SASS Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS)

1. Overview

The SASS Teacher Follow-Up Survey (TFS) is a survey of elementary and secondary school teachers who participated in the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) (see the SASS chapter for details on SASS). TFS is conducted for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) by the U.S. Census Bureau in the school year following the SASS data collection. TFS consists of a subsample of teachers who left teaching within the year after the SASS was administered and a subsample of those who continued teaching, including those who remained in the same school as in the previous year and those who changed schools.

Purpose

To measure the attrition rate for teachers, examine the characteristics of teachers who stay in the teaching profession and those who leave, obtain activity or occupational data for those who leave the position of a K–12 teacher, obtain current teaching assignment information for those who are still teaching, and collect data on attitudes about the teaching profession in general and job satisfaction in particular. TFS is designed to support estimates of public elementary, secondary, and combined school teachers and private school teachers at the national level.

Components

TFS is composed of two questionnaires: the Former Teacher Questionnaire, which collects information from sampled teachers who leave the K–12 teaching profession within the year after SASS; and the Current Teacher Questionnaire, which collects information from sampled teachers who currently teach students in any of grades prekindergarten through 12. Eligible survey respondents are teachers in public and private elementary and secondary schools in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Former Teacher Questionnaire. This questionnaire collects information from former teachers on their current occupation, primary activity, plans to remain in their current position, plans for further education, plans for returning to teaching, reasons for leaving teaching, possible areas of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with teaching, salary, marital status, number of children, and reasons for retirement, as well as any other information that may be related to attrition.

Current Teacher Questionnaire. This questionnaire obtains information from current teachers, including teachers who continued to teach in the same school as in the previous year and those who changed schools. It collects information on occupational status (full time, part time), primary teaching assignment by field, teaching certificate, level of students taught, areas of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, new degrees earned or pursued, expected duration in teaching, marital status, number of children, academic year base salary, time spent performing school related tasks, and effectiveness of the school administration. If the teacher is teaching in a different school than during the SASS administration, the questionnaire obtains information on the teacher's reasons for leaving the previous school.

Periodicity

TFS is a follow-up of selected teachers from the SASS teacher surveys and is conducted during the school year following the SASS administration. As a nationally representative subsample of public and private school K–12 teachers who participated in the previous year's Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), the TFS survey has been conducted seven times: in the 1988–89, 1991–92, 1994–95, 2000–01, 2004–05, 2008–09, and 2012–13 school years (following SASS administrations in the 1987–88, 1990–91, 1993–94, 1999–2000, 2003–04, 2007–08, and 2011–12 school years, respectively).

Data Availability

Information about the restricted-use data available for TFS through 2012–13 is located at https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/dataproducts.asp.

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