In the 2021-22 school year, the District began using Renaissance Star assessments as the screening and progress monitoring tool for all grades, assessing students during four assessment windows throughout the school year. The Star assessments provide multiple metrics that help monitor student performance at each testing window and student growth between testing windows. This reference document discusses what these metrics are, how they are calculated, and what kind of information they provide about student learning.
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.
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.
Food insecurity directly impacts physical health and is associated with adverse developmental, behavioral, and social-emotional outcomes. This brief describes the prevalence of food insecurity among SDP households that responded to the District-Wide Survey in 2020-21 and examines the differences in food insecurity rates across different student subgroups and schools.
Research has found that many high school graduates who intend to enroll in post-secondary education do not follow through with their intentions, a pattern known as “summer melt.” This brief summarizes findings from a study of the summer melt rates of the 2021 cohort of college-intending School District of Philadelphia (SDP) high school seniors.
In Spring 2022 the Office of Research and Evaluation (ORE) surveyed School District of Philadelphia (SDP) stakeholders about what supports should be prioritized in the budget for the 2022-23 school year. This slide deck provides an overview of feedback and responses.
The report is an expansion of a prior report’s discussion of PSSA and aimswebPlus data. The analysis in this report looks more deeply at the differing trajectories of aimswebPlus performance by fall 2015-16 kindergarten aimswebPlus performance group, with comparisons between students who performed in the different spring 2018-19 third grade ELA PSSA performance groups.
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.
The 2020-21 Senior Exit Survey contained a subset of questions specifically related to Career and Technical Education (CTE). The survey asked self-identified CTE students about their post-graduation plans for further education and employment. This slide deck provides a summary of the survey results for CTE respondents.