This set of posts, the first in our six-part research series, will answer two questions:
1. What staff, student, and parent survey questions are scoring highest and lowest?
2. What questions saw the biggest year-over-year changes?
In our next set of posts (coming later in September), we’ll talk about which areas you should consider fixing first to boost engagement for each group.
At the end of each school year, we combine the results from all our staff, student, and parent surveys. We then look for interesting trends and study what these data points tell us. (Unless otherwise noted, all items are on a 1 to 5 scale; the higher the score, the better.)
First, we looked at staff. Next, let’s focus on parents.
Parent Observations:
1) Parent scores are rosier than staff scores. No item from parent surveys is below the median (3 on a 1-5 scale). That means, in aggregate, parents lean toward agreement on every item; that’s a great place to be!
2) The items at the bottom focus on climate (bullying and overall culture) and leadership (unlike staff, this applies to both district administration and the school board). Overall, though, parents seem to be pretty satisfied.
3) The relatively high overall satisfaction level is reflected in the final parent survey question (the one that asks whether they’re likely to recommend their schools to others). This is the question that increased the most.
4) Not only are parents pretty satisfied with their schools overall, but only four items declined year-over-year. This tells us that schools have done a good job maintaining fairly high levels of parent satisfaction.
5) We expect some annual movement; that’s just what happens in surveys. A few tenths of a percent decline aren’t much to write home about. However, parents are growing more unsatisfied with their school board than any other type of leadership.
The School Perceptions Blog and Resource Center features the voices of our team members. This post was written by Rob DeMeuse, Vice President of Research.
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