The School District of Philadelphia is the school district that includes all public schools in Philadelphia. Established in 1818, it is the eighth largest school district in the nation.The School Board was created in 1850 to oversee the schools of Philadelphia. The Act of Assembly of April 5, 1867, designated that the Controllers of the Public Schools of Philadelphia were to be appointed by the judges of the Court of Common Pleas. There was one Controller to be appointed from each ward. This was done to eliminate politics from the management of the schools.Eventually, the management of the school district was given to a school board appointed by the mayor. This continued until 2001 when the district was taken over by the state, and the governor was given the power to appoint a majority of the five members of the new School Reform Commission.SchoolsThe School District of Philadelphia operates 214 of the city's 300 public schools, including 149 elementary schools, 16 middle schools, and 49 high schools.The remaining 86 public schools are independently operated charter schools. Charter schools are authorized by the School District of Philadelphia, and are accountable to it.DemographicsEnrollment in Philadelphia's district schools was 131,362 students as of December 2013.As of the 2014-2015 school year, there were 107 languages other than English spoken at home by district students. The largest group of students with families using languages other than English at home was the Spanish speakers, with 6,260 students, making up 52% of the school district's other than English at home population. The other languages, in descending order, were Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese, Khmer, various English and French-based Creoles and Pidgins, Russian, French, Portuguese, Nepali, Cantonese Chinese, Pashto, Malayalam, Ukrainian, Albanian, Bengali, and 82 other languages.
