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.
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 2023 summer programs, including information about enrollment and attendance, and findings from surveys and observations.
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.
In the fall of 2021, the School District of Philadelphia administered the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) to 1,351 randomly selected high school students from 30 District schools. This report highlights statistically weighted results from the 2021 Philadelphia YRBS, which means that the results are considered representative of high school students in the entire District.
Since the 2021-22 school year, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) has administered Star assessments as a universal screener and progress monitoring tool for all grades, K-12. This report summarizes findings on participation, performance, and growth across Fall and Spring Star testing windows in 2022-23, with comparisons to 2021-22 outcomes and details on performance of different student groups. A report addendum extends the analyses to focus on the relationship between attendance and student performance on Star assessments.
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.