The Philadelphia School District released last Friday the School Performance Report on Education and Equity (SPREE) — an annual report that provides a summary of how each school is performing and improving on the Goals & Guardrails, as well as other measures, including test scores, attendance and graduation rate. 

The extensive report showed significant drops across a variety of metrics in district and charter schools. 

Tonya Wolford — Chief of Evaluation, Research and Accountability — explained how the scores in this year’s report works. She said that the system is usually set up to understand whether a school is meeting a goal, not meeting a goal or improving on a goal. Because they don’t have sufficient growth data from past years due to the pandemic, they are not accessing improvement in this year’s report. 

The 2021-2022 report groups schools according to meeting or not a goal (levels one, three and five). Level one means that a school met two-thirds or more of the metrics that are appropriate to that school group; in contrast to level five, which shows schools that met a third or less of their targets for the metrics. 

Only 15% of the district schools were at level one, and 12% of charter schools; while 73% of district schools were meeting a third of fewer of their metrics, and 64% of charter schools. 

Regarding attendance, 37% of students attended school 95% of the time or more, a significant drop from the 58% of 2020-2021. On top of that, 20% of students had less than 80% attendance. 

“I think this data does show that in many of the areas we are missing the targets,” Wolford said. “However, I think this has to be considered in the sense that these goals were set before the pandemic and they haven’t been adjusted since the pandemic.” 

She believes there needs to be some adjustments to the trajectory moving forward. 

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