Posted on February 5, 2021
Categories: Research and Evaluation

There are different ways to calculate attendance. The School District of Philadelphia (SDP) reports the percentage of students attending at least 95% of instructional days. Other districts may focus on Average Daily Attendance (ADA). Here’s how they’re different.

The metric we use is the percentage of students attending 95% or more of instructional days. This is a two-step calculation:

  1. First, we determine whether each student has attended 95% of instructional days by adding up the total number of days a student was present and dividing by the total number of days the student was enrolled at a school.
  2. Then, to calculate the school rate, we add the total number of students who have attended 95% of instructional days and divide by the total number of eligible students at each school. A student must be enrolled for a minimum of 10 days to be included in the school’s attendance calculation.

This is the metric used for the District’s accountability framework (the School Progress Report on Education and Equity, or SPREE), as well as for school-level improvement plans.

You can see the percentage of students attending at least 95% of instructional days on SDP’s School Profiles website. This metric is titled “High Attendance” and can be viewed on the bottom row of blue metric tiles (see example, right). You can also see this attendance rate for each school by selecting from the list or by using the filters in light blue on the left-hand side of the page. The blue High Attendance tile appears at the same location on each individual school overview page.

In addition, the SPREE for each school* has information about the following:

  • The percentage of students attending 90-95% of instructional days;
  • The percentage of students attending 85-90% of instructional days;
  • The percentage of students attending 80-85% of instructional days; and
  • The percentage of students attending less than 80% of instructional days.

95% attendance information is also available on our Open Data page under School Performance.

Average Daily Attendance (ADA) is another way to look at attendance. This can be calculated by adding up the total number of days attended by all students, then dividing by the total number of instructional days for all students. This metric is not part of our accountability framework. However, other school districts use this metric, so we make the data publicly available to make it easier to compare school and district performance using the same metric. ADA data is also available on our Open Data page under School Performance.

Reports on attendance from the Office of Research and Evaluation (ORE) provide further details about how we calculate and use attendance metrics.

For more information, contact the Office of Research and Evaluation: research@philasd.org.

*For school years 2018-19 and earlier, see School Progress Reports (SPRs).