what's it like for students at penn alexander?"When the kids need extra help, they give them extra help... Before school, after school, and in school." -- Parent Interview
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In the most recent school year, Penn Alexander was host to 564 students in grades K-8. The demographics of the students are approximately 39% White, 24% African American, 18% Asian, 7% Latino and less than 1% Pacific Islander and American Indian. View our demographics page for a more comprehensive overview of the demographic makeup of the student body at Penn Alexander. The students attending the school live within the catchment zone, but must be enrolled through a lottery system.
The student we interviewed was a graduate from Penn Alexander who attended the school for K-8. She hopes to attend Temple University and become a therapist. In her yearbook, the graduating eighth grade students were asked to state their desired occupation in the future. Most of her classmates seek careers that require at least a college education, with many requiring advanced degrees as well. These jobs included lawyer, attorney, engineer, pediatrician, entrepreneur, marine biologist, and nurse practitioner. The student that we interviewed told us that her freshman year in high school was too easy for her because she had already studied the material as a student at Penn Alexander. She looks forward to taking Honors courses in the upcoming school year, which she believes will be more challenging and more in-line with the level of instruction for which Penn Alexander prepared her. |
Test scores
Penn Alexander is consistently ranked one of the top public elementary schools in the Philadelphia School District, due in part to students' continual high performance on standardized tests. Take, for example, the average district PSSA scores for third grade math and eighth grade reading compared to Penn Alexander's scores, with Penn Alexander (blue) far outperforming the SDP average (red) in both sections over three years. (view more here).