The top reported proficiency rate is 64% in English language arts. The lowest is 51% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Cook-wissahickon Sch
Cook-Wissahickon is a small, fully Title I elementary and middle school in the Wissahickon neighborhood of Northwest Philadelphia. The school serves students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, with an enrollment spread evenly across its grade bands. Every student in the building qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting the economic profile of the catchment area.
The student body is racially and ethnically mixed. White students make up a plurality, followed closely by a substantial Black enrollment. A meaningful share of students identify as multiracial, and smaller numbers of Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian students also attend. The school draws from a neighborhood with median home values around the citywide norm and rents slightly above average for the city, though affordability pressures are present across Philadelphia given current mortgage rates and rental trends.
On the 2024-25 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, Cook-Wissahickon showed mixed results across tested grades (3–8). In English language arts, proficiency came in at just under two-thirds, which is a relative strength. In mathematics, proficiency was just over half. Science assessment data from 2022-23 (the most recent available) showed proficiency at about half. These scores place the school at the lower end of the performance spectrum within Philadelphia City School District, where overall proficiency rates tend to be lower than state averages. A parent may want to look into whether the district's recent shift to Illustrative Mathematics for K-12 (starting 2023-24) and the new EL Education reading curriculum for K-8 (starting 2024-25) has begun to move numbers for this school, since year-one implementation of reading materials saw a slight dip citywide.
The school is embedded in a neighborhood with strong walkability and access to Philadelphia's extensive parks system, including Wissahickon Valley Park. It sits within a city experiencing moderate, concentrated growth in downtown and Center City areas, with steady but uneven population change across neighborhood schools. The district is currently in the middle of a major facilities overhaul and school consolidation plan approved in April 2026, which is reshaping catchments and may affect which schools feed into middle school and high schools in the coming years. For families considering Cook-Wissahickon, it is worth confirming current catchment boundaries and feeder patterns with the school, since the broader district restructuring is underway.
The school's data on special education enrollment, English learner numbers, chronic absenteeism, and discipline were not available in the records reviewed. State testing is not conducted in pre-K through grade 2, so those early grades do not appear in the proficiency results. The school's website was not accessible during this review, so information on specific programs, staffing, extracurricular offerings, or recent school-level initiatives could not be verified.
See more original research from School Decision →