{"id":324549,"date":"2025-10-22T19:00:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T19:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/324549\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T19:00:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T19:00:11","slug":"preliminary-data-show-growth-challenges-for-philadelphia-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/324549\/","title":{"rendered":"Preliminary data show growth, challenges for Philadelphia students"},"content":{"rendered":"

Philly students have shown improvement in a number of areas over the past three years, including test scores, but some measures are still far from the targets<\/a> set by the city\u2019s Board of Education.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to preliminary performance data<\/a> from 2021 to 2025, presented at a school board meeting in early October, students saw major increases in math test scores and attendance, as well as a decrease in student dropouts. However, reading scores dropped slightly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Also, despite improvements, many of the reported test scores still did not meet projected targets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cRebounding from the pandemic\u201d<\/p>\n

In Pennsylvania, school students are required to take two standardized tests: the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) or the Pennsylvania Alternative System of Assessment (PASA) for students with disabilities, and the Keystone exams in grades 8-11.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The PSSA tests for students in grades 3-8 include ELA (English Language Arts) and Math exams.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The percentage of third graders who scored Proficient or Advanced on the PSSA ELA\u00a0 increased from about 28% in the 2021-22 school year to above 31% in 2024-25.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

In math, the percentage of third graders scoring Proficient or Advanced increased from above 20% in 2021-22 to above 33% in 2024-25.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While the percentage of students in grades 3-8 scoring Proficient or Advanced for PSSA Math increased from 16.5% in 2021-22 to 25.1% in 2024-25, reading scores dropped slightly.<\/p>\n

The percentage of students in grades 3-8 scoring Proficient or Advanced for PSSA ELA dropped from 34.4% to 33.2%.\u00a0<\/p>\n

School District of Philadelphia Superintendent Tony B. Watlington said in a statement that the data reflects \u201ca product of hard and strategic work for teachers, principals and support staff\u201d and new, \u201cstandards-aligned curricula across the city.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Watlington also said the district is still rebounding from the pandemic, but is still committed to \u201caccelerate academic achievement.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The district still has goals to meet by 2030.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One goal, set by the city Board of Education, aims to see the percentage of students in grades 3-8 who are proficient on the state ELA exam reach 65.0% by August 2030 \u2014 with the current numbers at just above 33%, that would require dramatic improvement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The second goal is achieving proficiency scores for 62% of 3rd grade students on the state\u2019s ELA assessment \u2014 currently, just 31% of 3rd graders passed the ELA in the 2024-25 school year.<\/p>\n

Finally, the goal is to get 52% of students in grades 3-8 scoring as proficient on the state math assessment by August 2030. The latest data shows only around 25% of students passing the state\u2019s math test \u2014 so hitting that goal would require a doubling in those who receive proficient or advanced scores.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Other preliminary results show that student attendance improved \u2014 increasing from 57.3% in 2021-22 to 61.4% in 2024-25 for regular attendance (90% or more days).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Teacher attendance rose by 8.2 percentage points as well \u2014 rising to 85.7% in 2024-25.<\/p>\n

Additionally, the number of student dropouts in grades 7-12 dropped from almost 4,000 in 2021-22 to 1,680 in 2024-25.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Preliminary data<\/p>\n

These results are still preliminary, the district emphasized. Final results and data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education are expected in November.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The district\u2019s plans for improving test scores and data includes supporting new curricula for K-12 math, ELA and Science, plus a push for improvements in grades K-8, and \u201cmore aggressive strategies\u201d like high-impact tutoring.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Philly students have shown improvement in a number of areas over the past three years, including test scores,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":324550,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,407,1448,2830,1311,80,151769,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-324549","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-education","10":"tag-pa","11":"tag-pennsylvania","12":"tag-philadelphia","13":"tag-politics","14":"tag-standardized-tests","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115419363807639626","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324549\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}