I'd like to be able to send my kids to the public school down the street. Not some lifelong dream — just a reasonable expectation for a family that pays what we pay to live here. With a second one due in a couple of weeks, where they'll go to school has stopped being a someday question.
So let me tell you what's happened to my tax bill while I've been weighing it.
For years, the city figured my rowhome in East Falls was worth about $250,000. Then, in the span of three tax years, the Office of Property Assessment decided it was worth $461,000 — a jump of more than 80%. What actually hits your wallet is the taxable value — market value minus the Homestead Exemption — and mine went from $173,000 in 2024 to $361,000 in 2027. It more than doubled. At the city's 1.3998% rate, my bill climbed from roughly $2,400 a year to about $5,050 — for the exact same house, on the exact same block, that I already owned.
Notice the quiet part, too: the Homestead Exemption that's supposed to protect me is a flat dollar amount. It crept from $80,000 to $100,000 while my assessed value exploded by more than $200,000. A fixed shield against a soaring number isn't much of a shield.
I'm not a special case. Philadelphia has reassessed again and again — a citywide jump averaging 31% in 2023, another round in 2025 — and for plenty of us the taxable value has simply run away from the paycheck. Every year or two the number goes up, and there's nothing you can do about the value they assign your home except pay it.
So I did the thing I always do: I followed the money. Where does a Philadelphia property-tax dollar actually go? The answer surprised me — and then it worried me — because most of it goes to schools, and I'm no longer sure the schools are worth what we're being charged.
Your property tax is mostly a school tax
Philadelphia's real estate tax rate is 1.3998%. But that number is split: 0.6159% goes to the City and 0.7839% goes to the School District. As of this year the schools' share is 56%; the city keeps 44%.
So when they reassess your home and your bill jumps, the majority of that increase isn't paving your street or keeping your library open. It's going to the School District of Philadelphia.
And that's just the property-tax piece. Separately, the city has been shoveling its own general-fund money into schools. I pulled 25 years of city budgets into a budget explorer, and the line called "Contribution to School District" went from $35 million in 2008, to $178 million in 2019, to $284 million today — an eightfold increase. Most of that ramp came after 2018, when the schools returned to local control and the city took ownership of the results.
Add it up and the message is unmistakable: your rising tax bill is, first and foremost, a bet on Philadelphia's schools.
Which leaves exactly one question that matters. Are we winning that bet?
$22,000 a child — and one in four can do grade-level math
Here's where it gets hard.
Philadelphia now spends about $22,379 per student per year. That is not a low number. It's higher than plenty of the suburban districts people move to for the schools.
And here's what that money buys, by the district's own reporting:
- 25% of students in grades 3–8 are proficient in math. Three out of four are not.
- 33% are proficient in reading — and that number went down last year.
- The four-year graduation rate is 77.5% — better than it was, but still nearly one in four kids not finishing on time.
The district's own goal is to reach 52% math proficiency by 2030. They're at 25. That's not an ambitious target; it's an admission of how deep the hole is.
I want to be fair here, because this is genuinely complicated:
- Philadelphia educates a very high-poverty student body, and poverty is the single strongest predictor of test scores anywhere in America. Comparing Philly's raw numbers to a wealthy suburb isn't apples to apples.
- The district was starved for years — a state takeover from 2001 to 2018, chronic underfunding, and in 2023 a Pennsylvania court ruled the state's school-funding system unconstitutional. Philly is genuinely shortchanged by Harrisburg.
- The numbers are, slowly, moving the right way. Math is up from its pandemic low. Graduation is up.
All true. And I still can't get past the core of it: I'm being asked to pay more every year, into a system that graduates a quarter of its kids late and can't get most of them to grade level — and to simply trust that this time the money will land.
Then they closed 17 schools
While I was staring at my new assessment, the School Board voted — 6 to 3, on April 30 — to close 17 schools.
Not because the checkbook hit zero on paper. It's part of a $3 billion facilities plan to shutter aging, under-enrolled buildings and modernize others. But the timing tells you plenty: it lands right as $1.2 billion in federal COVID relief money runs out — the same temporary federal wave you can watch crest and recede in the city's own budget numbers. Most of City Council threatened to block the closures. The board did it anyway.
So here's the view from my kitchen table: my assessment goes up, most of it flows to the schools, the city has octupled its own school funding, we spend $22,000 a child — and what my kids are offered in return is a closed building and a one-in-four shot at grade-level math.
Notice what the city funded — and what it didn't
One more thing I found in the budget that I can't unsee.
The Office of Property Assessment — the office whose entire job is to raise your home's value — has roughly doubled its budget over the last decade, to about $22 million. Meanwhile the Board of Revision of Taxes — the office where you go to appeal your assessment — has sat flat at about $1.1 million for fifteen years.
The city invested in the machine that raises your number. It did not invest in the process that lets you fight it. That's a choice, and it tells you exactly who the system is built to serve.
What you can actually do about your bill
I'm angry, but I'm also practical — and if your assessment jumped, there are real ways to lower what you owe. Do these:
- Homestead Exemption. If you own and live in your home, this knocks $100,000 off your assessed value before the tax is calculated — the city just raised it from $80,000. If you haven't applied, do it today; for most homeowners it's the single biggest lever.
- First Level Review and formal appeal. You can ask the city to review your new assessment, and separately appeal to the Board of Revision of Taxes. Deadlines are strict — check the date on your notice.
- LOOP (Longtime Owner Occupants Program). If you've owned your home 10+ years and your assessment spiked, this can cap the increase — but you generally can't combine it with the Homestead Exemption, so compare which saves you more.
- Senior Citizen Tax Freeze. If you're 65+ and income-eligible, this locks your bill so future reassessments can't push it up.
- Payment plans. If the bill is a true hardship, the city offers installment and hardship options. Don't just fall behind — call.
Details and applications are on the city's Real Estate Tax page.
The bottom line
I'm not against funding schools. I'd just like the school down the street to be good enough that sending my kids there is an easy call. That's the whole reason I'm holding this bill up to the light instead of paying it and moving on.
Because the deal on the table right now is: pay more, every year, forever, into a system that's closing schools and can't get three out of four kids to grade level — and don't ask too many questions. That's not a deal. That's a demand.
I'll keep paying. But I want what anyone wants when the price keeps climbing: proof it's working. Show me the reading scores rising. Show me the schools staying open. Show me my kids have a seat worth having. Until then, every reassessment notice is going to feel less like an investment in my city and more like a bill for a service I'm not receiving.
Sources: Philadelphia 2023 reassessment (avg +31%) and 2025 reassessment (+$330, 56% school share); test scores; graduation rate; per-pupil spending; the 17-school closure vote. City budget figures are from Open Common Ground's own budget explorer, parsed from Philadelphia's annual appropriation ordinances.