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.
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.
The report is an expansion of a prior report’s discussion of PSSA and aimswebPlus data. The analysis in this report looks more deeply at the differing trajectories of aimswebPlus performance by fall 2015-16 kindergarten aimswebPlus performance group, with comparisons between students who performed in the different spring 2018-19 third grade ELA PSSA performance groups.
This brief explores 2021-22 student enrollment patterns at District, Alternative, Charter, and Cyber Charter schools in Philadelphia, including by school admission type and student demographics, as well as changes in those patterns over time.
In summer 2021, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) offered a series of virtual and in person summer programs for students who had completed grades PreK-12. In response to students experiencing digital and hybrid learning from March 2020 – June 2021, summer 2021 programming offerings were expanded from previous summers. Nearly 16,000 students enrolled in summer programming, over 12,000 students attended a program for at least one day, and nearly 6,000 students attended at least one program for 75% or more of days.
The School District of Philadelphia implemented a universal K-12 interim assessments program beginning in the 2020-21 school year. All schools across the District administered aimswebPlus for grades K-5 and Star for grades 6-12; reading and math tests were administered for both assessments. The overall goals of this analysis were: (1) to examine whether there are patterns of nonparticipation during the spring assessment window that can provide additional information when interpreting 2020-21 performance and (2) to discover whether there are ways to support increased participation in the 2021-22 testing windows.
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 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.
This brief summarizes the performance of students who received support from a Reading Specialist before the transition to digital learning and support, from October 2019 (fall) to February 2020 (winter).