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Through Listening and Learning sessions held from February to May 2023, we sought to better understand the challenges and barriers that prevent students from attending school on time every day. This slide deck presents the findings from sessions with school leaders and students.
Attendance is important for positive educational outcomes. Research has found that high attendance is associated with reading at or above a student’s grade level, scoring at or above grade level in math, and being prepared for college and career. This brief uses attendance data across all students enrolled in District schools, including alternative programs, to identify trends in student attendance from 2017-18 to 2021-22.
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.
Each year, SDP and its partner organizations offer a variety of summer programs to ensure that students, especially those most vulnerable to experiencing summer learning loss, have the opportunity to continue learning during the summer months. This report provides a summary of the 2022 summer programs, including information about enrollment and attendance, and findings from surveys and observations.
In the summer of 2021, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) redesigned 133 pre-kindergarten to third-grade classrooms into interactive learning environments. Physical renovations and classroom set-ups were completed by the start of the 2021-22 school year. This was the fifth cohort of classrooms to receive renovations and accompanying professional development sessions and materials. This report uses teacher survey data to evaluate teacher satisfaction with the project and perceived benefits to instructional practices and student outcomes.
In spring 2021, new questions related to the topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) were added to the District-Wide Surveys. This is the second report exploring these survey responses from 2020-21.
Academic Parent-Teacher Teams (APTT) is a family engagement program aimed at strengthening family-school partnerships. During meetings held three times a year, teachers share student data, guide data-driven conversations, and provide parents/guardians with timely information and academic resources to support student learning. In this research brief, we looked at implementation of APTT at six schools during the 2021-22 school year.
When selecting which data to use to monitor progress towards the Board’s Goals & Guardrails, the School District of Philadelphia 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, school staffing, and school climate. This brief seeks to identify which sets of predictor variables best predict the academic outcome variables and, therefore, provide the best “signals” for identifying groups of schools with common underlying root causes.
As part of the Promoting Adolescent Student Health (PASH) grant, the Office of Research and Evaluation (ORE) administers the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) every other year. In fall 2021, the YRBS was administered to a random sample of high school students at 30 randomly selected School District of Philadelphia (SDP) schools, and the CDC compiled a summary of the results.
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.