The Philadelphia Board of Education has established Goals & Guardrails that outline what School District of Philadelphia students must know and be able to accomplish, and describe the conditions needed in each school to empower all students to succeed in and beyond the classroom.

When selecting which data to use to monitor progress towards these goals, the District used prior research that identified relationships between certain data points and school-level outcomes. The selected data points reflect a broad range of specific, measurable characteristics of schools, but they can also be seen as three distinct “sets” of data points reflecting enrollment demographics (who are the students in our schools?), school staffing (who are the staff working in our schools?), and school climate (how safe and welcoming are our schools?).

Using these three sets of data points, this brief’s guiding research questions are:

1. In schools serving grades K-8: Which sets of predictor variables [enrollment demographics, school climate, and school staffing], best predict the outcome variables [student ELA and Math performance], and, therefore, provide the best “signals” for identifying groups of schools with common underlying root causes?
2. In schools serving grades 9-12: Which predictor variables [percent of students with economic disadvantage status, percent of students with 95% attendance, and teacher years of experience], best predict the outcome variables [student ELA and Math performance], and, therefore, provide the best “signals” for identifying groups of schools with common underlying root causes?

Key findings:

• A school’s enrollment demographics account for over 50% of the variation in school-level ELA and Math achievement.
• Climate and staffing are significant indicators for predicting achievement in ELA and Math in both elementary and high schools.