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PSP is a key player working to transform Philadelphia education – we engage in four main ways:
• Using our Great Schools Fund to invest as growth capital to expand the number of outstanding schools of all types – district, private and charter – in the city;
• Building a pipeline of high-quality educator talent by incubating and scaling top-tier local and national talent and collaboration initiatives in Philadelphia;
• Improving access to great schools with GreatPhillySchools, a resource that empowers low-income families with actionable information to find and choose great schools; and
• Advocating for policies and conditions that are necessary for great schools to thrive and that prioritize student needs above adult interests.

PSP makes grants to launch new schools, expand effective schools, and turn around long-struggling schools. PSP also invests to incubate and scale initiatives to train urban principals and teachers. Finally, PSP empowers parents through GreatPhillySchools, which puts user-friendly information on 2,300 pre-K-12 schools at families' fingertips online and in free print guides distributed across the city.

Each school investment is vetted by our expert team, our investment committee and is ultimately presented to the Board of Directors for final approval. We've invested over $50 million to support the expansion or turnaround of over 50 district, charter and private schools across Philadelphia. As a result, over 25,000 additional students are now in high-quality schools or schools on the path to quality.

To date, over 600 school leaders have been trained through one of our incubated programs, reaching three in five schools citywide. We currently partner with nationally recognized talent development organizations including TNTP and Relay, local universities including St. Joseph's and Drexel, and local schools including KIPP, Mastery and Independence Mission Schools, among others.

To help remove barriers that prevent families from accessing high-quality schools, we developed GreatPhillySchools (“GPS"), a free resource which provides objective school performance data in an easy-to-use and -understand format. GPS provides information on more than 2,300 quality-rated early childhood education providers and K-12 schools of all types in Philadelphia. The city's push to enable universal pre-K created a big opportunity to expand the GreatPhillySchools audience and engage families before their children reach elementary school. In a city of some 250,000 families with children aged one to 18, GPS reaches more than 100,000 families annually: online, in print (we distribute more than 90,000 free print guides each year) and via school fairs that draw more than 12,000 families.

As evidenced by a variety of metrics, Philadelphia lags most of its big-city peers in educational outcomes. Many factors contribute to this unfortunate reality. To counteract this, PSP looks for high outcomes—including better college matriculation and persistence rates; high-school graduation rates; reading, math and science performance; student attendance and retention—in schools across all of the city's education sectors, and provides startup capital to expand those schools' impact on the city. As a result, schools in PSP's “portfolio" have created new educational opportunity for 25,000 students, while enrollment in schools that were labeled the lowest-performing in the city in 2010 has dropped by a third, from roughly 60,000 to 40,000.

Our investments in schools overwhelmingly target economically disadvantaged students and families. Over 84% of our portfolio expands access to good schools to low income students, over 91% help minority students and 16% focus on those that need special education.

Most of our school and talent investments have occurred in parts of the city where great schools have historically been in short supply, and through GreatPhillySchools and other initiatives, PSP has helped low-income families to overcome obstacles to applying to a wide range of good school options. Nearly all of the city's top-performing schools, public and private, have seen increased application flow as a result.