The District-Wide Survey (DWS) program measures five key topics related to school improvement—climate, instruction, leadership, professional capacity, and parent/guardian-community ties, while allowing respondents to share their perspectives and provide feedback about how they experience and perceive their schools. This research brief answers two questions about the representativeness, or external validity, of the student and parent/guardian DWS responses from 2020-21.
This report describes the framework that guided survey development, the administration of the surveys, the processes of survey reliability testing and validation, and the construction of school-level scores for reports. This version reflects new updates from the 2020-21 DWS administration.
The Pennsylvania Department of Education requires each district to survey exiting seniors about their intentions after high school—specifically, whether students plan to obtain additional education, secure employment, or pursue other activities. This graduate follow-up survey asked Career and Technical Education (CTE) students from the class of 2020 about their experiences after graduation.
Each fall, SDP students can apply to attend any school in the District. Although the school selection process (SSP) is open to all grades, 8th-grade students are particularly encouraged to participate by applying to up to five high schools. Fourth-graders are also likely to consider special admission schools that serve 5th grade. We gathered community input on alternative ways of matching students with good-fit schools by considering different admission requirements through a survey that was open May 17-June 11, 2021. A total of 5,849 people responded to the survey, and the responses are summarized in this slide deck.
This report examines the reading performance of the 2015-16 kindergarten student cohort over time, including how student performance on the aimswebPlus assessment changed between kindergarten (2015-16) and third grade (2018-19), how student performance on the aimswebPlus assessment change between kindergarten and third grade by demographic characteristics, and how student performance on the aimswebPlus assessment changed between kindergarten and third grade grouped by third grade ELA PSSA performance.
These four slide decks provide a District-level overview of K-12 student participation and performance on the aimswebPlus and Star math and literacy assessments. During the 2020-21 school year, aimswebPlus was administered 3 times (fall, winter, and spring) in grades K-5 and Star was administered 4 times in grades 6-8 and 3 times in grades 9-12.
This brief describes the prevalence of food insecurity among SDP households that responded to the District-Wide Survey in 2019-20 and examines the differences in food insecurity rates across different student subgroups and schools.
This series of reports compares performance in reading and math assessments for the same set of students over time. The main metric used in the reports is the National Percentile Rank (NPR). NPR is a norm-referenced measure that compares student performance to a national sample of students.