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.

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.

The other languages, in descending order, were Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese, Khmer, various English and Haitian Creole, French-Base Creole and Pidgins, Russian, French, Portuguese, Nepali, Cantonese Chinese, Pashto, Malayalam, Ukrainian, Albanian, Bengali, and 82 other languages.

The board of education was re-established in July 2018 after seventeen years of governance by a School Reform Commission.

The demonstrators were met with force by the Philadelphia Police Department, and the resulting riot left 22 injured and 57 arrested.

[22] An analysis determined that increased district spending was limited by a state system which relies heavily on property taxes for local school funding.

[22] In February 1998, then-superintendent David Hornbeck threatened to close the city's schools if the state did not provide the funds needed to balance his proposed budget.

[23] State lawmakers responded to the threat with fast-moving legislation, Act 46,[24] on April 21, approving a school funding package that included a takeover plan.

[26][25] "Holding students and their parents and teachers hostage in an effort to gain additional funding is certainly bold but not very wise", commented Representative Dwight Evans, Democratic chair of the House Appropriations Committee and prime architect of the takeover bill.

[25]Two lawsuits were filed by the city and the Philadelphia School District in 1997 and 1998 to address what they considered inadequate funding levels.

The first, filed by the school district, the city and community leaders, contended that Pennsylvania did not provide a "thorough and efficient" education; it was dismissed outright by the state court.

[21] In June 2000, under increasing pressure to find a solution to the fiscal and academic problems facing the district, school superintendent David W. Hornbeck ended his six-year tenure.

Hornbeck said he did not have the financial support of state and city officials to continue his school reform program (and a year later launched a statewide advocacy organization, Good Schools Pennsylvania, to mobilize citizens in support of improved state funding for public education).

[22] In recognition of the assistance, Mayor Street agreed to postpone for three months a 1998 federal lawsuit brought by the city claiming racial discrimination in the way the state funds the Philadelphia school district.

In a study released in July by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, Pennsylvania was ranked as having the sixth most segregated schools in the United States.

Members of the NAACP and a group of black ministers blocked an intersection in front of City Hall during rush-hour traffic.

[34][35] And earlier a crowd consisting mostly of unionized district employees marched on City Hall, where they disrupted the Christmas tree-lighting ceremony and drowned out the choir with their chants.

[28] On December 21, 2001, Secretary Charles Zogby of the Pennsylvania Department of Education signed a Declaration of Distress for the district.

[26] This action was the result of a months long negotiation under the legislation enacted by the Pennsylvania General Assembly in April 1998.

[26] Edison was not given as many schools as it had hoped, primarily because of conflict of interest concerns[26] Youth organizers from the Philadelphia Student Union staged protests, and engaged in civil disobedience to prevent the school district from handing over control of the central administration to Edison.

In contrast, district-managed schools given additional resources and a "restructuring" intervention showed larger achievement gains in mathematics.

[37] On June 17, two parents and two cafeteria workers began a hunger strike and the protest was named "Fast for Safe Schools".

The district increased the staff and accessibility of its call centers to provide services and allow parents and the community to report directly to the headquarters.

In 2009, The Superintendent's Roundtable discussions were held to hear (firsthand) from many parents who felt that their children were not receiving the quality education they deserved.