On Thursday, April 25th at 4 p.m., the Board will hold a Budget Hearing, followed by an Action Meeting. Find materials here here.
The Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) provides grant funding to eight regions in Pennsylvania to serve students experiencing homelessness through the Education for Children and Youth Experiencing Homelessness (ECYEH) program. This brief provides information about progress toward the goals of the ECYEH grant program and priorities of SDP staff.
In spring 2021, new questions related to the topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) were added to the District-Wide Surveys. This is the second report exploring these survey responses from 2020-21.
Academic Parent-Teacher Teams (APTT) is a family engagement program aimed at strengthening family-school partnerships. During meetings held three times a year, teachers share student data, guide data-driven conversations, and provide parents/guardians with timely information and academic resources to support student learning. In this research brief, we looked at implementation of APTT at six schools during the 2021-22 school year.
This brief extends an ongoing series of reports examining SDP’s 2021-22 school selection process, offering a summary of the number of external and internal K-12 applicants to SDP schools.
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.
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.
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.
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.