PRESS RELEASE
May 13, 2026
Contact: Sam Stockwell
samuel_stockwell@gse.harvard.edu
617.495.0342
New Jersey Ranks 20th in Math and 19th in Reading Recovery Among States, with Districts on the Rise Emerging Across the State
Students remain nearly .6 grade equivalents below 2019 levels in math, with reading continuing to decline since 2022.
Chronic absenteeism has improved but remains more than 4 percentage points above pre-pandemic levels.
Montgomery Township, Paramus, and Princeton are outperforming their peers in both math and reading, while Trenton and Edison Township face the steepest climb back to 2019 levels.
(May 13, 2026) In its fourth year, the Education Scorecard (a collaboration between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, and faculty at Dartmouth College) is issuing its annual report on district-level student growth in math and reading.
The latest report provides a high-resolution picture of where New Jersey students’ academic recovery stands, combining state test results for roughly 35 million grade 3–8 students nationwide with national assessment data to describe changes in local communities. Here’s what we found:
New Jersey:
- New Jersey ranks 20th out of 38 states in academic growth in math and 19th out of 35 states in reading between 2022 and 2025.
- In math, the average student is performing about .17 grade equivalents above their 2022 level, but about .59 grade equivalents below 2019 levels. Some districts like Edison Township, Trenton, and Paterson continue to lag behind 2019 levels.
- In reading, the average student is performing about .14 grade equivalents below their 2022 level, and .41 grade equivalents below 2019 levels. A number of districts like Trenton, Toms River RSD, and Edison Township continue to slip and remain over a full grade equivalent behind their 2019 levels.
- Several New Jersey districts are emerging as Districts on the Rise. These districts have shown unusual progress relative to similar districts in their own state. A core group of districts is excelling in both math and reading, with districts like Montgomery Township, Paramus Public, and Princeton Public outperforming their peers.
- Several other districts are rising relative to their peers in one subject—either math or reading. Millville, Bloomfield Township, and Freehold Township are leading the way in math performance, while Haddonfield, Brick Township, and Bernards Township are leading the way in reading.
- Statewide, there is some good news on chronic absenteeism (students missing more than 10% of a school year), which has fallen from over 18% in 2022 to less than 15% in 2024. However, chronic absence rates still remain over 4 percentage points above pre-pandemic levels.
- New Jersey received about $4.31 billion in federal pandemic relief for K–12 schools—roughly $3,200 per student. Our analysis finds that the gains in many high-poverty districts were driven by this federal support. Unfortunately, many middle-poverty districts (those with 30 to 70 percent of students receiving federal lunch subsidies) received little federal aid. Now that the federal relief is gone, New Jersey should focus school improvement dollars on the middle and higher poverty districts that remain behind their pre-pandemic levels.
“The pandemic was the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement,” said Professor Tom Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. “The ‘learning recession’ started a decade ago, after policymakers switched off the early warning system of test-based accountability and social media took over children’s lives. In this report, we highlight the work of a small group of state leaders who have started digging out by changing how students learn to read, and 108 local school districts that are finding ways to get students learning again. The recovery of U.S. education has begun. But it’s up to the rest of us to spread it.”
Spotlight: Union City Public Schools
Among New Jersey’s Districts on the Rise, Union City Public Schools (UCPS) stands out for a long-standing, system-wide commitment to early childhood education that now serves as a national model. The district’s PreK program reaches approximately 1,400 three- and four-year-olds through a mixed-delivery model—partnering with community-based providers to operate 95 classrooms at provider sites alongside 27 in-district classrooms, all using district-developed curriculum. The anchor of the program is a standalone PreK-K facility named a 2025 National Blue Ribbon Lighthouse School—the only standalone preschool program in the nation to receive that designation that year. The district develops its PreK curriculum in-house, combining a thematic framework with the HighScope approach and aligning to New Jersey’s Preschool Teaching and Learning Quality Standards, and maintains fidelity through a two-tier coaching structure: Preschool Instructional Coaches rotate across sites delivering embedded professional development, while Preschool Instructional Resource Specialists work alongside classroom teachers to identify struggling students and coordinate with families before any formal referral. Language development is built in from the start—Spanish-speaking children build English proficiency and then begin Mandarin instruction, with many developing functioning skills in all three languages by kindergarten. Family engagement is treated as a core program function: every school has a bilingual parent liaison and every community provider site has a family worker, running monthly workshops on literacy, math, nutrition, attendance, and social-emotional development, with social workers and psychologists available to help families build home-based learning strategies. Individual classrooms host rotating parent visits throughout the year so families experience learning alongside their children in low-pressure settings. For the full case study, click here.
“We are humbled and grateful to be recognized once again for extraordinary achievement,” said Silvia Abbato, Superintendent of Union City Public Schools. “It is an honor that inspires us to keep striving for academic excellence.”
