In spring 2024, the Gates Foundation sponsored the recruitment of public school pre-kindergarten (pre-K) teachers to RAND's American Teacher Panel (ATP), an online survey panel of approximately 27,000 U.S. public school teachers that had previously covered teachers in kindergarten through 12th grade. In this short report, the authors describe…

This technical report on the 2025 State of the American Teacher (SoT) survey and the American Life Panel (ALP) companion survey includes descriptions of survey content, survey administration, and survey weighting for the SoT and ALP surveys, as well as univariate descriptive tables of the SoT survey and ALP survey results.

Mostly in web surveys, attention checks have been proposed to identify inattentive respondents in self-administered surveys as previous research has argued that low-quality answers may introduce severe biases in data analyses. The increasing popularity of mixing survey modes for conducting probability-based surveys amplifies the need for…

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…

This 2022 policy evaluation explores the continually low (<60%) educator participation rate associated with the Teaching and Learning Conditions Colorado (TLCC) survey and the state's overall alignment with its 2008 goal, to reduce educator turnover and related student achievement gaps. Through an intrinsic case study and a pragmatic lens,…

Surveys are widely used data collection tools in empirical studies of human behaviour. Self-reporting plays a central role in exploring various psychological processes that are integral to human behaviour and learning, such as motivations or emotions. However, respondents can sometimes be the source of measurement error in survey research. In this…

The Maryland School Survey (MSS) draws upon items from several existing surveys. The content is closely connected across two types of respondents: instructional staff and students. Separate results from these respondents will allow policymakers and educators to identify schools that have a disconnect between instructional staff perceptions and…

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…

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,…

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.…

The authors used the 2025 State of the American Teacher survey to explore teachers' perceptions of their work-life balance, personal and work factors that are plausible drivers of work-life balance, and relationships between work-life balance and well-being. The authors compare teachers' responses with those of similar working adults to provide…

The purpose of the research was to explore how instructional practices of teachers are related to factors at the teacher-level (e.g. self-efficacy, effective professional development, etc.) and school-level (school size, school sector, etc.) simultaneously. Using the large dataset of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018…