About the American Educator Panels

The American Educator Panels—made up of the American Teacher Panel, the American School Leader Panel, and the American School District Panel—are unique resources for obtaining accurate survey responses that measure the evolving knowledge, attitudes, practices, and work conditions of educators nationwide. More than 25,000 teachers, 8,000 principals, and 1,000 school district leaders from across the country are surveyed regularly through the panels.

In this page

Concept illustration of educators taking a research survey.

Evidence You Can Trust

The American Educator Panels (AEP) provide policymakers, practitioners, and the public with trusted, accurate information about educators’ knowledge, attitudes, practices, and working conditions.

Advantages of Running a Survey with the American Educator Panels:

  • Get accurate, nationally representative survey data from teacher, school principals, and district leaders, as well as state-level estimates for teachers in 20+ states.
  • Collaborate with Ph.D. statisticians—as well as survey programmers with years of experience in programming complex surveys online—who will ensure you get the survey data you want at the precision you need.
  • Consult with education policy experts to improve your survey questions and learn about innovative survey question formats to get answers to questions you didn’t know you could ask.
  • Obtain high-quality documentation of survey methods. The American Educator Panels is a proud member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s (AAPOR) Transparency Initiative, which ensures that important details about the methods used to conduct a survey are openly reported. RAND always delivers a data file, codebook, and technical documentation upon completion of your survey, all of which has undergone extensive quality assurance, cleaning, and weighting to ensure it is representative of your target population.
  • Have the option of working with RAND researchers to gather qualitative interview data from survey respondents to gain deeper information about your topic.
  • Commission a RAND report authored by RAND staff who will analyze and report on findings from your survey. All RAND reports go through an extensive quality assurance and peer review, and they are posted for free download on the RAND website.
  • Download, analyze, and report on survey data that are available for free download on the AEP Data Portal or explore data via data visualization tools on Bento.

Survey Methods and Panel Details

How Do the Panels Work?

We typically invite the teachers and principals who are members of our panels to complete a few web-based surveys every year, immediately after which they receive a small monetary incentive. We also invite district leaders to complete a small number of surveys per year, although we do not provide them with monetary incentive. Panelists receive regular reports on the survey results, allowing them to understand the changing responses of their peers nationwide.

Researchers from RAND and other organizations run surveys through the panels, which are programmed and administered by the American Educator Panels team. The team then prepares the survey data files to deliver to the researchers who analyze and report on the results. Interested in running a survey through the panels? Complete this survey intake form.

What Methods Does RAND Use to Maintain the American Educator Panels?

RAND regularly selects educators using probability-based sampling methods to invite them to join the educator panels. The sample design allows us to generate nationally representative estimates for teachers, school leaders, and district leaders plus state-level estimates for oversampled states for teachers. The following reports document our procedures, as well as methodological research on AEP measures more generally:

What Sampling Methods Are Used for AEP Studies?

We select panelists to participate depending on the specific needs of the study. The size of the panels allows targeting of teachers and/or principals to generate representative samples by, for example, grade band (e.g., K–5 or 6–12), subjects taught, or some combination. The sampling and weighting details for studies completed with the American Educator Panels are documented in a technical report accompanying each study.

Explore the RAND American Educator Panels

About RAND and the American Life Panel

RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.

Nearly all of RAND's research—including current and forthcoming releases by the AEP—is free to access on rand.org.

Looking for the RAND American Life Panel? Visit the ALP site to learn how to survey a broader audience.

AEP Contacts

View the full AEP team

General Inquires

Want to learn more about the American Educator Panels? Reach out to the AEP team using this form or the email address below, and they’ll be in touch with you.

aep@rand.org

If you’re interested in running a survey with the AEP, please fill out this separate form.

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