Quality, Choice and Access Report
Access to high-achieving schools varies widely by a student’s zip code, income and race.
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- Philadelphia has too few high-achieving schools, and the shortage is especially critical in North, West and Southwest Philadelphia.
- No schools serving more than 85% economically disadvantaged students are high achieving
- Philly’s Black and Latinx students are overrepresented in low-achieving schools and underrepresented in high-achieving
- schools.
The Opportunity Myth
- 4 out of 10 K-12 classrooms with a majority of students of color never received a single grade-level assignment.
- 40 percent of college students (including 66 percent of Black college students and 53 percent of Latinx college students) take at least one remedial course.
- first-time bachelor’s degree candidates who take a single remedial course are 74 percent more likely to drop out
Goals and Guardrails
- Fewer than 20% of the city’s fourth and eighth graders met national benchmarks in math and reading on the last NAEP test, given in 2019
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- That performance put Philadelphia – the nation’s poorest big city – behind 16 other districts in fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading and math. In fourth-grade math, it was behind 19 other districts.