During the 2017-18 school year, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) developed and launched a new metric to monitor the success of first-time 9th graders. According to the new metric, students were considered to be On-Track if they earned at least one credit in English, math, science, and social studies, plus an additional fifth credit in any subject area (“four core plus one more”).

The study described in this brief revisits SDP’s 9th Grade On-Track metric to examine whether the relationship between 9GOT and on-time graduation remains strong for more recent cohorts of students. The metric was first established using analyses of first-time 9th grade cohorts from 2011-12, 2012-13, and 2013-14. In this study, we repeat the analyses for the first-time 9th grade cohorts of 2016-17, 2017-18, and 2018-19.

Key findings include:

• SDP’s 9GOT metric continued to be strongly related to 4-year graduation.
• For all cohorts, the four-year graduation rates for 9th graders who were on-track were more than double that of 9th graders who were off-track (85% to 87% of 9th grade students who were on track graduated in four years compared to 36% to 40% of 9th grade students who were off track).
• There were large on-track/off-track differences in graduation rate for all student groups, regardless of race/ethnicity, gender, English learner status, IEP status, or economic disadvantage status.