According to a new report, Philadelphia school students are still struggling from the lack of resources and funding in area schools.
Many data points in the Children First’s report on Philadelphia show students continually facing issues like poverty, mental health issues and low test scores. However, it’s not all bad news. Some areas, such as substance use and violent crime, have shown notable improvement over the study’s duration.
The education advocacy group has been putting out reports on the status of schoolchildren since 1982. This analysis looks into how children fared over a 10-year period — the latest report pulls data from 2014 to 2024, though in some cases the latest information is from 2021 and 2022 — and how measures such as economic prospects, learning quality and systematic changes affect them. The report “encourages lawmakers to act on proposals,” said Children First’s Executive Director Donna Cooper.
“What we do is build the public will to improve the lives of kids who have the greatest obstacles in life,” she said. “We do that by mobilizing citizens and putting out clear, actionable research.”
The organization’s latest analysis on Philly schools had several takeaways.
Financial struggles
According to the report, nearly half of Philadelphia students are living in families that can’t meet their basic needs without “going into debt or skipping out on essentials.” The latest available data shows 47% of Philadelphia School District schoolchildren in 2022 lived in households earning too little to meet their needs. This is down from a high of 55% in 2017.
Cooper said the U.S. typically relies on measures of “below or above poverty” to measure financial need. She said this is not representative of what a Philly-area family truly needs to comfortably live.
“If you’re earning $7.25 per hour or you’re earning $14,000 a year, you’re in poverty,” she said. “You’re far from being able to meet your costs. And what we found is in Philadelphia, a family has to earn around $75,000 a year to afford rent, utilities, transportation, food, out-of-pocket healthcare expenses and just basically what it takes to support your household.”
She emphasized this measure is general, and representative of a family of four with two children. She said other expenses – such as unexpected health issues – can drive up costs for families as well.
At least 152,000 students in Philadelphia are facing this economic hardship, according to the report. Cooper emphasized this number may be higher, and that this is just the “formal” report.
“There’s plenty of kids couch-surfing, there’s plenty of families who skip meals, so public benefit needs are high as a result of this economic stress,” she said.
She said many Philly-area teachers keep food in their classrooms, as students come to class hungry. Some schools provide washing machines for students who come to school without proper attire.
“When children go to school when their families are in stress, number one it’s hard to learn, but then it also means children are going to school hungry,” she said.
Cooper explained fixing this issue is multi-faceted.
“We could solve [this] by increasing the minimum wage, increasing the child tax credit, creating a state EITC,” she said, referencing an earned income tax credit. “These are things that will reduce public benefit dependence.”
She adds that struggling financially to this extent can make higher education and college feel out of reach for students and families.
Underfunded schools
According to the report, Philadelphia’s local contributions to its school district have increased, but the state’s contribution system has been “inadequate for decades.”
Cooper explained the Philadelphia School District is underfunded by nearly $1.25 billion.
“We have obscenely large class sizes,” she said. “The standard budget for a Philadelphia school district elementary school is one teacher to 33 children.”
She said, typically, research suggests class sizes can be effective when it is a one to 17-20 student ratio. Cooper explained that class size can affect academic performance and attention on students who may need extra help.
Additionally, she highlighted the lack of extra support staff due to limited funding.
“Let’s say you have a particular reading challenge,” she said. “Our district doesn’t have enough reading support specialists to meet the needs of kids who learn differently or need extra support.”
She said the lack of resources for children struggling socially or mentally is low as well. There are only 200 social workers in the School District of Philadelphia that serves over 100,000 students.
Cooper adds “aspirational things” like art, music and after-school activities also suffer without proper funding.
“Things that would never be acceptable in a suburban school district are the norm here,” she said.
Cooper explained there are also only two paid librarians on the school district’s payroll – meaning more than one generation of Philly schoolchildren have gone through the school district without having used a library or met a librarian. Librarians frequently get cut from districts due to budgeting issues, but Philly’s School District has been cited as having one of the “worst school librarian ratios” in the U.S.
A Pennsylvania judge declared the state’s school funding system “unconstitutional” back in 2023. Following this, lawmakers created a new school funding formula.
“That’s how we know we’re owed $1.25 billion,” said Cooper. “Because the Republicans and Democrats crafted a formula to determine the actual shortage, and so we know we’re owed that amount.”
Cooper said increasing the Philadelphia City Council’s local tax efforts, working on increasing the school district’s starting salaries and compliance from the state government are all potential solutions to these issues.
Despite this, she echoed the need for solutions is immediate.
“Our state is 42nd in the country. That means if you rank all the states 50 to 1, we’re eight states from the bottom. That means there’s only eight states that are worse than us, in terms of the share that they are spending per student on education.”
Mental health concerns
The report reveals 48% of students in the district feel “depressed or sad most days,” and 24% report having considered suicide. These numbers are up since 2013 – when 32% of students had reported feeling depressed or sad most days, and 13% of students reported having considered suicide.
Cooper said a lot of these statistics could be due to the surrounding environment.
“We live in a community that’s poor,” she said. “We live in a community where we drive through the streets and they’re dirty, so the signals are bad. We live in communities where retail corridors have vacancy rates, where there’s dilapidated houses, so there’s a lot of toxic images coming into kids, and add to that the violence.”
In addition to this “negative stimuli,” Cooper said the rise of social media and social isolation created from COVID have also contributed to increasing mental health stress over the past decade.
Mental health issues, particularly for youth, have worsened since the COVID pandemic. According to a 2021 declaration from The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Children’s Hospital Association, emergency department visits for mental health reasons rose 24% among kids aged 5-11, and 31% for teens aged 12-17. Suicide attempts also increased by nearly 51% among teen girls in early 2021 compared to two years before.
Social media use has also been harmful for youth and their mental health. According to research from Yale Medicine, children using social media face higher risks for anxiety and depression, and could experience challenges with sleeping, paying attention and body dysmorphia.
Cooper said there is a silver lining – the Philadelphia School District has one of the “most developed” school-based mental health services in the state.
“The city’s nonprofit, Community Behavioral Health, which is a Medicaid-managed care organization for behavioral health, invested and partnered with the school district to put, for every school building, a mental health partner,” she said. “Every counselor that sees a kid that is withdrawn or upset, they have a partner right there in their school they can begin to connect children to.”
However, she explained Medicaid is only available for kids who are “really sick.” She said there are many elementary or middle school students who will begin to exhibit the “early signs of mental stress” but will not be meeting the threshold for an official mental health diagnosis.
In some cases, she said these students are able to talk to school social workers. She said these teams, which can involve clinical counselors, are available in 65 schools in the district.
“In those schools, those kids have less school-based incidents and mental health is more of a common conversation,” she said.
However, Cooper said the program as a whole needs to get “more robust.” She added many children are also struggling when they aren’t formally diagnosed with a mental illness, but still need support for anxiety, sadness or stress.
“A kid who doesn’t feel good mentally can’t go anywhere [for help] if they’re not diagnosed,” she said.
She said mental health issues often develop over time, and without proper prevention or treatment, they can continue to get worse. She said a comprehensive mental health system that is available at all schools would be more effective.
Violent crimes drop
According to the report, violent crimes undertaken by children in Philadelphia dropped by 51% from 2014 to 2023. Cooper said there wasn’t a definitive cause for this drop, but that she has some guesses as to what led the statistics here.
“Since 2014, Philadelphia created the Philly Pre-K program,” she said. “And 5,000 kids have been in that program. And pre-K is a proven strategy for reducing the share of children interacting with the juvenile corrections system.”
She explained in the last four to five years, city and state resources have also been poured into community-based violence interruption and prevention programs – including youth programs.
“One of the things about the violence grants that went out is that they began to create access for kids to have contact with a caring adult, to have contact with someone who knew their name and know what they’re up to and to get some mentorship,” she said.
Cooper said prior to COVID, a lot of rec center programs were reduced, and community-based programs weren’t as prevalent. She said recent investments in these things have given children more avenues to explore positive interests and activities.
“COVID began a pretty strong investment in out-of-school-time activities that Mayor Cherelle Parker has continued,” she said. “These are the kinds of things research tells us help kids make better decisions.”
She said that rollout of mental health services in schools could have also contributed to a decline in these violence rates.
Substance use decreased
Another statistic from the study showed substance use across three of four risk behaviors has decreased in the last decade. The percentage of Philly high schoolers who report lifetime use of alcohol decreased from 64% of students in 2013 to 48% in 2021. Cigarette use declined from 25% to 16% and marijuana use from 43% to 34%. E-cigarette use saw a slight drop, but remained at 39% in both 2013 and 2021.
Cooper said there is not a well-understood reason behind this drop. She said it likely has to do with more social isolation and reliance on social media.
“What they’re doing on social interactions is a lot of doom scrolling – adults are doing doom scrolling on politics, kids are doing doom scrolling on their self image, lots of negative things about who they are, or what they are or what they wanna be,” she said.
She said she is grateful students are more often staying out of partying situations and avoiding behaviors. She said social media may be leading them to use “less-destructive processes.”
She said she is hopeful that students will continue to participate in interactions in spaces like afterschool programs or community-based initiatives that will allow them to avoid these “doom scrolling” strategies, and also reduce risk behaviors.
Cooper suggested another reason for the decrease in risk behavior could be the small school improvements that have happened over the past 10 years.
“Our school district has not suffered any cuts, it has only had increases in funding,” she said. “Every year, it’s a little bit that you see at your school. An art teacher, a music teacher, an afterschool program, a reading specialist, a counselor. And, I do think the fact that we’re not attacking the institution that kids know is their pathway to the future is having a positive effect on our children in a way that may be also mitigating self-destructive behavior.”
Other takeaways
Several other takeaways come from the survey.
- In Philadelphia, 65% of students cannot pass third grade English assessments, while 3 out of every 5 eighth grade students cannot pass state math assessments. The report emphasized these statistics were likely impacted by COVID – which led to some lower numbers of proficiency for these tests within the 10-year period. The number of students passing and failing these tests are about the same as they were at the beginning period of this study.
- Additionally, the share of children in Philly starting school without required vaccinations increased fourfold since 2016.
Cooper said there are many study results that indicate the need for changes.
“I think this report is a call to action for every elected official in Philadelphia and for every concerned parent and citizen to put kids at the top of the list,” she said. “There’s a lot of competing interests for how we use our resources, but what we know is that some of these investments are already showing benefit and if we could do more, we could really see a different pathway for the future of this city.”
She emphasized the importance of state, local and community partners in working together to accomplish these goals.
