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.)
Let’s begin with staff.
Staff Observations:
1) Start with the elephant in the data room: zero staff questions improved in 2023-24 compared to 2022-23. However, when we presented data to a district that did improve year-over-year, boy, was that a source of pride. They bucked the trend and really hung their hat on that. Don’t be fearful of the data. Even worse is not knowing. You can’t solve a problem until you know what it is.
2) Some items scoring the highest for staff are items we want to see at the top. If staff aren’t getting along with each other, don’t feel effective in their job, and don’t feel safe, well, it’s pretty hard to see movement in any other area. These things need to be in place before you can make any progress elsewhere.
3) Discipline. Yikes. Remember that the scale is 1-5 (strongly disagree to strongly agree). That means that only two items for staff lean toward disagreement (i.e., are below 3), and both are related to discipline. At the same time, they’re getting worse. That signals something that needs an immediate fix: a concerning score that’s getting worse.
4) Satisfaction with district leadership differs when you peel away what “leader” means. Staff are growing more unsatisfied with the direction their board is taking them. District administrators don’t make the list.
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.