Building A Comprehensive Data Set On Every Teacher: The Nces Teacher Compensation Survey

• Activity Number: 287
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 2, 2011 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Government Statistics
• Author(s): Stephen Q. Cornman*+ and Frank Johnson and Lei Zhou and Amber Noel
• Companies: National Center for Education Statistics and National Center for Education Statistics and Educational Services Institute-MacroSys, LLC and American Institutes for Research
• Keywords: Administrative data on teachers' compensation ; teacher salaries ; teacher characteristics

Abstract

National data on teachers are limited to periodic sample surveys or to simple counts at the district or school level. In response to the need for individual teacher-level data, the US Dept. of Education, NCES developed the Teacher Compensation Survey (TCS), an administrative records survey that collects total compensation, teacher status, and demographic data about individual teachers from multiple states. Approximately 1.6 million teachers are currently in the data set, representing 50% of teachers in the United States. In 2007, NCES launched the pilot TCS data collection, with seven states volunteering to provide administrative records for school year (SY) 2005-06. The TCS expanded to 17 states reporting SY 2006-07 data, 18 states reporting SY 2007-08 data, and 23 states reporting SY 2008-09 data. It is anticipated up to thirty-five states will volunteer to participate in the TCS from 2011 to 2013. This session provides an overview of the TCS data collection, a comparison of state administrative records with other sources of data, data availability and quality, limitations, and advantages of the TCS. This session also presents findings and descriptive statistics.