Announcing the Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Priorities Survey! Learn more and participate HERE
The School District of Philadelphia Board of Education’s Goals 1-3 are focused on improving the reading and math performance of grades K-8 students on the ELA and Math PSSA tests, both for students overall and for student subgroups. This data brief examines the participation and performance of K-8 students who qualify to receive Special Education services on the Winter 2021-22 within-year Star reading and math assessments.
The School District of Philadelphia’s English Learner (EL) population includes students from over 130 countries who speak over 100 different languages. By tracking the enrollment trends of ELs in the District, we can identify Learning Networks that have growing EL populations and allocate resources to accommodate for the programs and supports that benefit ELs.
Reporting by racial/ethnic subgroup and by English Learner status are crucial tools for investigating disproportionalities, targeting student supports, and monitoring the progress of equity initiatives. However, when student groups are identified in this way, it highlights differences between groups, but may also imply that the differences within those groups are unimportant, or even absent. This brief aims to surface some of the internal diversity within racial/ethnic groups, and within home language groups, by exploring the intersection of race/ethnicity and home language among our students.
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 2020-21, comparing trends for District, Alternative, and Charter schools.
New questions related to the topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) were added to the District-Wide Surveys in spring 2021 to better understand the perspectives and experiences of parents/guardians, students, teachers, principals/assistant principals, and support staff. This report examines how each group responded to the new DEI questions and how responses differed by respondent demographic characteristics.
The School District of Philadelphia (SDP) serves a diverse student population, and language is a key dimension of this diversity. However, linguistic diversity is not distributed uniformly across schools, and some schools serve students with a much wider variety of linguistic backgrounds than others, requiring different resources and support strategies as a result. The Office of Research and Evaluation has developed a new indicator to better describe the predominant composition of the EL population at a given school.
In collaboration with other city agencies, such as Philadelphia’s Office of Homeless Services, ECYEH priorities include tracking the number of homeless students and providing support such as school enrollment assistance, vouchers for uniforms, transportation passes, and additional funding for school supplies. This brief provides information about progress toward the goals of the ECYEH grant program and priorities of SDP staff.
This slide deck provides an overview of responses to fifty District-Wide Survey items related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that were included on the student, teacher, support staff, principal/AP, and parent/guardian surveys in 2020-21.
This report provides a descriptive summary of the nine Specialized Service support programs provided to 20,787 students with one or more Individualized Education Plan (IEP) classifications in the School District of Philadelphia during the 2019-20 school year.
This series of reports compares performance in reading and math assessments for the same set of students over time. The main metric used in the reports is the National Percentile Rank (NPR). NPR is a norm-referenced measure that compares student performance to a national sample of students.