Camden schools superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard gave the results Tuesday of his "listening tour." Here he is seen after being named to the post in August. (RON TARVER / Staff Photographer) 
 
 CAMDEN Camden schools superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard embarked on what he said was a "listening tour" after he was named to the post in August. On Tuesday, the state-appointed leader relayed to the school board and the community what he had heard from parents, teachers, and students in the struggling district and learned from test scores and other data. One of the most startling statistics, prompting groans from meeting attendees, was that only three students of all those in high school who took the SAT in 2013 tested as college-ready as defined by the College Board. Rouhanifard called that number a "kick-in-the-stomach moment." 
 
 "It is OK if all of our students don't end up with a four-year diploma. There are two-year associates out there, vocational opportunities, multiple pathways to success in life, and I deeply believe that," he said. 
 
 "But we can do better than three students. We know we can do better than just three students. We know we have to do better than three students." 
 
 He also noted deep concerns among the people he talked to over school safety and the quality of education. 
 
 He called the responses unsurprising in a district where 23 out of 26 schools have been labeled failing and only 53 percent of students graduate from high school. 
 
 The struggles of the district prompted the state to take it over in June, relegating the school board to an advisory role. 
 
 But participation at his four town hall meetings and eight focus groups showed an interest among residents in helping solve the problems, Rouhanifard said. 
 
 Rouhanifard visited all 26 district schools and met also with small groups of parents, students, and staff. 
 
 Student complaints mostly had to do with safety in and out of schools, facility conditions, limited access to technology, low expectations from teachers, and teacher retention, Rouhanifard said. 
 
 Teachers reported a lack of curriculum and instructional support, too much paperwork, disparities in pay scale, and a lack of parental involvement, he said. 
 
 A key desire among parents was an easier pathway to engaging with schools. 
 
 In a step toward achieving that, Rouhanifard announced that the district would waive a $75 fee parents have had to pay to cover the cost of a background check in order to volunteer. The background checks will still be conducted but not at parental cost. 
 
 A district-wide plan, taking into account the tour's findings, will be released in January, Rouhanifard said. 
 
 But given the alarm over safety - a report released in the fall showed half of elementary-age students feel unsafe in hallways and bathrooms - the district already has completed a security audit, updated security plans, and along with the Camden County Police Metro Division, has installed a safe corridors program. 
 
 The board also approved an auditors report for 2013 that found 11 deficiencies compared with 14 last year. 
 
 Among the issues was a failure to comply with certain public school contract laws and grant requirements. 
 
 The 2013 fiscal year ended June 30. 
 
 Board Vice President Martha Wilson lamented that numerous deficiencies were repeated: "This is three years ago. . . . If I was working in the business world, this wouldn't happen; things that happen here can't happen anywhere else." ||||| But stark problems remain. A recent report by the Education Research Alliance confirmed that principals engage in widespread “creaming” — selecting, or counseling out, students based on their expected performance on standardized tests. In a forthcoming study, the alliance expects to show that lowest-scoring students are less likely to move to higher-performing schools. 
 
 The rhetoric of reform often fails to match the reality. For example, Paul G. Vallas, the superintendent of the Recovery School District from 2007 to 2011, boasted recently that only 7 percent of the city’s students attend failing schools today, down from 62 percent before Katrina, a feat accomplished “with no displacement of children.” This was simply false. 
 
 Consider Joseph S. Clark Preparatory High School, one of the city’s last traditional public schools to be “taken over.” Most of its 366 students declined to re-enroll when it reopened under new management in the fall of 2011. During its first year under FirstLine, a charter management organization, Clark had only 117 “persisters,” or returning students, according to a study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as Credo. FirstLine could not account for where the students went after they left Clark. However, Jay Altman, its chief executive, told me in an email that before FirstLine took over, a similarly low proportion of students, about 35 percent, were returning. (The school district did not respond to my queries about Clark.) 
 
 One problem is that in the decentralized charter system, no agency is responsible for keeping track of all kids. Two years ago the Recovery School District, acknowledging that it was “worried” about high school attrition, began assigning counselors to help relocate students from schools it was closing. Louisiana’s official dropout rates are unreliable, but a new report by Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council, using Census Bureau survey data from 2013, found that over 26,000 people in the metropolitan area between the ages of 16 and 24 are counted as “disconnected,” because they are neither working nor in school. 
 
 Ironically, schools like Clark actually feed the New Orleans success narrative because when bad schools are taken over their “F” grades automatically convert to a “T” — for a turnaround. Thus, in the 2013-14 school year, the four schools with “T” grades wouldn’t be counted as “failing” schools, nor would the 16 schools that received a “D” grade. About 40 percent of Recovery School District schools were graded “D,” “T” or “F” that year. 
 
 Adding to the difficulty of assessing the New Orleans experiment is the fact that Louisiana education data has been doled out selectively, mostly to pro-charter researchers, and much of the research has been flawed. Last fall, the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives was forced to retract a study that concluded that most New Orleans schools were posting higher-than-expected graduation rates and test scores. 
 
 Last spring, Credo produced a study of 41 urban charter districts, including New Orleans, that purported to show that charters outperformed urban public schools on standardized test scores; but this study was also highly flawed. The methodology was based on comparing each charter student to a virtual “twin,” a composite of as many as seven public-school kids who attend “feeder” schools and who match the charter students on demographics and test scores. The problem in New Orleans was that there are virtually no local feeders left from which to draw comparisons.
– Just how bad are things in Camden's schools? So bad that only three students there managed a "college ready" SAT score in 2013, new superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard revealed yesterday. He called the number a "kick-in-the-stomach moment." It was one of a number of sobering assessments Rouhanifard delivered in presenting the results of his August "listening tour" to the school board, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. "It is OK if all our students don't end up with a four-year diploma," he said. "But we can do better than three students." Rouhanifard also announced that the district would do away with the $75 fee for a background check it has been charging parents who want to volunteer; the schools will now cover the checks. Camden is plagued by poverty and crime—Rolling Stone had a damning piece last week declaring it "America's most desperate town"—and only 53% of its students graduate high school. But "college ready" SAT scores are a little harder to come by than you might assume; only 43% of students hit the College Board's 1550 benchmark this year.