The American School District Panel (ASDP) is a nationally representative set of more than 1,000 school district leaders who agree to take surveys over time. RAND recruits ASDP members using probabilistic sampling methods, which allow researchers to weight survey results to generalize to the national population of school districts and charter…

The American School District Panel (ASDP) is the newest addition to RAND's American Educator Panels (AEP) and was designed to survey district leaders two times each school year. RAND recruits ASDP members using probabilistic sampling methods, which allow researchers to weight survey results to generalize to the national population of school…

This is the latest report in the State of the Superintendent series, an annual report intended to provide a reliable, recurring snapshot of the U.S. public school superintendency. Since the American School District Panel began in fall 2020, researchers have periodically surveyed superintendents about their job, focusing on job-related stressors,…

Many education tests and psychological surveys elicit respondent views of similar constructs across scenarios (e.g., story followed by multiple choice questions) by repeating common statements across scales (one-statement-multiple-scale, OSMS). However, a respondent's earlier responses to the common statement can affect later responses to it…

In sample designs, it is commonly recognized that using auxiliary information significantly increases an estimator's precision. This manuscript introduces an weighted strategy for computing the finite population mean using auxiliary information in sample surveys. The equations for the mean squared error ("MSE") of the proposed estimator…

The American School District Panel (ASDP) is the newest addition to the RAND Corporation's American Educator Panels (AEP) and was designed to survey district leaders several times each school year. RAND recruits ASDP members using probabilistic sampling methods, which allow researchers to weight survey results to generalize to the national…

Insufficient wages and unequal pay create challenges in attracting and retaining high-quality early educators, critical for young children's success in early care and education (ECE) programs. While ECE professional wages are already lower than similar workers, there may be wage disparities based on race/ethnicity and gender within the workforce.…

This technical report provides detailed information about the sample, survey instruments, and resultant data for the 2024 American Instructional Resources Surveys (AIRS) that were administered to principals and teachers in spring 2024 via RAND's American Educator Panels (AEP). The 2024 AIRS focused on the usage of, perceptions of, and supports for…

School leadership research literature has a large number of widely used constructs. Could fewer constructs bring more clarity? This study evaluates construct content validity, defined as the extent to which a measure's items reflect a theoretical content domain, in school leadership literature. To do so, we reviewed 29 articles that used Teaching…

Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are now a popular tool to inform causal inferences. We discuss how DAGs can also be used to encode theoretical assumptions about nonprobability samples and survey nonresponse and to determine whether population quantities including conditional distributions and regressions can be identified. We describe sources of…

There are over one million school-age children in Missouri, and we estimate 61,000 (6% of all school-age children) are homeschooled. Missouri is one of 29 states that does not require homeschooling to be reported. Using methods that can be replicated elsewhere with publicly available data, we test three approaches to estimating homeschool…

The purpose of this study is to review the literature on the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) for the past 10 years to identify multiple paths through which school leadership exerted influences on school organizations and organizational outcomes. Our analysis of a network, consisting of 83 nodes (variables) and 242 variable ties…

The objective of our project was to develop a smartphone app for administering shorter ("modular") surveys. Given the paucity of research on this topic, we decided to use "co-design" techniques to generate design solutions. To implement these techniques, we recruited respondents in the survey target population to work in small…

A number of previous studies have shown that the direction of rating scales may affect the distribution of responses. There is also considerable evidence that the cognitive process of answering a survey question differ by survey mode, which suggests that scale direction effects may interact with mode effects. The aim of this study was to explore…

This paper aims to showcase the value of implementing a Bayesian framework to analyze and report results from international large-scale assessments and provide guidance to users who want to analyse ILSA data using this approach. The motivation for this paper stems from the recognition that Bayesian statistical inference is fast becoming a popular…