We share the public’s sense of urgency to significantly improve public schools in the City of Philadelphia, and the District is making significant progress towards the superintendent’s charge to position the School District of Philadelphia to be the fastest improving large urban district in the nation.
While we have a lot of work to do, we are encouraged by the May 2026 Education Recovery Scorecard from Harvard and Stanford Universities that found Philadelphia students in grades 3 – 8 learned at a faster rate than students in any of the nation’s 25 largest school districts between 2022 and 2025, and outperformed 84% of the 8,147 districts included in the study.
Annually, the School District of Philadelphia issues the Philly School Experience Survey (PSES) that collects feedback from District parents, students, and staff on a variety of topics aligned with school improvement. According to the 2024-25 PSES results, 90.3% of 26,321 parents of students at District schools agreed or strongly agreed that they were pleased with the quality of education their child received. This Spring, the 2025-26 survey, found that 90.8% of 21,853 parents responded similarly.