Newark School Board President Hasani Council says his top priority for this troubled district is raising student proficiency in reading and math. Today the Star-Ledger Editorial Board called Newark’s proficiency scores “horrifying” because “more than 80 percent of third graders can’t read on grade level. At Hawkins Street School, just one out of 64 third graders passed the state reading exam last Spring.”

The first step for Council and his colleagues? Get students to show up.

According to the just-released Return to Learn Tracker (R2L), which examines student attendance across the U.S., Newark’s chronic absenteeism rate for 2022 was 28 percent, ten points above the state average. That means that of Newark traditional schools’ 44,000 students, 12,320 of them missed ten percent or more of school days. R2L analysts say student learning “will be severely hampered by current rates of chronic absenteeism, making it the most pressing post-pandemic problem in public schools.”

Some Newark schools are better, some are worse. In 2023 at Barringer High School, 33 percent of students had “severe chronic absenteeism,” which means they missed 15 percent or more of school days. There, nine out of ten students can’t read on grade-level and the state redacts the proficiency levels for math because they are so low. As Paula White, Executive Director of JerseyCAN notes, “chronic absenteeism is a major threat to education recovery in the city of Newark and across our state.”

Indeed, Newark’s 2020-2030 Strategic Plan calls out the importance of attendance, declaring the district’s intention to “continuously monitor and assess school- and student-level data and implement prevention strategies for students at-risk of chronic absenteeism, truancy, and/or credit deficiency.”

Pandemic school disruptions have caused nationwide attendance problems. Yet at last month’s public meeting of the Newark Board of Education as members quizzed district administrators about what they were doing to address chronic absenteeism— the rate at the High School of Fashion and Design is 38 percent—Superintendent Roger Leon appeared defensive, telling the audience, “we don’t get penalized for attendance factors…it does impact our ability to demonstrate to everyone how well we know our students. You also have to understand what the issue is at the school. There are a number of schools that have students that I pray to God every day that I’m grateful they woke up, because their parents are praying and hoping that their children wake up.”

President Council’s priority is praiseworthy. But Newark students won’t learn to read or do math unless district leaders figure out a way to persuade students to show up.