District Schools will be closed for students and staff from April 14th-17th, for Spring Recess.
District Parents & Families: The 2024-25 Philly School Experience Survey is now open. Let your voice be heard! Take the Survey
Students throughout Philadelphia have the opportunity to apply to attend SDP schools of their choice through an annual School Selection Process. Students across all grades may apply to all available SDP K-12 schools, but 8th graders applying for 9th grade constitute the largest group of participants. This report includes analyses of several phases of the 2022-23 School Selection Process, with a focus on 8th graders enrolled in District (non-charter) schools, and their engagement with the School Selection Process to enroll in 9th grade criteria-based schools and programs in the 2023-24 school year.
The annual Philly School Experience Survey (PSES) is one of the best tools we have for monitoring conditions in Philadelphia public schools. This deck summarizes the 2022-23 survey results for District and alternative schools, highlighting system-level trends across the six core survey topics.
The 2022-23 Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL) initiative in SDP consisted of a series of professional development opportunities for K-12 educators across 29 schools. This report summarizes the results of a year-long implementation evaluation of the QTEL initiative.
This Philadelphia Education Research Consortium (PERC) study shines a spotlight on ELs in 7th and 8th grade, describing the diversity of home languages spoken, countries and regions of birth, and duration of EL status across the population of English Learners in the years leading up to their transition to high school.
From 2014-15 to 2022-23, English Learner (EL) enrollment in the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) increased both in number of students and as a percentage of the total student population. With this growth, the diversity of home languages spoken in SDP students’ households also increased. The analyses conducted for this brief aim to summarize the growth patterns of EL enrollment and home language diversity in SDP over time.
The ACCESS assessment is administered to English Learners (ELs) annually each winter to measure their progress toward English proficiency. Star Computer Adaptive Tests (CATs) are a suite of assessments administered 3-4 times during the school year to students in grades K-12 that measure students’ reading and math skills, monitor achievement and growth, and track how well students understand skills aligned to state and Common Core standards. Although some ELs are excused from participation in Star, most take Star Reading and Math. This report examines EL performance on the ACCESS and EL performance on Star within the context of ACCESS performance.
This report continues a series of publications examining the School District of Philadelphia’s (SDP) 2021-22 school selection process (SSP), and summarizes the last phase of the school selection process with a specific focus on high school enrollment results for 9th grade students in Fall 2022.
In the fall of the 2021-22 school year, five substantive changes were made to the School Selection Process, particularly with respect to rising ninth graders applying to criteria-based high schools for the 2022-23 school year. This series of reports provides a summary of eighth grade student qualifications and applications (report 1), initial lottery-based offers of admission (report 2), offers of admission after the waitlist process and student acceptances (report 3), applications and outcomes for external and internal K-12 applicants (report 4), and Fall 2022 student enrollment in criteria-based schools (report 5).
As one of the primary measures of students’ college and career readiness, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) closely monitors graduation rates each year. This brief explores graduation rates across public schools in the city of Philadelphia in 2021-22, comparing trends for District, Alternative, and Charter schools.
The Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) provides grant funding to eight regions in Pennsylvania to serve students experiencing homelessness through the Education for Children and Youth Experiencing Homelessness (ECYEH) program. This brief provides information about progress toward the goals of the ECYEH grant program and priorities of SDP staff.