The Department of Education wanted to revamp a longstanding survey of school staff.

In 1987, the U.S. Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) launched the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). SASS ran seven times between its inception and 2011. The survey comprised school, district, principal, and teacher questionnaires and gathered data from public schools--including charter schools and Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools--and private schools. Many of the same survey questions were used in each survey round, allowing researchers to analyze trends in important issues affecting teachers, principals, and schools.

In 2012, NCES began planning a successor to the SASS, named the National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS), that would be highly flexible, timely, and integrated with other Education Department data, such as EDFacts and the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). For the redesign to be effective, NCES needed a thorough review of the SASS along with expert recommendations about improving the survey. 

NORC developed recommendations for reorganizing Schools and Staffing Survey content.

NCES engaged NORC at the University of Chicago to review SASS. NORC documented the overlap between questions from the 2011-12 SASS questionnaires and other extant data sources and removed the duplicate SASS items. To learn how the survey might be improved, NORC conducted research to understand how SASS data had been used in the past and convened a Technical Review Panel in June 2013 to develop recommendations for content.

Based on this work, NORC developed detailed recommendations about how SASS/‌NTPS content could be reorganized into a new system in 2015-2016 and afterward. Under these recommendations, the core instruments, module instruments, and other needed instruments would form a unified survey system. NORC also recommended core content for instruments for public and private school teachers and for public and private school principals, as well as content that would rotate in and out of the teacher and principal surveys on a four-year cycle. 

NORC helped the Education Department launch its National Teacher and Principal Survey.

The newly developed NTPS consisted of 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 survey collects data on core topics, including teacher and principal preparation, classes taught, school characteristics, and demographics of the teacher and principal labor force. In addition, each round of the NTPS contains rotating modules on important education topics such as professional development, working conditions, and evaluation. This approach has allowed policymakers and researchers to assess trends on both stable and dynamic topics.

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