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Support Philly students

The Fund for the School District of Philadelphia is a nonprofit organization that helps the School District raise money—for buying laptops, classroom libraries and other projects. You can donate to the Fund here.

Connect with scholarship organizations like Children’s Scholarship Fund Philadelphia by volunteering your time to support projects or doing outreach in the community to spread the word about scholarships to under-resourced families looking for educational options.

Purchase an Art Kit, and support two Philadelphia school students in the process. You can also Donate to get supplies to even more Philly kids.

Call your local school or Friends of group to see how you can help kids in your neighborhood.

Show up at school board meetings and stay up to date on the ever-changing School District of Philadelphia news here.

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Help Philly kids

Get reading support this summer

Whether your child fell behind or could just use a bit of enrichment, there are plenty of Philly resources offering extra help between now and September. Plus: How to volunteer and donate, whether or not you have kids of your own.

Read more about how to get—and give—free reading support for Philly kids this summer.

Covid slide solutions

Across the country

Metro Nashville Public Schools launched a Navigator program to connect school staff with every single family, regularly and continuously. Between August and December, according to an article in The 74, 5,600 school district employees—including teachers, lunchroom workers and office staff—made about 220,000 calls to parents and students. they helped them connect to housing, food and healthcare, solved technical issues with online learning, referred them to mental health and other social services.

Burien, Washington, outside Seattle—where 71 percent of students live in poverty—they’ve spent the year teaching with an “acceleration” mindset normally reserved for gifted students. They start every unit with pre-tests, so teachers know where students are, group the kids into learning cohorts to help teach each other, and then use asynchronous time to catch students up who are struggling with the concepts.

In Cleveland, every Wednesday this year is set aside for asynchronous learning, allowing teachers to work individually and in small groups with students who need extra help, and to talk with parents about their concerns. The district, which has also seen a significant drop in attendance, in December launched a deliberate effort to find missing students, including by knocking on doors, checking social media and calling other districts to find out if they’ve enrolled elsewhere.

Philly-based Springboard Collaborative has had success for years helping students maintain reading skills in the summer months by working with parents to help set goals, use proven methods of literacy learning, and celebrate milestones. After six months of working with teachers and families, students using Springboard’s FELA method showed six times the progress of their peers in reading.

Read more:

What’s the School District Trying To Hide?

It took two requests and an Office of Open Records ruling before the School District of Philadelphia released data to a Broad + Liberty reporter about the increase in students failing classes last year. How can we solve a problem we're not allowed to see?

What’s the School District Trying To Hide?

It took two requests and an Office of Open Records ruling before the School District of Philadelphia released data to a Broad + Liberty reporter about the increase in students failing classes last year. How can we solve a problem we're not allowed to see?

The School District of Philadelphia has released data showing the number of students who have failed at least one class in a marking period in the last three years. The move by the District comes after it asserted it did not maintain the data in response to two (one, two) different Right to Know Law requests.

After reporting last month on the District denying the requests, local outlet Broad + Liberty filed an appeal with the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records. The office ruled in favor of Broad + Liberty and the District subsequently supplied the information.

The data show an increase of 6 to 12th grade students who had failed at least one class from 26 percent at the end of the 2019-2020 school year to 31 percent in the 2020-2021 school year. This timeframe would include the 2020 fall semester in which tele-learning was the only method employed for the semester.

The District is continuing a relatively slow, phased approach to full-time, in-person learning, and aims to have students back by next fall.

A group of education-minded parents in the suburbs had been collecting the failure-rate data from various school districts in Southeast Pennsylvania, trying to get a grasp on how damaging school closures had been. Numerous reports and studies had begun to suggest drastic learning loss by the summer of 2020.

After their request for the data was denied by the District, Broad + Liberty filed a second Right to Know Law request, hoping that broader language would create results. But again, the District responded by saying it “does not maintain comprehensive records and/or documents that ‘records, enumerates, lists, tracks, or otherwise keeps track of students (whether by raw number or by percentage or by individual name)” who had failed one class in one marking period.

The data show an increase of 6-12th grade students who had failed at least one class from 26 percent at the end of the 2019-2020 school year to 31 percent in the 2020-2021 school year. This timeframe would include the 2020 fall semester in which telelearning was the only method employed for the semester.

Despite the two denials, the SDP pushed back hard when Broad + Liberty requested comment for an article about the lack of information.

“To assert that the District does not track information just because said information, which is not public, was not shared with your outlet is irresponsible and feeds negative stereotypes that are often attributed to urban school districts with large numbers of students of color,” the District said.

The District did not return a request for comment after the data was finally released.


MORE ON EDUCATION SOLUTIONS IN PHILADELPHIA


Parent groups, education advocates and others have been using metrics similar to these to try to measure how detrimental school closures had been.

Even by June, studies were beginning to report the damage.

“The average student could begin the next school year having lost as much as a third of the expected progress from the previous year in reading and half of the expected progress in math, according to a working paper from NWEA, a nonprofit organization, and scholars at Brown University and the University of Virginia,” the New York Times reported in early June.

As far as tracking the pandemic’s effect on education by looking at the percentage of students failing, The Morning Call did such a study of more than a dozen school districts in the Lehigh Valley. Some districts showed alarming increases in the failure rate, but used a slightly different metric by only examining the number of students who had failed two classes, as opposed to the Philadelphia data looking at the number of students who failed just one class.

“Some students adapt very well to remote learning and that change, but what we’re finding is, here, that most students have not, and I think it’s going to be extremely difficult to make up all of the academic loss because of COVID over the coming years,” said Northampton Area Superintendent Joseph Kovalchik to the The Morning Call.

This article is part of a content partnership with

Todd Shepherd is Broad + Liberty’s chief investigative reporter.

Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash

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