Original Research by School Decision on Mastery Cs-harrity Campus
Mastery CS-Harrity Campus is a small charter school district serving students in kindergarten through eighth grade in Philadelphia. The enrollment is modest, distributed evenly across grades, with the student body overwhelmingly Black—the school reflects the demographic composition of its immediate neighborhood rather than a diverse cross-section of the city.
The school became a Renaissance charter, a model in which the School District of Philadelphia took over a lower-performing school to be operated by a network organization. In June 2025, the Philadelphia Board of Education approved Mastery Harrity for a five-year charter renewal with conditions. That approval matters greatly to families considering enrollment: charter schools operate on contracts, and non-renewal can force closure. This five-year renewal secures continued operation through roughly 2030, removing immediate closure risk from the decision-making equation.
State assessment data for Harrity was not available in the records reviewed. For a charter school in Philadelphia's context, that gap often reflects either a school still in early stabilization after a takeover or data not yet aggregated and released publicly. A parent should ask Harrity directly for its latest state testing results and proficiency rates in reading and mathematics, which are the standard measures of elementary and middle school academic performance.
The school's chronic absenteeism rate places it above the midpoint among Philadelphia County's districts. That is worth noting because absenteeism is one of the strongest predictors of student outcome, and a rate in this range suggests the school or families may be navigating attendance barriers—something a parent may want to look into further with the school, including whether Harrity has supports for students with attendance challenges.
Per-pupil spending at Harrity falls in the middle range of the county's districts, at the lower end of that middle band. The school operates with resources available to most districts, not exceptional spending levels.
Beginning in the 2025-2026 school year, Mastery is adopting new elementary and middle school English Language Arts curricula—Amplify CKLA and Amplify ELA—across all its schools, including Harrity. Both are designed around Science of Reading principles, which emphasize explicit phonics and systematic instruction. This is a district-wide shift that will directly reshape daily reading instruction for all students.
A meaningful pathway has also opened. Students who complete middle school at Harrity now have a defined K-12 trajectory to Hardy Williams High School, another Mastery school. Hardy is launching the Health Institute at Hardy in partnership with Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, starting in August 2025 with grades seven through nine and expanding through 2028. For families interested in healthcare careers, that partnership creates an early and sustained pipeline into a specialized program.
The school serves a contained grade band with no high school component itself, so it functions as part of a larger network rather than as a standalone entity. Its renewal status, its curriculum investments, and its connection to the Hardy pathway are all structural anchors that matter to families weighing whether to enroll. State assessment results remain the key piece of missing information for evaluating academic performance.
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