EdTribune NJ - New Jersey Education Data

New Jersey's Charter Schools Have Higher Chronic Absence Rates, but the Averages Hide a Deeper Story

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

College Achieve Greater Asbury Park Charter School has a chronic absenteeism rate of 1.1%. LEAD Charter School's rate is 71.4%. Both are New Jersey charter schools. Both numbers appear in the same state database. And both get averaged together to produce a single statistic that is supposed to tell us something meaningful about charter school attendance.

That average, 16.7% for the state's 85 charter districts in 2023-24, is 3.9 percentage points higher than the 12.8% mean for 564 traditional districts. It is a real gap. It has persisted for years. And it obscures almost as much as it reveals.

The headline number

Charter districts in New Jersey have posted higher mean chronic absenteeism rates than traditional districts in every year the state has reported the data. Before COVID, the gap was 3.5 percentage points: charter districts averaged 11.9% in 2018-19 compared to 8.4% for traditional districts.

The pandemic blew it open. By 2021-22, charter districts averaged 22.0% compared to 15.6% for traditional districts, a 6.4 percentage point spread. Two years of recovery have narrowed it, but not to where it was. The 2023-24 gap of 3.9 points is wider than the pre-COVID baseline.

Seven of the 20 highest chronic absenteeism rates in the state belong to charter districts, despite charters making up just 13% of all districts. LEAD Charter School's 71.4% rate is the highest in New Jersey by more than 20 points. Eight charter districts top 30%.

What the mean does not say

Switch from the mean to the median and the picture shifts. The median charter rate in 2023-24 was 14.6%, compared to 11.5% for traditional districts, a gap of 3.1 points instead of 3.9. Before COVID, the median gap was even narrower: 1.3 percentage points in 2018-19.

The difference between mean and median tells a specific statistical story: a small number of charter districts with very high rates are pulling the average upward. Remove the eight charter districts above 30% chronic absenteeism and the charter sector mean drops to 14.4%, barely above the statewide average of 14.9%.

That matters because 43 of 85 charter districts, just over half, posted chronic rates below the state average in 2023-24. The charter sector is not uniformly worse. It is more variable. The interquartile range for charter districts runs from 9.9% to 21.7%, nearly 12 points wide. For traditional districts, it spans 8.0% to 16.2%, about 8 points. The charter distribution is flatter, with longer tails in both directions.

The best and the worst

The five lowest chronic absenteeism rates among charter districts in 2023-24 would rank among the best performers in the entire state regardless of sector. College Achieve Greater Asbury Park (1.1%), Benjamin Banneker Preparatory (2.6%), Soaring Heights (2.9%), Central Jersey College Prep (3.7%), and University Academy (3.8%) all posted rates below 4%, figures that most affluent suburban districts do not reach.

At the other extreme, LEAD Charter School's 71.4% rate means nearly three in four students missed 10% or more of school days. Roseville Community (39.4%), TEAM Academy (37.7%), Hope Community (36.3%), and Kindle Education (31.7%) round out the high end.

The spread between the best and worst charter district, 70.3 percentage points, dwarfs the traditional sector's range. That single fact makes sector-level comparisons inherently slippery.

Why the comparison is not apples to apples

New Jersey's charter schools are concentrated in urban communities. According to the New Jersey Charter Schools Association, charter students are 44% Black, 41% Latino, and 76% economically disadvantaged. Charters disproportionately serve the student populations that face the highest chronic absenteeism rates statewide: Black students averaged 21.4% in 2023-24, economically disadvantaged students 21.2%, compared to 11.4% for white students.

A comparison between the average charter district and the average traditional district is, in part, a comparison between urban and suburban, between high-poverty and low-poverty, between the demographics that struggle most with attendance and the demographics that struggle least. The gap does not disappear when you account for this, but it shrinks.

The subgroup data underscores the point. Among charter districts reporting Black student rates, the mean was 19.8%. Among traditional districts, it was 15.9%. The charter premium narrows to 3.9 points within the same racial subgroup, roughly the same as the overall gap, suggesting that demographics explain some but not all of the difference.

The gap that widened

What COVID did to the charter-traditional divide is harder to explain away with demographics alone.

Before the pandemic, the median charter rate (8.7%) was within shouting distance of the median traditional rate (7.4%). By 2020-21, the first year back, the median charter rate had nearly doubled to 14.3% while the traditional median barely moved, from 7.4% to 7.3%. The median gap exploded from 1.3 points to 7.0 points in a single year.

It has closed since then but not fully. The 2023-24 median gap of 3.1 points is still more than twice its pre-COVID level. Something about the pandemic hit charter attendance harder, and the recovery has been slower to take hold for the typical charter school.

One possibility: many charter schools lack the transportation infrastructure of traditional districts. New Jersey requires districts to bus K-8 students living more than two miles away, but charter schools often draw students from across district lines with no guaranteed transportation. Families who relied on public transit or carpools during pre-COVID years may have found the return-to-school logistics harder to sustain.

What accountability looks like

New Jersey requires any school with chronic absenteeism above 10% to develop an Attendance Review Team and corrective action plan. Charter schools are subject to the same requirement. In 2023-24, 63 of 85 charter districts (74.1%) exceeded that threshold, compared to 332 of 564 traditional districts (58.9%).

Charter schools face an additional layer of accountability that traditional districts do not: their charters can be revoked. A charter school with persistently poor performance risks non-renewal by the state Commissioner of Education. Whether chronic absenteeism alone has ever triggered a non-renewal is unclear from available public records, but it factors into the School Performance Reports that inform renewal decisions.

The number that matters most

The most useful number in this analysis may not be the gap between sectors. It may be 43, the number of charter districts that beat the state average. Or 8, the number above 30% that drag the sector mean upward. Or 1.1%, the rate at College Achieve Greater Asbury Park, a charter school serving economically disadvantaged students in a city where attendance is typically a struggle.

The charter sector is not a monolith. It contains schools operating in similar communities with similar demographics that produce wildly different attendance outcomes. That variation, more than the sector-level average, is where the actionable information lives. A charter school in Trenton posting 5.1% chronic absenteeism and a charter school in Newark posting 37.7% are both charters. The question worth asking is not which sector is better but what the best performers in both sectors are doing that the worst are not.

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Newark Cut Chronic Absenteeism by More Than Half

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2018-19, more than one in four Newark^↗ students was chronically absent. The district's rate, 26.8%, was 16.2 percentage points above the state average, worse than all but a handful of New Jersey's urban districts. Superintendent Roger Leon had just taken office as the first locally selected leader in more than two decades, following 25 years of state control that ended with a unanimous vote by the state board of education.

Five years later, Newark's chronic absenteeism rate is 11.5%. That is 3.4 percentage points below the New Jersey statewide average of 14.9%.

The reversal is not marginal. In 2019, Newark's rate was nearly identical to Paterson^↗'s (27.6%) and far worse than Jersey City^↗'s (15.2%) or Elizabeth^↗'s (11.9%). By 2024, Newark had the lowest chronic absenteeism of any major urban district in the state. It did not merely recover from COVID. It erased the gap, crossed through zero, and kept going.

The scale of the drop

The 15.3 percentage point decline from 2019 to 2024 represents a 57% reduction. Among New Jersey's 605 districts with data in both years, Newark posted the second-largest improvement, trailing only Trenton^↗ STEM-to-Civics Charter School, an institution small enough that year-over-year swings are routine. Among traditional districts of any meaningful size, Newark's improvement is unmatched.

Every demographic subgroup in the district now has a lower chronic absenteeism rate than it did before the pandemic. That is not a common outcome. Statewide, 87.1% of districts have chronic absenteeism rates higher than their 2018-19 levels. Newark is among the 12.9% that broke through.

The subgroup numbers are where the story sharpens. Students with disabilities went from 36.3% chronically absent to 15.4%, a 20.9 percentage point drop. Black students went from 35.3% to 14.9%, a 20.4 point improvement. Economically disadvantaged students dropped from 26.2% to 11.0%. English learners fell from 16.6% to 9.1%.

How Newark compares to its peers

Camden^↗'s chronic absenteeism rate in 2023-24 was 46.9%, nearly half of all students. Paterson stood at 35.7%. Trenton at 34.0%. Jersey City at 23.8%. Elizabeth, the closest peer, at 15.8%.

Newark, the largest of the group with roughly 40,000 students, sits at 11.5%.

That gap is not explained by demographics. Newark serves a student body that is overwhelmingly low-income, majority Black and Hispanic, with high rates of English learners and students receiving special education services. Camden and Paterson serve similar populations. The difference is in what happened inside the schools.

What Newark did

The district deployed a layered strategy that combined personal outreach with institutional infrastructure. The Communities In Schools partnership, launched in 2023-24, placed attendance counselors in six schools to connect families with resources. The district has expanded the program by at least five schools per year since.

The "Take Five" program, also introduced in 2023-24, assigns each teacher a small group of at-risk students to maintain regular contact with families, including reminders at the start of the school year and check-ins during absences. Incentives ranged from gift cards to tickets at Prudential Center, provided through a partnership with the Devils Youth Foundation.

But the improvement predates these specific programs. Newark's chronic rate fell from 32.0% in 2017-18 to 26.8% in 2018-19, Leon's first year. Apart from the 2022 statewide spike, the trajectory has been downward in every year the district has data. The 2021 figure, 16.6% during a year of widespread remote and hybrid learning, is difficult to interpret, though Newark's attendance infrastructure was already expanding by then. Even the 2022 spike to 28.1%, which hit every New Jersey district, was followed by a 15.4 point single-year drop to 12.7% in 2022-23.

The equity dimension

Newark's Black students now have a 14.9% chronic absenteeism rate. The statewide rate for Black students is 21.4%. A Black student in Newark is less likely to be chronically absent than the average Black student anywhere else in the state.

In 2019, Newark's Black students had a 35.3% chronic rate, roughly double the statewide average for Black students. By 2024, the district had not only closed the gap but inverted it. Newark's Black student rate fell 20.4 points while the statewide Black rate barely moved.

The Council of the Great City Schools ranked Newark second nationally for lowest absenteeism in grades 8 and 9, and third in grades 3 through 6, based on 2023-24 data. The same report placed the district first in the nation for lowest out-of-school suspension rates across all demographic groups.

"This national recognition means that our work is transforming Newark Public Schools. It is clear evidence that the district is leading its students in the essential indicators." -- Superintendent Roger Leon, Newark Board of Education

The discipline connection matters. New Jersey bans out-of-school suspension for K-2 students except in cases of violent or sexual conduct. Newark appears to have taken this further. When students are not pushed out of school for behavioral infractions, they are more likely to attend. The relationship between suspension policy and attendance data is not coincidental.

What the data cannot explain

Three things are genuinely unclear.

The 2020-21 figure, 16.6%, is lower than both the pre-COVID baseline and the subsequent 2022 peak. This pattern, where a COVID-year chronic rate dips below normal, is unusual and may reflect different attendance counting methodologies during remote learning. The state did not collect chronic absenteeism data for 2019-20 at all.

It is also unclear how much of Newark's improvement reflects changes in how absences are counted or reported versus genuine changes in student behavior. Classification methodology can shift without public announcement, and the 2018-to-2024 span covers a period of significant change in state reporting requirements.

Finally, while the data shows what happened, it cannot prove which specific intervention caused the change. The district implemented multiple strategies simultaneously, hired attendance counselors, partnered with community organizations, changed discipline policy, expanded wraparound services, and opened a reengagement center for disconnected youth. The decline started before most of these programs were formally launched, which suggests either that earlier, less visible work was already effective or that structural changes in school culture predated the named programs.

What comes next

Newark reported its chronic rate dropped further to 10.4% in 2024-25, the third consecutive year of improvement. Elementary students are at 8.8%. The trajectory has not stalled.

But the composition of the remaining 10.4% hints at what comes next. Students experiencing homelessness had a 26.4% chronic rate in 2023-24. Students with disabilities sat at 15.4%. These are populations whose barriers to attendance -- unstable housing, medical appointments, transportation that depends on a parent who cannot miss a shift -- do not yield to mentoring programs or gift-card incentives. Newark has driven its overall rate below the state average. The harder work is ahead.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Paterson's Black Students Trail Every Group in Attendance Recovery

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: New Jersey 2023-24 Chronic Absenteeism.

At Paterson's^↗ School 6, more than half of all students were chronically absent in 2023-24. A reporting investigation found that the school, along with several neighbors, had not filed a corrective action plan since 2021-22, despite state requirements for districts above 10%.

School 6 is an extreme case. But the district-wide numbers tell a version of the same story, and the sharpest version belongs to Paterson's Black students.

45.9%

That is the chronic absenteeism rate for Black students in Paterson in 2023-24. Nearly one in two missed 18 or more school days. Before the pandemic, the rate was 35.2% -- already more than double the statewide average for all students. COVID pushed it to 59.0% in 2021-22. Two years of recovery have brought it down, but not nearly enough.

The total district rate followed a similar arc: 27.6% before the pandemic, 49.6% at peak, 35.7% now. The difference is that Black students started higher, climbed higher, and have come back less.

Hispanic students, who make up the majority of Paterson's enrollment, have recovered 63.8% of their pandemic increase, falling from 49.5% to 34.7%. The overall rate has recovered 63.2%. Black students have recovered just 55.0%, leaving them 10.7 percentage points above their own pre-pandemic baseline.

The gap within the gap

Every subgroup in Paterson runs far above state averages. But the internal disparities matter too.

The Black-white chronic absenteeism gap within Paterson was 16.2 percentage points before COVID. It blew out to 29.4 points at the pandemic peak in 2021-22, when 59.0% of Black students and 29.6% of white students were chronically absent. The gap has narrowed since then, but at 19.6 points in 2023-24, it remains wider than it was before the pandemic.

White students in Paterson are having their own attendance crisis -- 26.3% chronically absent is more than double the statewide white rate of 11.4%. But white students have recovered the least of any subgroup: just 37.6% of the way back from their peak. Their chronic rate actually got worse from 2021-22 to 2022-23, climbing from 29.6% to 30.7% before declining. For Black students, recovery has been slow. For white students in Paterson, it barely started until last year.

Four times the statewide white rate

Paterson's Black chronic rate of 45.9% is exactly four times the statewide white rate of 11.4%. That ratio has been remarkably stable: it was 4.4x before the pandemic, peaked at 4.8x in 2020-21, and has settled back to 4.0x.

The stability of that ratio is, in its own way, damning. It means the structural forces that produce the gap -- concentrated poverty, housing instability, inadequate transportation, health care access -- have not changed.

Paterson's Black rate also runs far above the statewide Black rate of 21.4%. The gap between Paterson's Black students and Black students statewide was 17.6 points before COVID. It exploded to 30.6 points at peak. At 24.5 points in 2023-24, it has closed somewhat but remains nearly 7 points wider than it was before the pandemic.

The most vulnerable

Chronic absenteeism in Paterson climbs further at every layer of disadvantage. Students experiencing homelessness hit 64.1% in 2023-24, up from 52.0% pre-COVID. Students in foster care reached 45.2%. Students with disabilities: 42.4%, up from 33.9%.

Economically disadvantaged students, a category that covers the vast majority of Paterson's enrollment, sat at 36.4% -- 9.4 points above their pre-COVID rate and barely distinguishable from the district's overall 35.7%.

The recovery picture is uneven. English learners have recovered the most (69.4% of their pandemic increase), followed by Hispanic students (63.8%) and the overall rate (63.2%). Black students (55.0%) and students with disabilities (53.8%) have barely crossed the halfway mark. White students, at 37.6%, are the furthest behind, though their lower absolute rate means the raw numbers are smaller.

Newark went the other direction

The comparison that should keep Paterson administrators up at night is 30 miles east on Route 80.

Newark's Black chronic absenteeism rate was 35.3% in 2018-19 -- essentially identical to Paterson's 35.2%. By 2023-24, Newark had driven its Black rate down to 14.9%. Paterson's was 45.9%. A gap of 1 point became a gap of 31.

Trenton's trajectory has been wilder -- its Black rate spiked to 73.0% in 2020-21 before settling to 38.9% -- but it too has recovered more of its pandemic increase than Paterson. Newark is the outlier: a district with comparable poverty and demographics that cut chronic absenteeism for Black students by more than half in five years, using attendance counselors, a truancy task force, and systematic family engagement.

Whether Newark's approach is replicable in Paterson is an open question. Newark had years of state intervention that built certain institutional capacities. Paterson's challenges include a 44.5% foreign-born population, families who travel internationally during the school year, and what district officials have described as "menstrual poverty" -- girls missing school because they cannot afford basic hygiene products.

What is being done

Paterson hired chronic absenteeism specialists in 2018, and the district uses compulsory attendance specialists to follow up with students. But the state data suggests these interventions have not yet bent the curve for the students who need them most.

New Jersey's funding structure creates a distinctive dynamic. Unlike California, Texas, and many other states, New Jersey funds schools based on enrollment, not average daily attendance. Paterson does not lose per-pupil revenue when students miss school. The financial pressure to chase attendance is indirect. The academic consequences are not.

In 2018-19, Newark's Black chronic absenteeism rate was 35.3%. Paterson's was 35.2%. Five years later, Newark's is 14.9%. Paterson's is 45.9%. Same state, similar demographics, comparable poverty rates, 30 miles apart on Route 80, and a 31-point gap in outcomes for Black students. Whatever Newark did that Paterson did not, it produced one of the starkest divergences in attendance equity anywhere in the country.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Only 1 in 8 NJ Districts Have Recovered to Pre-COVID Attendance

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In Westfield, 2.3% of students were chronically absent last school year. Thirty miles south in Camden, the figure was 46.9%. Both numbers appear in the same state report, filed under the same metric, subject to the same 10% threshold that is supposed to trigger corrective action.

New Jersey's statewide chronic absenteeism rate fell to 14.9% in 2023-24, down from its pandemic peak of 18.1% two years earlier. That improvement is real, and it earned the state the second-lowest chronic absenteeism rate in the country, behind only Alabama. But the state-level number conceals a harder truth: of the 605 districts with pre-COVID comparison data, only 78 have returned to their 2018-19 attendance levels. That is 12.9%, roughly one in eight.

The other seven in eight are still operating in a world the pandemic made.

The distance from normal

Before COVID, 10.6% of New Jersey's 1.4 million public school students were chronically absent, defined as missing 10% or more of the school year. That baseline held steady for at least two years. Then it jumped to 13.1% in 2020-21, spiked to 18.1% in 2021-22, and has been falling since: 16.6% in 2022-23, 14.9% in 2023-24.

The trajectory looks encouraging in isolation. The state recovered 3.2 percentage points from its peak in two years, clawing back 1.5 points in the first year and 1.7 in the second. But it remains 4.3 points above the pre-COVID floor. At this pace, reaching the old baseline would take another two to three years, assuming the trend continues, which is far from certain.

Among individual districts, the recovery is not just slow. For most, it has not happened. The median non-recovered district sits 4.9 percentage points above its pre-COVID rate. More than 60% of districts are at least two points worse off. Seventy-one districts are more than 10 points above their pre-pandemic levels. Ninety-one districts, 14.0% of all districts reporting data, posted their worst chronic absenteeism rate on record in 2023-24.

Camden, Paterson, Trenton: the anchor cities

The state's worst chronic absenteeism concentrates in a handful of urban districts where rates were already elevated before the pandemic and then accelerated.

Camden City School District, which has been under state operation since 2013, recorded a 46.9% chronic absenteeism rate in 2023-24. That is 13.1 points higher than its pre-COVID rate of 33.8%. Nearly half the district's students missed at least 18 days of school. Paterson reached 35.7%, up from 27.6%. Trenton hit 34.0%, up from 30.0%.

At KIPP Cooper Norcross, a Renaissance school in Camden, chronic absenteeism reached 45.5% in 2023-24, more than double its pre-pandemic rate of 21.1%. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Camden Prep, another city Renaissance school, saw 50.2% of its students chronically absent, up from 30.0% before the pandemic. Andrew Bell, the superintendent in neighboring Woodbury, told the Inquirer: "There are so many nuances of why kids aren't in school."

Then there is Newark, which defied the pattern entirely.

The Newark exception

Newark Public School District, the state's largest, dropped from a 26.8% chronic absenteeism rate in 2018-19 to 11.5% in 2023-24, a 15.3 percentage point improvement. No other major district in the state came close. The district's chronic rate is now below the statewide average.

The improvement continued into the current school year. Newark reported that its overall chronic absenteeism rate dropped further to 10.4% in 2024-25, with an average attendance rate of 95.1%. Superintendent Leon credited "the hard work of our families, staff, and community partners." The district's Office of Attendance, Truancy Task Force, and attendance counselors are cited as driving the improvement.

What makes Newark's trajectory unusual is not just the magnitude but the consistency. Its chronic rate fell in three of the four post-pandemic years, while Camden and Paterson fluctuated wildly. Newark's 2024 rate of 11.5% is less than half its 2019 rate. The data does not suggest any structural or reporting changes that would explain this, though the state performance reports do not fully document methodology shifts at the district level. The improvement appears genuine.

The question is whether Newark's approach can be replicated. State Board member Nedd Johnson told Chalkbeat that "the house is on fire here when you have that percentage of students missing 18 days or more," referring to the statewide picture. Newark may have put out its fire. Most districts have not.

Every subgroup is worse off

The pandemic's attendance damage was not distributed evenly, and neither is the recovery. Every major student group in New Jersey has a higher chronic absenteeism rate in 2023-24 than in 2018-19.

Hispanic students saw the largest increase: 5.3 percentage points, from 13.1% to 18.4%. Economically disadvantaged students rose 5.2 points to 21.2%. English learners climbed 5.0 points to 17.2%. Students receiving special education services increased 4.5 points to 21.0%.

Black students had the highest absolute chronic absenteeism rate at 21.4%, though their increase since pre-COVID (3.8 points) was smaller than Hispanic or economically disadvantaged students. The Black-white gap in chronic absenteeism was 9.6 points before the pandemic, spiked to 17.5 points in 2020-21, and has narrowed back to 10.0 points. It remains wider than it was in 2018-19.

Students experiencing homelessness face a different order of magnitude: 40.9% were chronically absent in 2023-24. Students in foster care reached 27.4%.

Asian and Pacific Islander students had both the lowest rate (7.3%) and the smallest increase (2.5 points) since pre-COVID.

The charter sector gap

Charter schools entered the pandemic with chronic absenteeism rates roughly comparable to traditional districts: a median of 8.7% versus 7.4% in 2018-19. The pandemic blew that gap open. By 2021-22, the charter median hit 18.1% while traditional districts reached 13.2%. Two years of recovery have narrowed the difference, but charters still sit at a median of 14.6% compared to 11.5% for traditional districts.

The recovery rates tell a similar story. Among districts with pre-COVID comparison data, 12.4% of traditional districts have recovered versus 16.7% of charters. The charter sector's slightly higher recovery rate is misleading: charters fell further and have more ground to make up. Their median rate is still 3.1 points above traditional districts.

The pattern is likely driven partly by where charters operate. New Jersey's charter schools concentrate in the same urban districts, Camden, Newark, Paterson, where chronic absenteeism is most severe. A charter school in Camden faces many of the same attendance barriers as the traditional district, regardless of governance model.

What the state is doing about it

New Jersey requires every district with a chronic absenteeism rate above 10% to establish an Attendance Review Team and develop a corrective action plan. Before the pandemic, about 32% of schools exceeded that threshold. By 2022-23, more than 70% did.

In December, Governor Murphy signed S3776, establishing an 18-member Chronic Absenteeism Task Force charged with examining root causes and recommending interventions. The task force includes educators, community members, and researchers, and must report findings within one year. Chalkbeat reported that Nelida Valentin of the Princeton Area Community Foundation called for "a coordinated state approach" to "help strengthen and connect what is happening on the ground."

Separately, the state's NJ4S program, a student mental health support network launched in 2023, reached 281,972 students with Tier 1 services by mid-2025, an 18% increase over its first year. The program addresses one of the four root cause categories the state has identified: school aversion driven by anxiety and mental health challenges.

Whether these efforts are sufficient depends on what the data is actually measuring. If most of the post-pandemic increase reflects a genuine behavioral shift, where families now view occasional absences as more acceptable, policy interventions face a cultural headwind. If it reflects specific, addressable barriers such as transportation, health access, or safety concerns, then targeted programs can move the needle. The data cannot distinguish between these explanations. The task force is designed to try.

The 73.5% and the 24.8%

There is one encouraging signal buried in the district-level data. In 2023-24, 73.5% of districts improved their chronic absenteeism rate year-over-year, compared to 51.0% the year before. The direction of travel, for most districts, is correct.

But 24.8% of districts got worse between 2022-23 and 2023-24, even as the state rate fell. And improvement is not the same as recovery. A district that moved from 25% to 22% chronic absenteeism improved. It is still more than double its pre-COVID rate. The state's 2nd-place national ranking is real, but it reflects a nationwide collapse in attendance norms, not a return to pre-pandemic health.

The Rutgers State Policy Lab noted that New Jersey could learn from Alabama's targeted approach despite Alabama having a far higher share of economically disadvantaged students, 64.7% versus New Jersey's 38.1%. Relative performance against peer states is useful. It does not change the fact that 527 New Jersey school districts are operating with higher chronic absenteeism than they had before the pandemic, and 91 are at their worst levels ever recorded.

The task force has one year to produce recommendations. The 605 districts have students right now.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

New Jersey's Attendance Recovery Stalls at 43%

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In Ocean Gate, a barrier island borough in Ocean County with a single school and fewer than 300 students, chronic absenteeism hit 43% in 2023-24. Before the pandemic, it was 7%. The statewide rate has been falling for two consecutive years, and New Jersey ranks second-lowest nationally. Ocean Gate has gotten worse every single year since 2021.

That is the paradox at the center of New Jersey's attendance recovery. The state number moves in the right direction. The district numbers tell a different story.

The statewide picture

New Jersey's chronic absenteeism rate peaked at 18.1% in 2021-22, the worst in the state's reporting history. Two years of improvement brought it to 14.9% by 2023-24, a 3.2 percentage point drop. The state now ranks second-lowest nationally, trailing only Alabama at 14.8%.

That framing flatters the recovery. The pre-COVID rate was 10.6%. New Jersey has clawed back 3.2 of 7.5 percentage points, or 42.7% of the gap. At the current pace of 1.6 points per year, the state would not return to its pre-pandemic baseline until 2027.

The year-over-year improvements have been modest: 1.5 points in 2022-23, 1.7 points in 2023-24. The initial surge was far steeper. Chronic absenteeism climbed 2.5 points in the first year back from COVID (2020-21), then accelerated to a 5.0-point jump in 2021-22. Two years of recovery have not yet undone one year of deterioration.

172 districts are worse now than at the pandemic peak

The state average obscures a distribution that would unsettle any education official.

Of 605 districts with comparable data across 2019, 2022, and 2024, only 78 (12.9%) have fully recovered to their pre-COVID chronic absenteeism rates. At the other end, 172 districts (28.4%) posted a higher chronic rate in 2023-24 than they did at the statewide peak in 2021-22. The median district has recovered just 32.4% of its pandemic-era increase.

The 47 districts on four-year worsening streaks, getting worse every year since 2021, span the state's geography and demography. They include Keansburg (33.8%, up from 24.3% pre-COVID) on the Raritan Bay shore, Haledon (24.6%) in Passaic County, and Lacey Township (20.7%) in Ocean County. Some are tiny. Livingston, a well-resourced Essex County suburb, is on the list at 4.2%, a rate that would be enviable in Camden but represents a steady annual climb since 2021.

The urban divergence

The largest cities tell four different stories.

Newark, the state's largest district, has pulled off something close to unprecedented. Its chronic rate fell from 26.8% in 2018-19 to 11.5% in 2023-24, a 15.3 percentage point improvement that brought it well below the statewide average and its own pre-COVID baseline. In 2024-25, the district reported the rate dropped further to 10.4%, with elementary chronic absenteeism at 8.8%.

"These results reflect the hard work of our families, staff, and community partners to keep students engaged, supported, and present." -- Newark Superintendent Roger León, Newark Public Schools, 2025

Camden City moved in the opposite direction. After an initial recovery from 67.2% (2021-22) to 40.7% (2022-23), the rate reversed, climbing back to 46.9% in 2023-24. Nearly half of all Camden students are chronically absent. KIPP Cooper Norcross, a Renaissance school operating in the city, saw its rate jump from 21.1% pre-COVID to 45.5%, the largest increase among districts with 500 or more students. Camden Prep, operated by Uncommon Schools, hit 50.2%.

Paterson (35.7%) and Trenton (34.0%) have improved from their peaks but remain roughly where they were before the pandemic, or worse. Paterson's pre-COVID rate was 27.6%. Trenton's was 30.0%.

The gap between Newark and the other three cities is not new, but COVID widened it. In 2018-19, Newark's rate was comparable to Paterson's and lower than Camden's. By 2023-24, Newark's rate was less than a third of Camden's.

Where the gap is widest

The districts furthest from recovery are not all urban. Ocean Gate (a shore community), Seaside Heights (a boardwalk town), and Weymouth Township (rural Atlantic County) all saw chronic rates climb by more than 20 percentage points since 2019. Several charter schools appear on the list: Hope Community Charter School (up 26.2 points to 36.3%), Principle Academy Charter School (up 21 points to 27.7%), and Link Community Charter School (up 18.2 points to 21.5%).

Charter districts averaged a 16.7% chronic rate in 2023-24, compared to 12.8% for traditional districts. That gap has persisted since before the pandemic but widened during it. In 2018-19, the median charter rate (7.9%) was close to the median traditional rate (7.7%). By 2023-24, median charter rates (14.6%) had pulled substantially ahead of traditional districts (11.5%).

What the state is doing about it

Governor Tahesha Way signed legislation in January 2026 creating an 18-member Chronic Absenteeism Task Force. The group, sponsored by Senators Shirley K. Turner and Angela V. McKnight, has one year to deliver findings and legislative recommendations. Its mandate includes root-cause analysis, a review of discipline policies, and an assessment of COVID's lasting effects on student engagement.

"Attendance is an indicator of whether students feel connected to their schools and supported in their learning environments." -- Senator Angela V. McKnight (D-Hudson), Hudson Reporter, 2026

New Jersey's funding structure matters here. Unlike California, Texas, and many other states, New Jersey funds schools based on enrollment, not average daily attendance. Districts do not lose per-pupil revenue when students miss school. The fiscal incentive to chase attendance is indirect, flowing through academic outcomes and intervention costs rather than direct budget impact. That structural difference makes New Jersey's attendance challenges qualitatively different from states where every absent student reduces revenue.

The state already requires districts with chronic rates above 10% to establish Attendance Review Teams, a threshold that 367 of 649 districts (56.5%) now exceed. The NJ4S school mental health program served 281,972 people with Tier 1 services in 2024-25, an 18% year-over-year increase. The state also hired 69 new school-based mental health professionals through the School-Based Mental Health Services Program.

The Newark question

The one data point that complicates any statewide narrative is Newark. A district with 37,000 students, concentrated poverty, and a majority-Black and Hispanic student body cut its chronic absenteeism rate by more than half in five years. Its chronic rate is now lower than the statewide average. Newark's Truancy Task Force, attendance counselors, and court-referral system are well-documented. The question the data cannot answer is whether Newark's approach is replicable, or whether its success reflects conditions (stable district leadership, community partner infrastructure, specific state interventions from its years under state control) that do not transfer easily.

What the data can say: Newark is the only major urban district in the state that achieved pre-COVID attendance levels. It did so while Camden, Paterson, and Trenton all remained at least 4 percentage points above their pre-COVID baselines.

The Task Force has a year. The data suggests the easy gains, the districts where recovery was mostly a matter of returning to normalcy, have already been captured. The 172 districts still above their pandemic peak, and the 47 getting worse every year, represent a harder problem. Those are the places where chronic absenteeism has settled into something structural, not a temporary disruption waiting to resolve itself.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Kindergarten Crossed the Line High School Never Did

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2019, a kindergartner in New Jersey was roughly as likely to be chronically absent as a sixth-grader, and far less likely than a high school senior. The grade-level hierarchy was stable and predictable: high schools ran the worst chronic absenteeism rates at 14.7%, elementary schools the best at 8.1%.

COVID demolished that order. By 2022, kindergarten chronic absenteeism had nearly doubled to 24.1%, vaulting past high school's 19.4%. Two years of recovery have not restored the old pattern. Kindergarten sits at 18.3% in 2024, still 5.8 percentage points above its pre-COVID rate. High school, by contrast, has recovered 61.7% of its COVID spike and is only 1.8 points above where it started.

The youngest students got hit hardest and are healing slowest.

What kindergarten looks like at 18.3%

At 18.3%, roughly one in five kindergartners across New Jersey missed 18 or more days of the 180-day school year. That matters more in kindergarten than in almost any other grade. Federal research has found that chronic absence in the early grades disrupts foundational literacy and numeracy, increases the likelihood of grade repetition, and predicts behavioral problems in later years.

The gap is not abstract. First grade chronic absenteeism in 2024 was 14.4%, up from 9.4% pre-COVID, a 5.0 percentage point increase. Second grade: 8.2% to 13.1%, a 4.9 point jump. Third grade: 7.6% to 12.0%, a 4.4 point increase. The damage fades as you move up the grade ladder, but in every elementary grade, the chronic rate is at least 35% higher than it was in 2019.

The pre-K problem dwarfs everything else

Pre-K operates on a different scale entirely. At 29.7% in 2024, nearly one in three pre-K students is chronically absent. That figure has actually recovered substantially from its 2022 peak of 41.8%, when two in five pre-K students were missing more than 10% of school days. The 88.3% recovery rate is the best of any grade band.

But the baseline was already catastrophic. Pre-K chronic absenteeism was 28.1% before the pandemic. The problem did not start with COVID; COVID just made it worse.

New Jersey's Department of Education has acknowledged the challenge, noting that even two absences per month push a student into chronic territory. For pre-K, where parents make every attendance decision, the NJDOE and federal Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic partnered to create a "Go-Learn-Grow" toolkit specifically targeting the youngest learners' families. Schools are not required to include pre-K students in their corrective action calculations for chronic absenteeism, which may reduce the urgency districts feel to address the issue.

Why younger grades broke worse

The mechanisms that drive elementary absence are different from those that drive high school absence. High schoolers skip. They disengage, take jobs, or drift out. The interventions for older students center on relevance, credit recovery, and engagement.

For kindergartners and first-graders, the decision to attend school belongs to their parents. The pandemic disrupted those parental habits in ways that have proven sticky. Parents who kept young children home for 18 months recalibrated what counts as "sick enough to miss school." Mild colds, low-grade fevers, and vague complaints that would have sent a pre-COVID kindergartner to school now keep them home.

A 2024 RAND survey of district leaders found that for younger students, administrators emphasized the need to establish attendance as a shared family routine early, noting that bad attendance habits formed in kindergarten create persistent problems in later grades. For high schoolers, the same survey found interventions focused more on engagement and relevance to future plans.

There is also a structural difference. High school students have their own transportation, their own social motivation to attend, and course-credit requirements that create consequences for absence. Kindergartners depend entirely on adults who may be juggling shift work, childcare for younger siblings, or transportation barriers. New Jersey law entitles K-8 students living two or more miles from school to district-provided transportation, and busing closures are classified as state-excused absences under administrative code, adding another layer of complexity to how transportation barriers show up in the data.

The recovery gap, grade by grade

The recovery data tells a sharper story than the raw rates. High school (9-12) has recovered 61.7% of its COVID-era spike, bringing its chronic rate from 19.4% to 16.5%. Elementary (1-5) has recovered only 46.4%, from 16.5% to 12.6%. Kindergarten sits at exactly 50%.

The pattern is not just about where each grade band peaked. It is about how far each had to fall. High school's COVID spike was 4.7 percentage points (14.7% to 19.4%). Elementary's was 8.4 points (8.1% to 16.5%). Kindergarten's was 11.6 points (12.5% to 24.1%). The grade bands that were best-behaved before the pandemic absorbed the worst shocks during it.

That asymmetry means elementary schools are still carrying a burden they were never built for. An elementary school at 12.6% chronic absenteeism has roughly 55% more students missing extensive time than it did five years ago. The staffing models, intervention resources, and family engagement practices designed for a school at 8% may not fit a school at 12.6%.

Newark offers a counterexample, not a template

Newark Public Schools has driven its districtwide chronic rate down to 10.4% in 2024-25, with elementary students at 8.8%. Superintendent Roger León credited the district's Office of Attendance, Truancy Task Force, and attendance counselors for the improvement, which marks three consecutive years of decline. Newark's model involves direct family contact by teachers and incentive programs for at-risk students.

Whether that model can transfer to suburban and rural districts with different demographics, budgets, and family structures is an open question. Newark has federal and state intervention resources that most New Jersey districts do not. The district's success is real and documented, but replicating it requires resources that most of the state's 649 districts cannot access at the same scale.

The kindergarten gap

Kindergarten chronic absenteeism was 12.5% in 2019. It is 18.3% now. That 5.8 percentage point gap is the largest residual increase of any grade band except pre-K, and it matters more than pre-K's because kindergarten is where compulsory education begins in New Jersey, where foundational literacy instruction starts, and where attendance habits form that persist through elementary school.

Spread across roughly 1,300 schools, 18.3% means thousands of five- and six-year-olds are missing more than 18 days a year. Their parents are making the attendance decision for them. The pandemic taught those parents that keeping a mildly sick child home was responsible, that a day missed here and there was not consequential, that school would be there tomorrow. Two years of recovery data suggest that lesson stuck.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.