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Recent weeks have been witness to yet another investigative article published by the Philadelphia Inquirer on the sad state of affairs that is the Camden Public Schools. The Inquirer, and its southern New Jersey competitor the Courier-Post, have done a pretty bang-up job chronicling the utter incompetence of the Keystone Cop Crew that masquerades as school leadership in Camden City; such a good job, in fact, that the slew of headlines is only topped by the simple understanding that Camden Public Schools just can’t stop screwing up.

The latest article focused on cheating. In New Jersey, there are other names for cheating, of course. When you spend more per urban student than just about any place in the country, you can’t crush student futures, or taxpayer expectations, with words like cheating. You develop subtler monikers like "adult interference," which was at the heart of Department of Education investigations into numerous schools in Camden this year–two of which were elementary schools that tested in the top six in the state in standardized test scores two years ago. With state monitors present the following year as a result of these unusually high scores, the schools, unfortunately, didn’t test in the top 600, with one of them watching its math scores plummet 77 points from 100% to 23% proficient. Notably, after the scores were released, the principals at these schools retired and now wait at home, collecting their pensions, fearing their names will appear on Edspresso.

Damn…that adult interference is pretty effective. Or as Yoda might say, "Powerful stuff, it is."

The cheating in Camden Public Schools, as it turns out, is not a new phenomenon. Teachers interviewed under cover of darkness by the Inquirer fessed up to doctoring grades, leaving prompts present in classrooms, and openly telling children to reconsider their answers, as far back as the early 1980s. There are so many years’ worth of abuse in there it’s likely difficult for one of the poor kids in Camden to count them all, despite their near $20,000 annual worth to the school hierarchy. When pressed further, a counselor responded simply "If I don’t [alter grades], I won’t have a job next year."

How quaint.

More troubling, perhaps, is that the district’s leadership seems to know all of this is happening, yet is unable, or unwilling, to act upon it. "We recognize that the problems began long before this current board," says School Board President and frequent apologist Philip Freeman. Thankfully, the Inquirer chose not to include Freeman’s formulaic weekly response to district criticism, which phrases out as part admission, and part denunciation of anyone questioning his ability to manage the district. Though it’s worth a laugh, he’s done it so many times lately its novelty has worn thin.

Between this lunacy is the toxic nugget of something deeper…a pattern of cold excuses that find their genesis in the "pressures" of lifting low achievement for low-income kids. No Child Left Behind and its goals and timetables, societal expectations, editorial boards–apparently they are all exerting some painful, downward force on all of the altruistic, top-flight instructors in Camden Public Schools. Some force so sinister they are compelled to cheat; almost watching themselves "interfere" as if some possessed group of disembodied sages. You can almost hear them chanting "It was like I was watching myself from afar, and I just couldn’t stop it. I wanted to take down the periodic table hanging on the wall during the exam, but I couldn’t!" Camden Public Schools have become to cheating what Grand Theft Auto III was, allegedly, to the teenaged mind: a playground absent a social compass where achievement and failure are rewarded equally, and always with more money.

What has become painfully clear here, in what is arguably America’s worst school district-so wracked by scandal and inefficacy that it would be comic if there weren’t real lives at stake-is that the public school system and its leaders in Camden, and indeed in many other places across the country, are lined up on one side, and the children, parents, and taxpayers are lined up on the other. The school-and-union leaders in Camden know the game they play–they know the brand they wield when they invoke the apple pie of "public school" on the masses. And most importantly, they know when to use that brand as a shield with poverty as its grip, and when to use it as a sword to parry the kind of controversy that is a weekly event in Camden Public Schools. Controversy that, if it reared its head in Haddonfield, or Princeton–two of the state’s oldest most affluent towns that spend on par with Camden–would have residents calling for the superintendent’s head on a stick.

But hell, it’s Camden. And these are public schools with poor kids. You expect something better?

And that noise you hear off in the distance?  That’s the sound of the shield being brought to bear, and the sword being unsheathed for another round of educational last man standing.

Derrell Bradford is deputy director of E3.