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 responses from 2019-20.
SDP’s Alternative Education Progress Report (AEPR) provides a high-level overview of how our alternative education programs are performing in the areas, or domains, that matter the most for student success, and it includes reports designed to evaluate the metrics most relevant to each school model and purpose. This brief analyzes data from 2016-17 to 2018-19 to identify trends by report type and domain.
This report examines one aspect of the differences between Fall 2020 and Fall 2019: participation and performance on formative assessments in reading and math.
This report analyzes how student responses to the District-Wide Survey (DWS) questions about eating breakfast relate to the availability of school breakfast programs.
Over the last decade, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) embarked on a critical effort to improve the outcomes of students in its low-performing schools. This effort, aimed to dramatically improve student achievement by shifting school management to either external charter providers, called Renaissance Charters, or by placing schools in a network that receives additional district supports, is named the Renaissance Initiative. The District selected Mathematica and its partner, Research For Action, to conduct a three-year evaluation from 2017-2020.
District-level report on findings from a 2019 survey of exiting seniors about whether they plan to obtain additional education, secure employment, or pursue other activities after graduation.
We are gathering information from a variety of sources about how digital learning is going. This document provides a summary of the questions that we’re asking across five main topics.
A summary of school-level and student-level trends within each SPR performance tier from 2014-15 through 2018-19.
On March 16, 2020, SDP closed schools and offices in response to the global Covid-19 pandemic. Like many other districts, SDP had to quickly pivot from in-person to virtual instruction. This report evaluates the four expected outcomes included in SDP’s “Continuity of Education Plan” for online instruction for the remainder of the 2019-20 school year.
This 11-page brief uses three years of school-level data to explore the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of school climate and teacher retention.