Philadelphia School District students’ math skills improved last school year, according to data released Thursday, but overall reading proficiency dipped slightly.
Overall, 25% of students met state standards in math last school year, according to preliminary data, up 3 percentage points from the 2023-24 school year and 9 percentage points over three years. Third graders’ performance improved more dramatically — 34% met state standards last year, a jump of 6 percentage points year-over-year and 13 points over three years.
The district is off track on the board’s own targets, which called for 22.2% of students to meet state standards in math in 2023-24 and 52% by 2029-30.
Still, a jubilant school board president Reginald Streater said the gains were a sign that the district’s investment in new curricula and focus on early-grades instruction was paying off.
“I’m so incredibly proud of these results, and I believe I speak for the board in saying that I remember a time when many people thought this would never be possible for our children — our babies — in the city of Philadelphia,” said Streater. “As a board, we are now eager to see the same positive trajectory emerge in ELA.”
Reading scores slipped, with 33% of students meeting the mark in reading, down one percentage point over both one and three years.
The board had wanted the district to be at 36.2% proficiency this year, with a goal of 65% proficiency by 2029-30.
Philadelphia students’ reading scores remain lower than they were 10 years ago.
Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. and other senior officials released the data at a school board “Goals and Guardrails” progress monitoring meeting Thursday.
Watlington and Jermaine Dawson, the district’s deputy superintendent of academics, said they believed the new curricula — math was implemented in 2023-24, English last year, and science this year — were driving the progress. Also deserving credit was “a change in the supports that are happening in schools,” Dawson said, including more scrutiny and assistance in the form of thousands of classroom observations.
“Although we still have a long ways to go, we are really on that Accelerate Philly road to get us to that North Star,” Dawson said, using the title of Watlington’s strategic plan to describe the superintendent’s oft-stated goal: to make Philadelphia the fastest-improving large urban district in the U.S.
Officials also released 2024-25 attendance and dropout figures Thursday — and the news was good.
Student attendance rose slightly — 61.4% of students attended school 90% of the time, up slightly from 61.1% the prior year. Teacher attendance also improved, with 85.7% of teachers showing up 90% of the time last year, a 2.3 percentage point jump from the prior year and up 8.2% over three years.
Fewer district students are dropping out, also. In the 2024-25 school term, 1,680 pupils left school and did not reenroll or graduate, 824 fewer than the year before, and down 2,237 from the 2021-22 figures.
Watlington’s administration issues an annual “report card” of sorts, measuring progress on major goals, from third to eighth graders’ reading scores to how many students pass nationally normed career and technical education tests.
This year, the district made progress in eight out of 12 areas. Over three years, it notched forward motion in 10 of 12 areas.
The district is rebounding faster than its peers from the pandemic, and trending in the right direction, the superintendent said.
“When you hear people say the district is not getting better, we encourage all of us to fact-check folks on the record, because they are,” said Watlington.
The district is “not happy” with the reading results, Dawson said — “what this exposed for us is that many of these students did not have the foundational skills.”
To spur improvement, the district will give 93 schools coaching in reading, work on student writing, and offer 79 schools math coaching, it said.