Principal Follow-up Survey: Tables Library Data

Summary:  The Principal Follow-Up Survey (PFS) is a follow-up survey of public and private elementary and secondary school principals who participated in the National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) during the previous school year. Historically, the PFS has also been conducted the school year following the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), the predecessor survey to the NTPS.

The purpose of the PFS is to determine how many principals in the base (NTPS) school year still work as a principal in the same school during the following school year, how many moved to become a principal in another school, and how many left the principalship altogether. Another goal is to measure, from those who left the principalship, what percentage retired or sought work in another occupational field.

Information collected on this survey will help policymakers, researchers, and other education leaders to:

• measure principal retention and attrition; and
• understand the effects of school policies and practices on principals’ decisions to remain in or leave the profession.

Data Organization
Each table has an associated excel and excel SE file, which are grouped together in a folder in the dataset (one folder per table). The folders are named based on the excel file names, as they were when downloaded from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) website.

In the PFS folder, there is a catalog csv that provides a crosswalk between the folder names and the table titles.

The documentation folder contains (1) questionnaires for PFS downloaded from the study website and (2) reports related to PFS found in the NCES resource library.

Original Distribution URL:   https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ntps/estable/Tables

Scope of Project

Subject Terms:   school principals; school personnel; public schools; private schools

Geographic Coverage:   United States

Time Period(s):   2008 – 2022

Universe:   Public and private elementary and secondary school principals who participated in the National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) during the previous school year.

Data Type(s):   survey data

Collection Notes:   Downloaded 6/25/25.