New Data on School District Website

Posted by on November 19, 2004

[posted from Neighbors On Line Philadelphia]

Those of you who use the School District website from the outside world may have been aware of the frustrating lack of school data on their website. If you went to the “Schools” page (link below) and got a list of schools, the only information you were offered was a “directory entry” with school address and the name of the principal (maybe not even the current principal). What you may not know is that until recently if you were a logged on as a District employee to the District’s network and went to this page, another link came up for each school – a school profile with a whole array of data. It took many months, many questions about why the rest of us didn’t have access to school data (apparently an MIS bottleneck), and the threat of a negative article in the upcoming Notebook, but it’s just been fixed. Finally those of us in the outside world can see current school-by-school data on demographics, test scores and school climate.

https://sdp-webprod2.phila.k12.pa.us/OnlineDirectory/schoolsInfo.jsp

or go to the School District home page (http://www.phila.k12.pa.us) and click on the “schools” link

They’ve done an impressive job and put up lots of current data. There’s some great information available in the climate/demographics section — attendance, suspensions, student mobility, serious incidents, etc. (starting with the A’s, I learned some amazing facts about Audenried HS). You do have to put up with some slow-loading pages (try hitting reload) and awkard navigation. — and the NCLB school report cards still aren’t linked. But it’s a big step forward. Take a look!

Paul Socolar
Editor/Director
Philadelphia Public School Notebook
3721 Midvale Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19129
http://www.thenotebook.org
Phone: 215-951-0330 x107
Fax: 215-951-0342
Email: pauls@thenotebook.org