Overview

The National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) is a system of related questionnaires that provide descriptive data on the context of elementary and secondary education while also giving policymakers a variety of statistics on the condition of education in the United States.

The NTPS is a redesign of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), which the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) conducted from 1987 to 2011. The design of the NTPS is a product of three key goals coming out of the SASS program: flexibility, timeliness, and integration with other Department of Education collections. The NTPS collects data on core topics including teacher and principal preparation, classes taught, school characteristics, and demographics of the teacher and principal labor force every two to three years. In addition, each administration of NTPS contains rotating modules on important education topics such as: professional development, working conditions, and evaluation. This approach allows policy makers and researchers to assess trends on both stable and dynamic topics. The NTPS utilizes primarily internet and paper data collection instruments.

Although the NTPS will have a different structure and sample than previous SASS administrations, the focus remains on schools and their teachers and principals. The content of the 2011-2012 SASS forms the basis of the NTPS content, though many questions will be shifted to different questionnaire instruments or will be answered through the use of extant data sources. Cross sectional analysis of trends is possible for SASS items that have been maintained in NTPS. The questionnaires from past SASS administrations are available online and can be downloaded from the SASS questionnaires page.