Commentary The decision to remove attendance targets for Indigenous students shows how policymakers have the wrong priorities for addressing the education gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. Closing the attendance gap is the single greatest lever in closing the achievement gap. Yet school attendance is a glaring omission from newly released data from the government-backed Closing the Gap initiative. New research from the Centre of Independent Studies (CIS) shows the achievement gap by Year 3 would close by 15 percent if the attendance gap alone were closed. But since national records were first tallied, student attendance has worsened year-on-year. Only around 36 percent of Indigenous students attend high school every 9 in 10 class days—a measure of school attendance. This is compared to the 66 percent of non-Indigenous students who attend every 9 in 10 days. The disparity is widest in remote schools but is sizeable in cities too. The …