PSSA scores show disparities, room for growth

Pennsylvania has officially released the statewide PSSA test results from last Spring, highlighting school-by-school where students are excelling and where there’s room for improvement.

How did Philly do? District-wide, 59 percent of students were proficient or advanced in math and 53 percent in reading. The Adequate Yearly Progress target is 67 percent for math and 72 percent for reading.

The Public School Notebook pulled other data from the results, showing disparities among different ethnicities. In both math and reading, black and hispanic students produced much lower scores than their Asian and white peers, hovering around the 50 percent mark in both subjects, where white and Asian students scored at 70 percent or higher.

There was some good news, though: Promise Academies and Renaissance Schools did perform better. Specifically, North Philadelphia’s Dunbar Elementary’s rates jumped 17 points in reading and 20 in math.