Newark Public Schools students are improving faster than most, but they are still behind

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Newark’s public school students are improving faster than nearly every district in the nation, but are performing two grade levels behind the national average in math and reading, according to a new national education report released this month.

Researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth found that Newark Public Schools students learned at an average rate of 1.23 grade levels per year in reading and math during the 2022 through 2025 school years, according to the fourth annual national Education Scorecard released last week. That means Newark students, on average, gained a little more than a grade level’s worth of skills every year post-pandemic.

Researchers analyzed state test scores from third to eighth grade for over 5,000 school districts in 38 states, allowing them to compare learning rates nationally and show where students’ academic recovery stands. Learning rates measure how much students improve year over year, regardless of where they started.

The researchers ranked Newark in the 93rd percentile nationally among school districts and found that Newark students outpaced the national and state average learning rate. Similar districts identified by researchers, including Trenton, Vineland, New Brunswick, Camden City, and Atlantic City, averaged about eighth-tenths of a grade level of learning each year.

But a closer look at the data shows that Newark Public Schools students performed 2.36 grade levels below the 2019 national average, according to the report. That gap highlights the disruption Newark families experienced during the pandemic and the slow recovery it’s taking to get students up to speed.

During Thursday’s school board meeting, Superintendent Roger León said the new study grounds the district “in knowing that we’re in a place where we can actually move from.”

“We are very, very confident in the work that we’re doing, and that we’re also cognizant that there’s a lot of work that needs to occur to continue to move the pendulum in the direction that we need,” León said Thursday.

In a press release issued late Thursday, board President Hasani Council said the report’s findings “reflect years of focused investment, strong leadership, dedicated teachers, and the resilience of Newark’s students and families.”

New Jersey received roughly $4.3 billion in federal pandemic relief for K-12 schools, about $3,200 per student. The national report found that the gains in many high-poverty districts were driven by that federal support.

Last spring, only 34% of Newark Public Schools’ students in grades 3-9 passed the state’s English Language Arts test, while 21.1% of students passed the math test. Although those numbers lag behind statewide averages, they are a slight improvement from levels seen right after the pandemic. Across New Jersey, 53% of students passed the statewide English Language Arts test in 2025.

Paula White, the executive director of JerseyCAN, a statewide education advocacy group, said that money “mattered greatly,” but even after that massive investment, middle and higher poverty districts are still behind pre-pandemic levels.

“Adhering to the status quo will only keep New Jersey in our troubling middle-of-the-pack position,” White said. She also called the statewide results on the national report card “a sluggish portrait of New Jersey’s education recovery” and urged the state to adopt science-of-reading reforms, invest in literacy coaches and high-impact tutoring, and tackle chronic absenteeism on an “accelerated timetable.”

The report also found that states that enacted literacy reforms, such as Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee, produced measurable reading gains while states that didn’t, including New Jersey, did not. Across the country, results are gloomier, and researchers warn that the U.S. is experiencing a reading recession, which predates pandemic school disruptions.

“The bottom line is that we must do more,” White added.

The full report is available at educationscorecard.org

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.