The SASS is the largest, most extensive survey of K-12 school districts, schools, teachers, and administrators in the U.S. today. It includes data from public, private, and Bureau of Indian Affairs school sectors. Therefore, the SASS provides a multitude of opportunities for analysis and reporting on elementary and secondary educational issues. The possibilities include:
The SASS asks similar questions of respondents across sectors, including public, public charter, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and private schools. The consistency of questions across sectors and the large sample sizes allow for exploration of similarities and differences across sectors.
SASS data are representative at the state level for public school respondents and at the private school affiliation level for private school respondents. Thus, SASS is invaluable for analysts interested in elementary, middle, and secondary schools within or across specific states or private school affiliations.
The large SASS sample allows extensive disaggregation of data according to the characteristics of teachers, administrators, schools and school districts. For example, researchers can compare urban and rural settings, and the working conditions of teachers and administrators of differing demographic backgrounds.
SASS data have been collected four times over the period between 1987 and 2000. Many questions have been asked of respondents at multiple time points, allowing researchers to examine trends on these topics over time. In addition, the linkage of the SASS data and the Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) create a small longitudinal component. A subset of teachers who respond to SASS are surveyed during the next school year, including teachers who have changed schools, left the teaching profession, and a subsample of teachers who have stayed at the same school over the two school years. Thus, researchers can study the antecedents of teacher attrition.
Users of restricted-use SASS data can link school districts and schools to other data sources. For instance, 1999-2000 SASS restricted-use data sets include selected information taken from the NCES's Common Core of Data (CCD).
The SASS data can be very useful for researchers performing their own focused studies on smaller populations of teachers, administrators, schools, or school districts. The SASS can supply data at the state, affiliation, or national level that provide valuable contextual information for localized studies; localized studies can provide illustrations of broad findings produced by SASS.
