Philly student performance improved in 2024, but still lags other big-city school systems, national test results show
Fourth and eighth graders showed improvement on a nationwide exam, but the district still trails most of its big-city peers.
Philadelphia students improved in all areas as measured by the nation’s report card — but its school system still lags most other large, urban districts.
The Philadelphia fourth and eighth graders who took part in the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA), a special exam of the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress report (NAEP), performed better in 2024 in both reading and math.
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Fourth graders’ proficiency jumped two percentage points, to 17% meeting federal standards, over the 2022 reading results, and six points in math, to 19% proficient. Eighth graders posted a one-percentage-point increase in reading, and two percentage points in math, to 15% proficient.
Philadelphia still ranks near the bottom of most big-city school districts, and its performance in all areas still has not matched pre-pandemic levels, as measured by NAEP performance. But Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. said progress is the bottom line.
“I did not expect us to improve in all four areas — fourth-grade reading, fourth-grade math, eighth-grade reading, eighth-grade math,” Watlington said in an interview.
The district still has a long way to go, Watlington said, but there’s no way to go from low-performing to stellar quickly in a large, historically underfunded school system.
“It’s no different than how your 401k grows — it doesn’t all grow in two days,” the superintendent said. “It takes time, and you have some ebbs and flows, but you’re staying for the long haul. The same thing is true for progress in a public school district, particularly a big-city school district like this one, the nation’s eighth-largest.”
NAEP officials do not deem Philly’s scores “significantly different” from the district’s 2022 results, except the jump in fourth-grade math.
One reason for that improvement, Watlington believes, is the district’s new $20 million math curriculum, adopted in the 2023-24 school year.
In the past, different schools had different curricula, but Watlington standardized the curriculum, purchasing Illustrative Math with $20 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds.
“It’s a math curriculum that Penn Alexander has been using for years — one of our highest-performing schools, not just in Philadelphia, but in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Watlington said.
Philadelphia bested the average fourth-grade math and reading scores of just four cities — Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. It fared worse in eighth-grade comparisons. Philadelphia eighth graders outperformed three districts — Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee — in math, and only Cleveland and Detroit in reading.
Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center on Education Statistics, said that while there were bright spots, nationwide, the news about student performance on the NAEP is concerning — particularly around reading. Historic levels of students’ scores fell into the lowest category — below basic.
“No one’s back to where they are prior to the pandemic, so I don’t know how much celebrating you should be doing,” Carr said. “This is a tough call that we have as a nation to turn this back around.”
Overall, 25 districts besides Philadelphia participated in the TUDA: Albuquerque, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte-Mecklenberg, Chicago, Clark County in Nevada, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, the District of Columbia, Duval County in Florida, Fort Worth, Guilford County in North Carolina, Hillsborough County in Florida, Houston, Jefferson County in Kentucky, Los Angeles, Miami-Dade in Florida, Milwaukee, New York, Orange County in Florida, and San Diego.