Philly pushes school selection back as Pa. moves to make it easier to achieve advanced score on state tests

Amid state delays and planned changes on who scores advanced on Pennsylvania’s standardized tests, the Philadelphia School District is again moving its school selection window.

Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. made the announcement Thursday, saying the school system will now accept applications for admission into the district’s 37 selective admissions schools through Dec. 16 — not Nov. 24, as was previously announced.

The shift comes days before the state Board of Education is scheduled to vote on a Pennsylvania Department of Education plan that would change the cut scores for math and English PSSA and Keystone tests, so that students with lower scores than in the past would earn advanced designation.

The proposal, which is on a Nov. 19 agenda, doesn’t lower the bar for proficiency.

The changes come as schools have been awaiting final scores from the 2026 tests. The scores can carry significant consequences in some districts, like Philadelphia, where PSSA results are used to determine whether students have access to highly selective magnet schools.

Here’s what to know about the score changes and what they could mean for students and schools.

Pennsylvania’s current test thresholds — which rate students’ performance as advanced, proficient, basic or below basic — have been in place since 2015.

The education department said it decided to review the thresholds now in part because this spring marked the first year the tests were taken entirely online.

“With this transition complete, it was the right time to consider alignment between what we expect students to know and how that knowledge is demonstrated,” department spokesperson Erin James said in an email.

According to a presentation to the state board of education, nearly 90 Pennsylvania teachers participated in a committee that reviewed the thresholds and made recommendations.

The changes put forward by the department would lower the thresholds required to be considered advanced on both the math and English PSSAs, which are taken by students in third through eighth grade, and the Keystones, which are taken by students in 11th grade.

The changes would also shift the threshold for basic performance, though not uniformly: At some grade levels, students would need to score higher to be rated basic, while at others, a score that would previously have been considered below basic would warrant a basic rating.

“If adopted, the new performance thresholds will largely reflect longstanding trends in student achievement while ensuring that individual students — particularly students performing above expectations — are more fairly categorized,” James said.

By making it easier to score advanced, the changes are “targeted more toward higher-performing districts,” where there are more kids scoring at the higher end of the continuum, said Jonathan Supovitz, director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

“Those districts are going to see this as win,” Supovitz said.

The changes will have another effect, in that it won’t be possible to make direct comparisons to test results from previous years without individual student scores, Supovitz said.

He noted that before the pandemic, “the general goal” behind standardized test benchmarks “was to over time increase expectations” for schools.

But with drops in scores in recent years, “this could be an attempt at recalibration to the new levels of capability of the kids,” Supovitz said.

In the Philadelphia School District, the timing of the changes is tricky.

Unlike other districts across the commonwealth, Philadelphia declined to release preliminary scores, as it has done for years, citing PDE uncertainty as the reason for the shift and saying scores would not be released until the state finalizes them.

District officials pushed back the window for the school selection process, saying they hoped the pause would allow the state to release scores by the time applications for magnet schools are due.

But the uncertainty has frustrated families.

Eighth grader Leo Stober, a student at Science Leadership Academy Middle School who wants to apply to selective high schools, told the school board in September that not having access to scores “is quite frankly disrespectful, not only to the students, but also to the teachers.”

Students want to know whether their 2026 PSSAs will open certain schools to them — Central and Masterman, for instance, require PSSAs in the 80th percentile to qualify for the lottery to apply — and teachers need the scores “to find which students need extra help on certain assignments,” Leo said.

Watlington, who earlier this fall declared that scores would be available in time for the Nov. 24 school selection deadline, on Thursday adjusted that formally in a letter to families.

“Because assessment results are an important part of the School Selection process, we are extending the application window to allow families additional time to review their official 2026 assessment results and make informed decisions about their school choices,” Watlington wrote.

The school selection portal will temporarily go offline on Nov. 24 so district officials can upload students’ 2026 PSSA scores. The window will re-open on Dec. 2, and now close Dec. 16.