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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.
At the School District of Philadelphia, PSSA performance is the focus for three of the five goals adopted by the Board of Education. This data brief describes District-wide trends in PSSA performance between the 2018-19 (pre-Covid) and 2022-23 school years.
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.
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. 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.
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.
This brief complements the 2021-22 four-year graduation brief by presenting the 2021-22 outcomes for students at District and Alternative schools who did not graduate from high school in four years.
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.
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).