucial to revitalizing the bleak downtown.
Camden, like America, was once an industrial giant. It employed some 36,000 workers in its shipyards during World War II and built some of the nation’s largest warships. It was the home to major industries, from RCA Victor to the New York Ship Building Corporation and Campbell’s Soup, which still has its international headquarters in a gated section of Camden but no longer makes soup in the city. Camden was a destination for Italian, German, Polish and Irish immigrants, who in the middle of the last century could find decent-paying jobs that required little English or education. The city’s population has fallen by more than 40 percent from its 1950 level of 120,000. There are no movie theaters or hotels. There are lots with used cars but no dealerships that sell new vehicles. The one supermarket is located on the city’s outskirts, away from the endemic street crime.
There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, Los Nietos and MS-13. Knots of young men in black leather jackets and baggy sweatshirts sell weed and crack to clients, many of whom drive in from the suburbs. The drug trade is one of the city’s few thriving businesses. A weapon, police say, is never more than a few feet away, usually stashed behind a trash can, in the grass or on a porch. Camden is awash in guns, easily purchased across the river in Pennsylvania, where gun laws are lax.
Camden is the poster child of postindustrial decay. It stands as a warning of what huge pockets of the United States could turn into as we cement into place a permanent underclass of the unemployed, slash state and federal services in a desperate bid to cut massive deficits, watch cities and states go bankrupt and struggle to adjust to a stark neofeudalism in which the working and middle classes are decimated.
* * *
I found the city’s homeless congregated in a collection of blue and gray tents, protected by tarps, set up under the shelter of a Route 676 ramp. The tent city, or “Transitional Park,” was overseen by Lorenzo “Jamaica” Banks, 57, who bought damaged tents from Wal-Mart and Kmart at a reduced price, repaired them and provided them to the homeless—at $10 a pop, police told me. Banks insisted he offered them for free.
When I walked into the encampment with my colleague, comics artist Joe Sacco, Banks was chopping firewood. A man with receding black hair and a beard, Banks was dressed in carpenter’s jeans and a plaid shirt over a gray hooded sweatshirt. There were about fifty tents in the park, and Banks owned forty of them. He spoke in the drumbeat staccato of a man who seems about to snap at any moment. He claimed to be a Vietnam vet, to have been a heroin addict now “clean for thirty-seven years,” to have ended up after the war in a mental institution, to have jumped off the Ben Franklin Bridge in a suicide attempt because of “a lot of flashbacks” and to have spent “twenty-two years, six months, three hours and thirty-three seconds” in prison for shooting to death his best friend because he was “killing his baby in front of me.”
“I’m better now,” he assured us as the commuter train into Philadelphia rumbled along the tracks overhead. “I’m on medication. I live here because it reminds me of the jungle.”
Banks, who called himself “the mayor,” ran the tent city, which had a population of about sixty, ranging in age from 18 to 76, like a military encampment. He had a second-in-command, his “CEO,” who took over when Banks had to buy supplies. There were weekly tent inspections on Saturday, weekly meetings every Tuesday night and a list of sixteen rules written on plywood tacked to a tree. These included restrictions on fighting and arguing, admonishments to clean up the trash, an order not to sell food stamps and several other blunt prohibitions, including: “Don’t bring your tricks here” and “No borrowing money or sex from anyone.” Residents received two warnings for infractions before they were evicted. Drugs were banned. Alcohol was not. Banks had even set up a bank account for the enclave. At night there were shifts when someone—Banks said he preferred a vet—had to stand guard. There was a Dumpster filled with trash at the edge of the encampment, white folding tables with white plastic chairs and five-gallon plastic water containers outside many tents. Firewood lay scattered about the site.
“Take a look at the American Dream,” Banks said as he guided us through the tents, stepping around rusted bicycles and shopping carts. “In today’s society no one is exempt from Transitional Park. Everybody is one paycheck away from being here.”
Officially, Camden has 775 homeless, but there are only 220 beds in the county, so city officials nervously tolerated the encampment, despite its illegality, until late spring, when they swiftly dismantled it. Those tossed out scattered, and about a half-dozen migrated to live in squalor under the concrete ramps of Route 676, where it runs across the river into Philadelphia.
Camden’s streets are filled with the unemployed. Ali Sloan El, who recently got out of prison, is chatting with some men in the street, several of whom are Muslims like him and have shaved heads and long black beards. The group of men around Sloan El have just witnessed a botched robbery at a barbershop a few minutes before Joe and I arrive. A young gunman, nervous and unsure of himself, had pulled out a pistol and tried to rob the barbers. He was chased out of the shop by a group of men and tackled on the sidewalk. One of the barbers is at the police station filing a report.
The mood inside the shop is hostile. “How did you know about the stickup?” asks a barber who says his name is Sam. “We were told about it on the street,” I answer. He arches his eyebrows in disbelief. “No one would talk to you on the street. No one would tell you nothin’,” he says coldly. “A mother with a 2-year-old in a stroller told us,” I tell him. “Yeah,” he admitted reluctantly, “maybe that’s right, maybe a mother would talk.”
The rumor on the street, Sloan El informs us, is that the robber was high on a narcotic called wet. The drug of choice of Camden’s criminal class, wet is made by soaking marijuana in embalming fluid, which is a mixture of formaldehyde, methanol, ethanol and other solvents. Phencyclidine, or PCP, known on the street as angel dust, is often added to the mix. Wet is smoked dry but the leaves, which glisten, give the drug its liquid name. Wet numbs its users and endows them with what seems to them like superhuman strength. Their body temperatures rise, their blood pressure drops and they frequently hallucinate. The high can last up to six hours. Two Camden police officers who do not want to be named tell us they fear confronting street thugs on wet. “You shoot them and they just keep coming,” one says warily.
Those who do not join street gangs live like minnows, darting through the currents to avoid the predatory fish. Darnell Monroe, 33, wearing a new pair of brown Timberlands, a black leather jacket, jeans and a black-and-white checked kaffiyeh as a scarf, sits with us in the barbershop. One of the barbers immediately turns up the radio to a deafening roar, I suspect to drive us out. Monroe, also a Muslim, is a tall man with a shaved head and a full black beard. He spent four years in prison for dealing drugs. He became a father when he was 13. The mother was 16. “I’m sociable,” he says when I ask him about surviving in Camden, “but I keep moving. I don’t want to draw the wrong kind of attention. I don’t want a conflict.”
Monroe was shot three times in the stomach in 1998, when he was coming out of a bar and tried to break up a fight. “To this day I don’t know who shot me,” he says. He awoke in the hospital twelve weeks later. His kidney, liver and upper and lower intestine had been badly damaged. He lifts his shirt and exposes a massive scar on his stomach that looks like a brownish mountain range with jagged edges. “It was a .380 automatic,” he says. Until he was laid off last year, Monroe had a job as a forklift operator in the scrap yards by the port. On the back of his right hand is a tattoo of a padlock with his current wife’s initials, EGK, and under his left eye is a tattooed teardrop he got in jail, in 1993, when his sister died.
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