American School Leader Panel

Findings from a 2025 American School Leader Panel Survey

The American Educator Panels (AEP) are nationally representative samples of teachers, school leaders, and K–12 public school districts across the country.

The panels are a proud member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s Transparency Initiative.

For more information about any one of the survey panels, visit www.rand.org/aep.

If you are interested in using AEP data for your own surveys or analysis or in reading other publications related to the AEP, please email aep@rand.org or visit www.rand.org/aep.

The survey was administered to a nationally representative sample of principals who were members of RAND’s American School Leader Panel (ASLP).

In this appendix, we describe our methods for administering a survey to a nationally representative sample of K–12 public school principals via RAND’s American School Leader Panel (ASLP) and for analyzing the results of that survey.

The ASLP is a panel of K–12 public school principals.

It was designed to produce national estimates from the perspective of public school principals, as well as subgroup estimates by respondent and school characteristics.

Principals are recruited into the ASLP using probability-based sampling methods.

The sampling frame for the ASLP is a list of U.S. public school principals purchased from Market Data Retrieval (MDR), a market-research firm specializing in education.

The ASLP currently includes about 8,000 principals.

Principals who have joined the panel have agreed to participate in surveys several times per year and receive incentives for completing surveys.

After being recruited into the ASLP, panelists are then invited to participate in specific ASLP surveys using probability-based sampling methods.

A final consideration was the availability of panelists across state policy contexts within the ASLP to be sampled. There were about 6,000 active panelists in the ASLP at the time of sampling.

sample selection weight (the inverse of the probability of selection into the survey sample using the panel as the frame)