Welcome to the Teacher Follow-up Survey 2008–09 information page!
If your school received a Teacher Status Form for the 2008–09 Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) in the mail recently, here are some answers to questions you may have:
The Teacher Follow-up Survey is conducted every four years by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) of the U.S. Department of Education to obtain information about current teachers' main assignment field, experiences, and satisfaction and about former teachers' employment and reasons for leaving the teaching profession. It is sent to a sample of teachers who completed the 2007–08 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS).
The Teacher Status Form lists the teachers from your school who were selected for the 2007–08 Schools and Staffing Survey. To help us select a sample of teachers for the 2008–09 Teacher Follow-up Survey, we ask that you complete the Teacher Status Form to classify teachers' occupational status for the current school year.
The rate at which teachers leave the teaching profession or move to another school is important to everyone from parents, school administrators, school boards, and state officials to researchers and policymakers. One way to measure these rates across the country is to compare what teachers do in one school year (2007–08) to what they are doing in the following school year (2008–09).
The data on this form is used to sample the teachers from last year's Schools and Staffing Survey and ask them some questions about what they are doing this school year. The teachers who completed the 2007–08 SASS were informed that there might be future requests for data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
This survey only goes out to a fraction of K–12 teachers who completed the 2007–08 SASS, and the goal is to be representative of all types of schools in your local area, state, and all around the country.
The Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, Public Law 107-279, Title I, Part E, Sections 151(b) and 153(c), authorizes the National Center for Education Statistics to collect data about the condition of education in the United States.
The Teacher Follow-up Survey is a voluntary survey that goes out once every 4 years. Your school's participation reflects the teachers in your area and how likely they are to stay at your school. A high participation rate from the schools and teachers sampled means that the findings are based on a variety of teacher workforce participation rates around the country.
Here are figures from the last Teacher Follow-up in 2004–05.
