Groundwork for Change

Camden’s History of Education Reform and Systems Change

For decades, Camden, New Jersey’s public schools have reflected the city’s struggle with poverty, fiscal instability, and public-sector disinvestment. In 2011, Camden City School District (CCSD) made headlines when then-Governor Chris Christie highlighted an alarming statistic that only three students at Camden High School were considered college-ready based on SAT scores. In 2012, 23 of Camden’s 26 schools were ranked among the lowest-performing in the state, and only about half of high school students were graduating. 

This environment created intense community demand for safer, better schools, paving the way for systemic policy solutions. What followed was a dramatic reconfiguration of Camden’s education system, driven by new state and local policies, a state takeover of district governance, new facilities investments, and the emergence of leaders who combined urgency with a relational approach to implementation.¹

The Urban Hope Act and State Takeover

The story of systemic change in Camden’s education system started in 2012, when the New Jersey legislature enacted the Urban Hope Act (UHA). The act authorized a unique hybrid model of “Renaissance Schools” that combined charter-like autonomy with a mandate to serve as guaranteed zoned neighborhood schools — meaning operators were required to enroll any student living within their catchment area and eliminating the selective admissions concerns often associated with charter schools. These schools would be managed and operated by nonprofit entities with demonstrated experience running schools in “high-risk, low-income urban districts,” and their schools would be located in new or substantially renovated facilities. Unlike standard charter schools, Renaissance schools would be authorized for 10 years, affording a longer runway to work through the unique challenges of turning around low-performing schools in high-poverty neighborhoods. Camden selected and partnered with three operators, with approval by the commissioner of education: KIPP, Mastery, and Uncommon Schools. Although the UHA was designed to support multiple cities across the state, only district leaders in Camden ultimately chose to implement the Renaissance School model. With the addition of Renaissance schools, Camden’s education landscape became a multi-sector model, offering families and students options of traditional district, charter, or Renaissance schools. As Morgan Craig, senior managing director of strategy at Teach For America (TFA)–New Jersey, reflected, “If we look at the evolution since the inception and the policy shift in 2012 to now, the education landscape in Camden is functionally different than what it was pre-Urban Hope Act.”²

The UHA created the statutory mechanism for restructuring Camden’s school system, but the legislation alone did not determine how reform would unfold locally. That implementation capacity came the following year, when the state assumed control of Camden City School District in 2013. The takeover occurred after years of low academic performance, declining enrollment, aging facilities, and fiscal instability. Under state control, Camden’s locally elected school board was converted into an advisory body, while authority over district operations shifted to a state-appointed superintendent. This governance change gave the superintendent powers normally held by a local board, including authority over budget, staffing, school closures, partnerships, and the district’s broader portfolio strategy. Governor Christie appointed Paymon Rouhanifard as Camden’s state superintendent to lead this work. 

A TFA alum with prior leadership experience in the New York City Department of Education and Newark Public Schools, where he worked closely with TFA alumni John White and Cami Anderson (among others), Rouhanifard pointed to the UHA as one of the primary reasons he took the job. He entered the role with unusually broad authority, but departed from the typical top-down school reform playbook. Rather than immediately imposing a comprehensive turnaround plan, he and his team spent their first 100 days engaging with families, educators, students, and community members to co-create a foundational strategic plan known as the Camden Commitment. The plan became the district’s organizing framework for improvement and was grounded in five pillars: school safety, facilities, educational excellence (i.e., expanding high-quality school options and strengthening instruction), parent and family responsiveness, and central office effectiveness. That last pillar of the Commitment — central office effectiveness — was especially notable as Camden’s reform strategy depended not only on introducing new school options for families, but also on building a district office capable of managing a more complex, multi-sector system amid a budget shortfall.

The Camden Commitment and Portfolio Model

A reimagined approach to community engagement was central to CCSD’s efforts to implement the Commitment. Starting in 2014, Rouhanifard’s team began making politically difficult decisions to close, merge, restart, or reconfigure low-performing schools, including transferring some schools to Renaissance operation. Those decisions generated community pushback, particularly where families feared losing long-standing neighborhood anchors. In response, the district paired its school improvement agenda with intentional community engagement. Community outreach strategies were exceptionally robust; they enlisted local residents as phone-bankers and door-knockers and clergy as community conveners, helping families understand their options and giving them more direct feedback channels. The approach did not eliminate tension, but it helped to empower families to provide input and allowed Camden to avoid some of the backlash that had defined reform efforts in nearby cities.

Between 2014 and 2018, school improvement and turnaround efforts were a central focus in the district. KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy opened in 2014 as New Jersey’s first Renaissance school, and new Mastery and Uncommon schools followed soon after. In 2015, the district announced a turnaround plan for five of its lowest-performing schools by replacing existing district- and school-led operations with Renaissance operators and allowing these schools to access facilities improvement funds.

Camden also built systemwide tools to help families navigate the emerging portfolio of options. In 2015, the city launched Camden Enrollment, a unified application and information system intended to replace 17 separate school application processes and give families an easy way to select from district, charter, and Renaissance options. A performance system was overlaid onto this enrollment system as well to foster greater transparency about academic performance and growth so parents could make informed decisions.

As Renaissance schools established themselves as new options for families, Camden experienced a dramatic shift in enrollment away from traditional district-run schools and toward a multi-sector system of operators (Figure A). For Rouhanifard, that shift reflected an intentional district governance bet. He described the Urban Hope Act and Renaissance schools as “fundamentally decentralizing or rethinking the role of the school district,” moving it away from being “the monopoly operator of schools” and toward a role focused on governing, overseeing, and regulating a more decentralized system. In that model, he said, the district’s job was to “have high expectations,” “create equitable access to schools,” evaluate school performance, and allow families to make informed choices.

That philosophy helped reshape Camden’s enrollment landscape and expand the range of public school options available to families. Over the past 15 years, Camden’s traditional district enrollment declined from 12,923 students in 2009–10 to 5,871 in 2024–25, while Renaissance schools grew to serve the largest share of students in the city. By 2024–25, roughly 40% of Camden students attended Renaissance schools, 25% attended charter schools, and 35% attended traditional district schools (Figure A). Camden students’ academic growth improved during the post-takeover reform period, with particularly strong gains in math by 2017 and stronger growth in Renaissance schools than in traditional district schools on several measures. Even as overall proficiency levels remained low, Renaissance and charter schools have generally outperformed traditional district schools. Camden also proved to be one of the few state takeover districts in the U.S. at the time that demonstrated improved outcomes. These shifts suggest meaningful progress in the city even while substantial work remains.

Because this rapid expansion of school options coincided with a stalling child population, the city has often found itself with more available school seats than children to enroll. This dynamic has sparked enrollment competition, forcing smaller independent charters to close while larger network operators expand their footprints.

FIGURE 1: ENROLLMENT IN DIFFERENT SECTORS OVER TIME

Source: National Center for Education Statistics, “Elementary/Secondary Information System (ELSi),” Common Core of Data, U.S. Department of Education.

Administration Changes and Cross-Sector Coordination

In 2018, Rouhanifard stepped down, and Deputy Superintendent Katrina McCombs, a Camden native and veteran educator in the district, was named superintendent. Her goal was to build a district that was more responsive to students and schools, better prepare students for college and career, and strengthen classroom instruction. New partners also helped sustain some of the cross-sector work after Rouhanifard’s transition. Camden Education Fund (CEF) launched in 2019 as an independent philanthropic and civic partner supporting teacher development, student supports, data analysis and reporting, and school quality improvement across the city’s portfolio of schools.

While McCombs maintained the existing model of school options, her roughly seven-year tenure was shaped by challenging external factors. Faced with a $40 million budget deficit and a shrinking student footprint in traditional district schools, McCombs announced the closure of four in 2021, a move that generated significant community backlash. In 2020, McCombs steered Camden schools through the COVID-19 pandemic, rapidly shifting the district to remote instruction, confronting deep gaps in student access to devices and internet connectivity, and managing learning continuity and acceleration efforts post-pandemic.

In the midst of these reforms, Camden has experienced periods of academic growth, especially from 2015 to 2019, although proficiency rates overall remain very low. The city’s Renaissance schools, which flourished under Rouhanifard’s leadership, have demonstrated the most notable progress and consistently outperform traditional district schools. While the COVID-19 pandemic set back the city’s momentum, in recent years academic performance has steadily rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.

In 2025, McCombs stepped down and was replaced by a new state-appointed superintendent, Alfonso Llano, who is now tasked with managing the city’s portfolio of schools. While academic performance still has a lot of room to grow, the foundation laid over the past 15 years has proven that systemic turnaround remains possible in Camden.

TFA Alumni Impact in Camden

In Camden, the contributions of TFA alumni were less a story of scale than of concentrated leadership at pivotal moments in the city’s education transformation. TFA’s alumni footprint in Camden (Figure 2) was smaller in number compared to some other cities but larger in influence in that it was concentrated in the leadership of Paymon Rouhanifard, the alumni-heavy central office team he built, and key alumni working in turnaround networks, schools, and community and philanthropic partnerships. Together, they helped establish Camden’s portfolio model and sustain it over time. In Camden, the contribution of TFA alumni appeared especially critical in three areas:

• Setting a clear vision and strategy through superintendent leadership.
• Providing the leadership capacity to implement and sustain reforms.
• Expanding educational opportunity through high-quality school options.

FIGURE 2: TFA ALUMNI WORKING IN EDUCATION IN CAMDEN OVER TIME

Note: Totals reflect the total number of pre-K-12 school-based staff, district office staff, and charter network administrators who were TFA alumni. Years 2013-2018 include Paymon Rouhanifard, who is not included in TFA Camden data and was added manually by the research team. Source: Organization, “Source Title With Hyperlink,” Date.

Setting a Clear Vision and Strategy Through Superintendent Leadership

No TFA alum shaped Camden’s reform trajectory more visibly than Paymon Rouhanifard, who brought the vision, urgency, and relational leadership needed to drive change in Camden at the executive level. One of Rouhanifard’s most important contributions as an executive leader was establishing with his team a bold vision for change and bringing the strategic courage needed to act on it. Interviewees described his leadership as a “game-changer” and “spark” for Camden, in part because he arrived with the outcomes-focused mindset and problem-solving orientation needed to move a system that had been stuck for years. Naeha Dean, a TFA alum who served as Rouhanifard’s chief of staff, reflected that “Paymon created this big, bold vision that really drove the change in Camden.” That vision was anchored in a relentless focus on student outcomes, especially improving grades 3-8 math and literacy performance, and it manifested in the Camden Commitment’s focus on reimagining the city’s school system. It also required a willingness to make difficult decisions about schools, staffing, facilities, and governance. For example, TFA alum and former CCSD Chief School Support Officer Anna Shurak noted that Rouhanifard’s administration took on the monumental tasks of merging multiple high schools, closing failing buildings, and deciding to tear down the dilapidated Camden High School because those conditions were holding kids back even though the decisions weren’t popular. As interviewees put it, Rouhanifard and his team “had the courage to do what was needed to be done,” giving Camden’s change agenda both a clear direction and the political will to pursue it.

Key to Rouhanifard’s leadership was his embrace of the Urban Hope Act and his active construction of a new portfolio system of school options in Camden. Rouhanifard himself recalled that the Urban Hope Act was a “big reason [he] took the job,” saying he “thought it was the best piece of education legislation I had ever heard of” because it created an opportunity to build a “third way” for public education. Rather than positioning the district as the sole operator of schools, Rouhanifard maximally leveraged the flexibilities of the Urban Hope Act to move Camden toward a decentralized portfolio system of schools in which the district would help ensure equal access, high expectations, and better information for families. Rouhanifard was also critical in efforts to recruit the Renaissance operators to Camden, and he pushed them to adapt their models to Camden’s neighborhood context and unique needs — such as when he encouraged Uncommon to step outside of its traditional grade-by-grade growth strategy and turn around an entire K-4 neighborhood school all at once. This embrace of the UHA and Renaissance options in particular was not always politically easy; teachers’ union representatives sometimes argued that he devoted too much of his time to Renaissance schools and not enough to traditional public schools. At the same time, Rouhanifard’s portfolio strategy was designed in important ways to avoid the pitfalls of aggressive closure-based accountability as he had witnessed in other cities. He made the decision to move away from a performance management system he believed overemphasized short-term test results and created unnecessary churn among school operators. Instead, he sought to “play the long game,” giving schools time to improve, recognizing the enormous challenges that poverty posed to children and schools in the community, and reserving closures for rarer cases driven primarily by low enrollment and fiscal pressures.

Finally, Rouhanifard and his team brought a deeply relational approach to leadership that prioritized community engagement and fostered the trust needed to drive change. The Camden Commitment was shaped by his understanding that state intervention could create real opportunities, but also deepen distrust if leaders moved too quickly without visible improvement or community buy-in. Arriving as a state-appointed outsider in a city already wary of outside control and negative portrayals, Rouhanifard spent his first 18 months listening to families, educators, clergy, civic leaders, and political stakeholders, including meeting residents in living rooms and churches, attending community events, and even serving as an assistant high school basketball coach. Rouhanifard and his team also proved open to slowing certain structural changes when local leaders like the mayor and city council signaled the timing was not right. As he later reflected, the goal was not to enter Camden declaring that “every school is failing,” but to build the “foundational trust” necessary to make difficult decisions.

Providing the Leadership Capacity to Implement and Sustain Reforms

While Rouhanifard offered executive leadership to the city, TFA alumni supported the design, implementation, and institutionalization of its improvement agenda, including as lieutenants inside the district central office and later through leadership of external organizations like the Camden Education Fund.

Central Office Leadership

To carry out the vision for change, Rouhanifard needed a central office team to build a new portfolio model of district, charter, and Renaissance schools while simultaneously navigating challenges around school closures, budget-induced central staff reductions, and community skepticism. As Rouhanifard assembled his cabinet and senior team, he leaned heavily on TFA alumni. “Almost every role on our leadership team was a TFA alum. They played every critical role you could imagine in the work that we did,” Rouhanifard said. One of those leaders, Tia Morris, CCSD’s chief family and community engagement officer at the time, recalled, “The real presence for TFA [in Camden] was our alumni presence in the leadership of the district office.” Rouhanifard noted that TFA alumni exhibited the exact types of qualities and values needed to lead reforms in a city like Camden, notably a belief in high expectations for kids, a humble and collaborative mindset, and entrepreneurialism. “TFA inherently or explicitly screens for those things,” he recalled.

TFA alumni data from the time demonstrates the reach of alumni talent in these schools (Table 1).

TABLE 1: SELECT LEADERSHIP ROLES OF TFA ALUMNI IN CAMDEN CITY SCHOOL DISTRICT

FIGURE 3: NUMBER OF TFA ALUMNI IN CCSD ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF OVER TIME

Note: Total CCSD administrators and administrative support staff obtained from the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data. Confirmed alumni CCSD staff counts obtained from TFA. Years 2013–2018 include Paymon Rouhanifard and two other members of his central office team, who are not included in TFA Camden data files and were added manually by the research team. Source: Organization, “Source Title With Hyperlink,” Date.

While many of these alumni were originally Camden outsiders, the office culture generally weighted toward collaboration with existing staff. Rouhanifard highlighted that his team of TFA alumni did an “incredible job of working effectively with the legacy district team,” and he noted that they openly addressed the tension between the “new guard” and the “old guard” in their work. Others on staff, however, noted that the relationship was not always as strong as it could have been and that the internal dynamics of the office did not always match the relational spirit of external engagements.

Rouhanifard’s leadership team set about redesigning Camden’s central office to make the district a more coherent engine of school improvement through the Camden Commitment. At least one CCSD leader at the time recalled the central office as being unofficially split into two sides of the house — the politics side and the academic and instructional side — that together helped bring the reforms to life, and TFA alumni were critical leaders on both sides. On the politics side, alumni such as Morris, Chief of Staff Naeha Dean, and Chief Innovation Officer Kevin Shafer helped the district navigate the external environment around Camden’s reforms. L. Wayles Wilson, former chief operating officer of school support in CCSD and former chief of staff to Superintendent McCombs, described that group as critical in shifting mindsets in Camden about what a school system should look like and building community support for a diversified system that included new charter and Renaissance schools.

On the academic and instructional side, alumni leaders led key workstreams of Rouhanifard’s improvement vision, which shifted how district-run schools were managed and supported. Anna Shurak, a TFA alum who was brought in to be chief school support officer along with long-time Camden educator and school leader Andrew Bell (who was also chief school support officer and then chief academic officer), led a reorganization of academic support around instructional excellence, principal development, and operational coherence across the district. She and her team consolidated academic functions so that curriculum, assessment, evaluation, and principal supervision were aligned rather than fragmented across departments; required districtwide academic planning to be completed by May so principals had the summer to prepare for implementation; and trained principals in observation, feedback, data use, and planning. The partnership with Bell proved especially critical, as his history in Camden helped lend credibility and legitimacy to an outsider-led reform administration. Wilson credited Shurak and Bell with having “completely reshaped school leadership and academics in the district,” and she worked with them on creating new operations manager roles so principals could spend less time on logistics and more time coaching teachers and leading instruction.

As part of this districtwide instructional work, Rouhanifard’s administration prioritized student well-being, holistic family support, and postsecondary preparation. To transform school discipline, the administration overhauled the standard approach to addressing student behavior, replacing more punitive practices with a restorative justice approach. Every school designated a staff member to oversee school culture and climate, educators received professional development in restorative practices and trauma-informed care, and students facing disciplinary issues were counseled in-house rather than suspended. The results were significant: the district reported a 53% decrease in districtwide student suspensions in a single year. This whole-child focus was further reinforced by creating new, dedicated positions across all district schools, specifically hiring family-focused staff and teachers devoted to students’ social and emotional learning. Finally, the district expanded college and career supports for high school students by increasing access to college entrance exams, financial-aid support, postsecondary planning, and dual-enrollment opportunities. By the end of Rouhanifard’s tenure, the district experienced a 22% increase in PSAT participation, a 46% increase in SAT participation, a 65% increase in FAFSA completion, and more than 300 students earning college credits through Camden County College.

Community Engagement

The institutionalization of Camden’s reforms required deep relational work, informed by lessons from cities like Newark and shaped by Camden’s own context of strong place-based identity, skepticism of outsiders, and concern about prospective school closures. Here, TFA alumni excelled as relational and community-grounded leaders. To lead this relational work, Rouhanifard appointed Tia Morris as chief family and community engagement officer. A TFA alum who had previously led similar community engagement efforts in Newark, Morris understood that the district office needed to demonstrate that they cared as much about students’ educational success as families did; as she put it, “The core of my role was building trust, building grassroots support, and ensuring the role of families wasn’t getting lost.” Morris’s team managed relationships with clergy, local nonprofits, school-based parent liaisons, PTAs, and other community stakeholders, but the work went well beyond traditional engagement meetings.

The moments that most demanded Morris’s leadership were the SY14-15 rollout of school redesigns and closures, as new options — especially Renaissance schools — were introduced to replace or turn around long-struggling schools. As Morris recalled, Rouhanifard gave her significant latitude to design the community outreach effort as she saw fit. “I ran it like a political campaign,” Morris reflected. “I had a room that was almost like a war room. I had computers set up, we were doing phone banking, I had people doing door knocking and armed them with walk sheets, and every single family that would have been impacted by a school closure had a direct conversation: ‘This is the school you’d be going to. Here’s why we think it’s a good idea. These are your options.’ And they were given the chance to choose what was best for them.” Morris also leveraged community residents and leaders to support the effort, recalling: “We partnered with local clergy and local nonprofit organizations to host our community meetings, so that this way they were hosted by the community and not just me as the district [representative]. We brought in the local people, local residents, and employed local folks to do this. We didn’t have the vitriolic community meetings [we saw in places like Newark]. We had local validators.”

The messaging and framing of these school changes were also strategically tailored to the specific type of redesign. For Renaissance school turnarounds, where operators were replacing leadership but keeping kids in their neighborhood school, the messaging focused on reassuring parents around stability. Dean (Rouhanifard’s former chief of staff) recalled: “[For Renaissance schools] we could communicate and promise to families that you could stay at your school, you weren’t going to get sent somewhere else, your school wasn’t going to be shuttered.” The three Renaissance operators also made themselves available for public forums, stepping in to answer questions, assuring parents that their child would have a seat, and pledging to minimize disruptions during the transitions. They even provided parents with transportation to visit their existing schools in other cities. In later years, when school closures were happening due to under-enrollment or crumbling facilities, Superintendent McCombs’ leadership team took a different approach, often using photos and visual evidence to make the case that it was unconscionable for children to be attending schools in those buildings.

Camden Education Fund

The launch of Camden Education Fund (CEF) by Dean in 2019 was another critical piece of infrastructure that helped institutionalize and sustain Camden’s reforms over time, especially in the post-Rouhanifard era. Dean, supported by fellow TFA alumni Jonathan Cetel and Jonathan Garr, created CEF as an independent, cross-sector education quarterback that could do work that had previously been housed almost entirely inside the district: attracting philanthropy, convening leaders across school types, supporting systemwide priorities, and keeping education reform on the city’s civic agenda. As Dean explained, the goal was to create “a hub for philanthropy coming into the city” that could “be the glue between sectors” and “spotlight great work happening in schools.” This was especially important as Camden’s education system became more diverse, with district, charter, and Renaissance schools all serving public school students. CEF gave the city a sector-agnostic institution that could support the full portfolio of schools and help make the reforms less dependent on one superintendent or administration. As Giana Campbell, CEF’s second executive director, stated: “Having an education quarterback to ensure that there is continuity and durability in those reforms was paramount, because as great and visionary as Paymon was … we knew there would be a day where there would be an administration change. We really wanted to make sure that there was an organization like ours that could insulate the reforms from external conditions around them.”

CEF helped preserve and advance Camden’s reforms in three main ways: by driving cross-sector collaboration, supporting portfolio management and accountability, and attracting and distributing philanthropic dollars. As Campbell described it, CEF’s role is “part funder, part strategist, part convener, and bridge builder to shift the conversation away from ‘which school type is the best’ and toward ‘how do Camden kids win in this unique system we’ve built.’” In practice, that means using philanthropy not only to help fund new schools, but also to build shared capacity across the system. CEF funding has helped strengthen teacher pipeline programs, build cross-sector educator communities of practice, fund youth-serving nonprofits, and strengthen supports for students with unique needs who weren’t always being well-served across sectors. From a portfolio management perspective, CEF has helped monitor Camden’s overall seat profile, developed parent-facing school performance reporting to assist with enrollment decisions, and applied gentle pressure around systemwide accountability, including the need to right-size under-enrolled or underperforming schools. As Dean put it, CEF became a place where “school leaders from different school types connect and collaborate” and where the city could work more quietly and consistently on “what needs to happen to make sure it’s the strongest system it can be.”

Expanding Educational Opportunity Through High-Quality School Options

Outside the central office, TFA alumni were critical in leading new schools and turning around campuses where performance had long been poor. The expansion of new, high-quality school options in Camden demanded educators who were willing to break traditional assumptions about educational delivery, embrace the relationship-building required in the close-knit city, and demonstrate deep belief in the possibility of transformative change for kids. School operators also had to be strategically savvy enough to establish and manage new schools, instructionally effective enough to assume responsibility for struggling campuses, and entrepreneurial enough to persuade families to choose them.

On this front, TFA alumni were central to the work of launching, leading, and staffing the three Renaissance school networks — KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy, Mastery, and Uncommon (Camden Prep) — central to Camden’s embrace of the Urban Hope Act. Over time, these schools have come to enroll thousands of students and expand educational opportunities for students, especially historically marginalized ones. TFA–New Jersey Senior Managing Director of Strategy Morgan Craig claimed that all three networks have been “saturated with alum leadership from top to bottom, from teachers in their first year all the way to executive leadership.” Unlike in other cities, in Camden, TFA alumni teachers and school administrators have served largely in the high-performing Renaissance and charter school sectors as opposed to in traditional district schools. Over time, these school-based alumni leaders have also played a critical role in sustaining progress for students and families, even as district leadership turned over.

TABLE 2: TFA ALUMNI SCHOOL STAFF FOOTPRINT ACROSS SECTORS

Note: *KIPP Cooper Norcross, Mastery, and Uncommon are Renaissance providers in Camden.

KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy’s (KCNA’s) story provides an illustration of the alumni role in launching, leading, and sustaining new high-quality options for families. TFA alum Anne Kadowaki, the founding school leader of KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy, opened KIPP’s first Camden school with a single kindergarten class. Over time, KCNA expanded to include the full K-12 continuum. As KIPP expanded to five campuses, Kadowaki became managing director of schools for the entire KIPP region. She highlighted that TFA alumni make up the core of KIPP’s leadership footprint, with five out of seven members of the leadership team being TFA alumni. She also emphasized a focus on retaining local talent in Camden, mentioning that Ken Calemmo, a 2012 Camden TFA corps member, has stayed in the city long term and now serves as one of KIPP’s principals. Today, KIPP consistently ranks near the top of city schools on ELA and math state assessments.

TFA alumni were also the backbone of Mastery’s leadership, guiding the network through some of the city’s most consequential and complex school turnarounds. Brian McLaughlin, a 2005 TFA alum, has overseen all five Camden Mastery campuses for over a decade, and he noted that it would be hard to find a Mastery campus leadership team in Camden without at least one or two TFA alumni. He noted, for example, that Meredith Howell-Turner founded the Cramer Hill campus. McLaughlin described Mastery’s entry into Camden as having an enormous impact on progress in the city, as Mastery took over several schools that were historically under-enrolled, had extremely low academic performance, and had high rates of weapons and violent offenses. Today, performance in these schools has improved dramatically, and the network offers a full K-12 continuum of support for students that gives families a sense of stability. 

Uncommon Schools’ Camden Prep offers a final example of TFA alumni helping launch and lead new high-quality options under the Renaissance school model. Julie Jackson and Natalie Cooper, both TFA alumni, played founding roles in bringing Uncommon to Camden after the network was asked to join the city’s Renaissance school effort. In light of the community’s skepticism of outside school providers, Cooper, board chair at Camden Prep Charter School and founding principal at Uncommon Schools, described the early work of establishing the school as gritty, entrepreneurial, and grassroots in orientation. She recalled that the team “knocked every door in the city of Camden” to recruit students and, because they did not initially have a facility, opened their first school in a church in South Central Camden. Over time, Uncommon, now a network of six schools located in new “state-of-the-art” facilities, has become another bright spot in the city with growing student enrollments, academic gains, and high rates of student engagement. TFA regional leaders report that every K-12 Uncommon campus is currently alumni-led and that the Copewood Elementary Campus, whose principal is former Camden TFA corps member Yvanna Saint-Fort, is one of the highest academic growth schools in the state.

Conclusion

Evidence from key leaders in the city suggests that Camden’s education landscape would look meaningfully different without the TFA alumni who chose to work and lead there. Many of them arrived with experiences from other reform cities, adapted those lessons to Camden’s small-city context, and took on roles that required both technical skill and political judgment. They helped turn policy into schools, strategy into operating routines, and fragmented options into a more navigable ecosystem. Perhaps most importantly, they helped reinforce a citywide belief that education could be delivered differently.

Acknowledgments, About the Authors, About Bellwether

Bellwether is a national nonprofit that works to transform education to ensure young people — especially those furthest from opportunity — achieve outcomes that lead to fulfilling lives and flourishing communities. Founded in 2010, we help mission-driven partners accelerate their impact, inform and influence policy and program design, and bring leaders together to drive change on education’s most pressing challenges. For more, visit bellwether.org.