Philly schools rank near the bottom of 26 big-city districts in national assessment

Philadelphia students’ achievement ranks near the bottom of urban districts nationally, according to data released Monday.

Virtually all of the 26 large city school districts that took part in the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA), a special assessment of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), saw drops in student scores this year. Unlike annual state exams, whose difficulty is set by each department of education, the NAEP is a national, centralized test considered tougher than many states’.

This year’s test, the first administered since the pandemic, assessed reading and math skills of fourth and eighth graders at 5,190 public schools whose students were meant to reflect the varying demographics of the country.

Of the 26 districts that took the urban assessment, Philadelphia ranked fifth from the bottom in fourth-grade math and reading, and sixth-worst in eighth-grade math and seventh-worst in eighth-grade reading. Philadelphia’s scores dropped from the last test administered in 2019, but it maintained the same relative position nationally as it did then.

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The district, which has 114,000 students in 216 schools, fared worse than both the nationwide average of all the participating public schools as well as the average of the 26 large districts that administered the exam. Philadelphia missed the large-city average by 18 points in fourth-grade math, 14 points in fourth-grade reading, 14 points in eighth-grade math, and 13 points in eighth-grade reading.

Gaps in achievement persisted, too. Black and Latino students and students from economically disadvantaged families generally scored worse, often significantly, than white students and students who were not from economically disadvantaged families.

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Although the absolute scores dropped compared with the 2019 exam — eight and two points in fourth-grade math and reading, respectively, and four and one points in eighth-grade math and reading — those dips are not considered statistically significant.

Philadelphia’s performance ranked it with districts including Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Baltimore. The urban districts that performed best and beat the national average on most measures were Hillsborough County (which includes Tampa) and Miami-Dade County, in Florida; and Austin, Texas.

Philadelphia school officials have acknowledged the district’s student achievement is lagging. Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr., who came to the job in mid-June, faces a tall task: As measured by state standardized tests, just 36% of district students meet reading standards, and 22% hit the mark in math.

Watlington, in a statement, said that given the pandemic, the fact that the district’s performance was not statistically different in three of four areas was “encouraging news that we intend to build on going forward. But we have a long way to go to ensure all students are succeeding academically. That’s why, outside of student safety, improving academic outcomes for all of our students will be our highest priority as we develop our new five-year strategic plan. Our goal is to make the School District of Philadelphia one of the fastest improving, large, urban school districts in the country for achieving successful outcomes for all students.”

A transition team that studied the school system over Watlington’s first months as Philadelphia superintendent came to similar conclusions.

“Despite periods of uneven student performance in the last decade, there has been consistently low student academic achievement,” the transition team report prepared for Watlington, the board, and the public, and released Thursday, said.

The district’s four-year graduation rate has inched up, to about 80%.

What do administrators believe is at the root of the low scores? In addition to underfunding, Watlington’s transition team found that the district “lacks a clear theory of action on how it expects to raise student achievement. When initiatives are launched, they rarely go to scale as they come from separate departments in the central office and simply layer on initiative after initiative.”

Also, “trend data on national, state and local assessments points to a lack of equitable access to rigorous instruction for all students and consistent achievement gaps across racial groups and among multilingual learners and students with disabilities.”

The district’s curriculum is also uneven, the team found. Some English and math materials were vetted by outside experts and match state standards, while “some of the district-adopted materials were deemed ‘not aligned’ to state standards,” the report said.