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The share of Newark students meeting state English language arts standards dropped last school year, while the share meeting math standards rose, newly released test results show.
Across the city’s traditional public and charter schools, 35.7% of students met grade-level expectations in English language arts, down from 41.7% last year, according to a Chalkbeat analysis. In math, proficiency rose to 30.1%, up from 27% in 2025.
The results, which the state released earlier this month, offer a mixed picture of academic performance in Newark, where schools have spent years working to help students recover from pandemic learning disruptions. The scores could lead to closer scrutiny of tutoring and literacy initiatives that have tried to assist in that recovery.
Newark Public Schools officials presented preliminary results at an October school board meeting, acknowledging that most district students continued to fall short of grade-level expectations.
The state’s more-detailed release also shows substantial differences in proficiency between Newark Public Schools, the state’s largest school district, and the city’s publicly funded, independently operated charter schools.
But changes to New Jersey’s standardized tests this spring, including new proficiency standards, make it difficult to determine how much student achievement has actually changed. State education officials have cautioned against directly comparing the results with scores from previous years.
The new tests, called the New Jersey Student Learning Assessments-Adaptive, or NJSLA-A, adjust the difficulty of questions based on students’ answers and establish new minimum scores for students to be considered proficient.
The results mark a departure from 2024-25 results, in which students showed gradual improvement in both subjects and brought Newark schools closer to pre-pandemic achievement levels.
The latest math proficiency rate is approaching the 2018-19 level of just under 35%, while English language arts proficiency is only slightly above its 2021-22 level, the first year students took state tests after the pandemic began.
The New Jersey Department of Education and Newark Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment on the test results.
Newark charter schools outperform district schools
About 29% of Newark Public Schools students met expectations in English language arts, compared with nearly 46% of students attending charter schools. In math, charter school students were nearly twice as likely as district students to meet expectations, with proficiency rates of 41.4% and 22.5%, respectively.
Across New Jersey, approximately 51% of students met expectations in English language arts, while 42% were proficient in math.Within Newark Public Schools, proficiency was particularly low in the middle grades. Just 14% of eighth graders who took the grade-level math assessment met expectations, compared with 29% of third graders and 18% of sixth graders.
Those figures exclude students taking other math assessments, including Algebra I, which some advanced middle school students take instead. Among district students taking Algebra I, roughly 1 in 4 were proficient, compared with about 40% statewide.
English language arts results were weakest among younger students. Just 22% of district fourth graders met expectations in English, the lowest rate among tested grades.
Newark officials point to student growth
Newark Public Schools officials highlighted signs of progress in how much students were learning over the school year, a measure distinct from proficiency.
Roughly two-thirds demonstrated typical or high growth in math, while about 60% did so in English language arts, according to Rochanda Jackson, the district’s executive director of policy, planning, evaluation, and testing.
“The review of our achievement data requires a new lens,” Jackson said during a prerecorded presentation at the October school board meeting, referring to the state’s revised proficiency standards and the introduction of adaptive testing.
Superintendent Roger León said the district was working with teachers to adjust instruction based on students’ performance. The district has also expanded tutoring and summer learning programs and introduced a new English language arts curriculum as part of its efforts to help students recover from pandemic learning loss.
But the effectiveness of such investments in New Jersey has come under scrutiny. At a State Board of Education meeting last week, some board members called for a closer examination of tutoring and literacy initiatives after the release of the latest state test scores.
Meanwhile, a study released in May found that Newark Public Schools students learned faster than their peers in most districts nationwide between 2022 and 2025. Despite that progress, their academic performance remained more than two grade levels below the 2019 national average in English and math.
Samantha Olander writes about Newark and New York schools.
