Announcing the Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Priorities Survey! Learn more and participate HERE
The Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) is comprised of multiple assessment anchors that represent categories of subject matter (skills and concepts). A strength profile (low, medium, high) is assigned for each anchor by weighting the anchor raw score by the difficulty of the items. This report examines the percentage of students who scored in the high, medium, and low strength profiles on each of the 3rd grade ELA PSSA assessment anchors from 2014-15 to 2018-19, identifying differences in strength profile patterns by student demographic group.
The Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) uses scale scores that correspond to performance tiers (Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, and Advanced). This report examines average scale scores for the 3rd grade ELA PSSA from 2014-15 to 2018-19, identifying differences in scale score patterns by student demographic characteristics and by school.
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.
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.