PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The School District of Philadelphia released its revamped 2020-21 school progress reports on Thursday, but without standardized testing to rely on, the reports don’t include data on academic performance.
The annual profiles of the district’s 216 schools were formerly called School Progress Reports. This year, the district modified the report and renamed it the School Progress Report on Education and Equity, or SPREE, to align with the equity goals of the Philadelphia Board of Education.
For the 2020-21 school year, the district is referring to the new reports as SPREE Lite because they don’t include scores for reading and English or math and sciences.
Because of the pandemic, most students didn’t take the Keystone or PSSA state exams over the past two years. As a result, the district did not include a full academic assessment in the latest reports. The SPREE Lite reports only outline attendance, school climate and graduation rates.
What the SPREE reports will eventually show, administrators say, is performances by demographic groups of students.
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“We’re not just looking at a single number for schools,” said Malika Savoy-Brooks, the district’s chief of academic supports. “We’re actually going into the demographics of the district and the demographics of the schools.
“Not just the what we are teaching, but who we are teaching and how we are impacting them for post-secondary opportunities.”
Instead of an overall number score, schools under the SPREE system will be grouped in one of six levels that reflect whether schools are meeting their goals and whether they’re improving.