Story ideas
22data-grounded story ideas surfaced from queries against the Philadelphia schools database. Each one ships with a thesis, supporting bullets, and reporting directions. The difficulty tag reflects how much outside reporting it would take to close the piece — easy stories are mostly "here's what the data shows"; hard stories need interviews, FOIA, or deeper context.
Punching above expectation
- easy12 Philly schools punching above demographic expectation on PSSA ELA
Twelve Philly schools at ≥80% economically disadvantaged hit the 90th percentile or higher against their demographically-matched peer group on PSSA ELA all-grades. The list includes A.S. Jenks (peer-pct 1.00, 70.5% profi…
District vs charter
- mediumRenaissance charters underperform regular charters — and barely outperform district
Of the 17 Renaissance Charter schools (district schools converted to charter operators 2010-2015), 15 have Keystone Literature data. Median proficiency is 27.4% — below the 31.7% median of the 62 other charters in our da…
- mediumPhilly charters have a 10-point attendance advantage over district schools
On the Future Ready PA Index 'persistent attendance rate' metric (% students attending ≥90% of enrolled days), Philly charter schools post a median 73.0% vs 61.7% for district — an 11.3-percentage-point gap. The gap refl…
- mediumPhilly schools with 1000+ students average 42% PSSA ELA — 17 points above 200-500 schools
Philly schools binned by enrollment: 201-500 students (n=58) average 25.4% PSSA ELA, 501-1000 (n=176) average 25.8%, and 1000+ (n=106) average 42.4%. The biggest-school bucket outperforms smaller schools by 17 percentage…
Intervention cohorts
- easyThe 53 Philly CSI schools: where they stand on PSSA right now
Pennsylvania designates 53 Philly schools as Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) — the bottom 5% statewide. On PSSA ELA all-grades, the 14 CSI schools we have data for post a median of 17.6% proficient vs 25.0% f…
- easyHalf of Philly schools sit in ESSA support tiers — the federal accountability tail
Of the 302 Philadelphia schools in Future Ready PA Index, 120 are at the default ESSA tier (meeting goals), 85 are TSI (targeted support and improvement), 53 are CSI (comprehensive support), 35 are ATSI (additional targe…
- easyOnly 4 Philly schools are NOT Title I — and they average 18 points below Title I peers
Philadelphia carries Title I federal-funding designation at 336 of 340 schools we can flag — virtually universal. The 4 non-Title-I schools have an average PSSA ELA of 13.1% (median 12.4%) vs Title I schools' 31.1% (medi…
- mediumPhiladelphia Military Academy graduates 100% — and 26% read at grade level
Philadelphia Military Academy posts a 100% 4-year graduation rate while only 25.9% of its students score Proficient or Advanced on the Keystone Literature exam. This isn't unusual at Philly's specialty / alternative HS w…
Survey vs outcomes
- mediumSix Philly schools with high teacher climate AND high PSSA — but also six exceptions
Among Philly schools with both 2024-25 PSES teacher climate scores ≥7.5 (on a 10-point scale) and PSSA ELA all-grades data: schools cluster into a clear positive-correlation set (Penn Alexander, Jenks Plus, Adaire, Powel…
- mediumWhich PSES domain shows the widest Philly inter-school variation? Family Engagement.
Across PSES topic scores for 2024-25 teacher respondents, Family Engagement shows the widest school-to-school spread of any of the 6 domains. The methodological question: is this measurement noise (high variance among di…
Learning Networks & geography
- easyNetwork 2 has a 79-point spread on PSSA ELA — wider than the Bronx range in NYC
Among Philly's Learning Networks with 5+ schools, Network 2 shows the widest internal range on PSSA ELA all-grades: 10.8% at the floor school, 90.5% at the ceiling. That's a 79.7-percentage-point spread inside one organi…
- easyThe 32-percentage-point gap between Philly's best and worst council districts on PSSA ELA
City Council District 10 (Northeast Philly) posts a median 48.8% PSSA ELA proficiency across its 24 schools. CD 7 (parts of North and West Philly) posts 16.8% across 52 schools. That's a 32-point gap by elected-official …
Growth vs status
- easyPVAAS growth is more democratic than proficiency — and Philly has the data NYC doesn't
Eight Philly schools hit the maximum PVAAS Algebra growth score of 100 — and they span the demographic spectrum from selective (William W. Bodine HS, Academy at Palumbo) to neighborhood (Baldi MS, Ethan Allen, Joseph Cat…
- mediumAverage PSSA ELA goes UP from grade 5 to grade 6 in Philly — selection, not learning
Across Philly schools, the average PSSA ELA proficiency rate is 26.8% at grade 5 (n=142 schools) but jumps to 34.4% at grade 6 (n=119 schools). That's a +7.6pp climb that has nothing to do with student learning — it's se…
- mediumPhilly's growth-vs-proficiency quadrant: 4 categories of school worth different attention
Plot PVAAS Algebra growth (x) vs Keystone Algebra proficiency (y) for the ~100 Philly schools with both metrics. Four quadrants emerge: (1) high growth + high proficiency = working well (selective HS), (2) high growth + …
Discipline & climate
- mediumPhilly publishes the suspension distribution — and the heavy-tail share is the real story
Unlike NYC (which publishes a single 'suspension rate'), SDP publishes the full distribution of how many suspensions students received: % with zero, with 1, with 2, with 3, with 4+. The 4+ share is the analytically inter…
- mediumWhere Philly's chronic-suspension tail moved 2019-20 to 2024-25
SDP publishes 6 years of OSS distribution data (2019-20 through 2024-25). The chronic-tail (4+ suspensions per year) at the schools currently leading the list is likely the inverse of citywide policy — Philly's disciplin…
Methodology
- mediumPhilly publishes both Acct and Actual PSSA cuts. They're byte-identical.
SDP publishes PSSA in two flavors: 'Acct' (accountability cohort, Oct-31-register attribution — the canonical SPREE-feeding figure) and 'Actual' (all tested students). NYC's analogous distinction drove known snapshot-agr…
- easySPREE agrees with our DB on 616/616 cells — Philly's data pipeline is structurally clean
Philly's (iii-a) SPREE spot-check shows 100% agreement at ±1.5pp tolerance across 616 paired PSSA/Keystone cells. Mean delta is -0.002, max absolute delta is 0.05. This is structurally tighter than NYC's analogous Snapsh…
- easyComputed-value (iv) validation: OSS + PSES rollups agree to the cell with the raw source
Philly's (iv) computed-value validation: re-derive the metrics from raw inputs, compare to the served DB. OSS distribution derivations (any/multiple/chronic) match the raw at 8,034/8,034 cells. PSES topic rollups (mean o…
- mediumPhilly PSSA: 2023-24 vs 2024-25 year-over-year — which schools moved most
With both 2023-24 and 2024-25 SDP PSSA in our DB (loaded for the SPREE spot check), we can now produce year-over-year deltas at the school × metric × subgroup grain. The Movers page surfaces this; the methodology questio…
- easyWith 287 peer-grouped schools and k=40, the rankings barely move at k=20
Only 8 Philly schools (~3%) show a substantively-different top-10 peer set between k=20 and k=40. The KNN matching is stable, so the choice of k matters less than which features feed the distance — and in v1 we use a 7-f…