Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study
OMB SUPPORTING STATEMENT
October 9, 2009
National Center for Education Statistics
A. Justification 3
1. Necessity of Information Collection 3
a. Purpose of this Submission 3
b. Legislative Authorization 4
2. Needs and Uses 5
3. Use of Information Technology 7
4. Efforts to Identify Duplication 7
5. Impact on Small Business 8
6. Consequences of Less Frequent Collection 8
7. Special Circumstances 9
8. Consultants Outside the Agency 9
9. Provision of Payments or Gifts to Respondents 10
10. Assurance of Confidentiality 11
11. Need for the Use of Sensitive Questions 12
12. Estimates of Hour Burden 13
13. Estimates of Cost Burden 14
14. Costs to Federal Government 14
15. Reason for Change in Burden 15
16. Project Schedule 15
17. Request Not to Display the Expiration Date 15
18. Exceptions to the Certification 15
B. Collection of Information Employing Statistical Methods 17
1. Respondent Universe 17
2. Procedures for Collection of Information 18
3. Methods for Maximizing Response Rates 19
4. Tests of Procedures and Methods 21
5. Reviewing Statisticians 21
C. Item Justification 22
Appendix A. Affidavit of Nondisclosure 16
Appendix B. Participant Contact Materials 33
PART A. JUSTIFICATION
1. Necessity of Information Collection
a. Purpose of this Submission
This document is a request from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) of the U.S. Department of Education (ED) for clearance of the activities occurring in calendar year 2009 through 2012 related to the Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study (BTLS 08). The BTLS 08 is a new study that will continue to follow a sample of public school teachers who were in their first year of teaching in 2007-08. These teachers were first interviewed as part of the 2007-08 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS 08). They were interviewed a second time as part of the 2008-09 Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS 09). At a minimum, current plans include following this cohort of first-year teachers for at least three additional collections—in the 2009-10, 2010-11, and 2011-12 school years. Contingent on future appropriation levels, NCES would like to continue following this one cohort of first-year teachers (approximately 2,100) for up to a decade.
BTLS is a survey of teachers that will provide a teacher attrition rate, mobility rate, and rate of re-entrance back into the teaching profession. Annual collections will track the career trajectories of these teachers. Additionally, BTLS will collect data that will permit comparisons of stayers, movers, leavers, and returners. (“Stayers” are teachers who remain in the same school between the SASS year of data collection and follow-up years. “Movers” are teachers who stay in the teaching profession but change schools between the SASS year and follow-up years. “Leavers” are respondents who leave the teaching profession between the SASS year and follow-up year. “Returners” are teachers who left the profession after the SASS year but have returned to teaching.)
The major objectives of the BTLS are:
To determine the cumulative attrition rate for teachers for more than one year.
To determine the rate of reentry into the profession.
To compare the characteristics of those who stay in the teaching profession, those who move from one school to another, those who leave the profession, and those who return to the teaching profession.
To obtain major activity/occupation data for those who leave the teaching profession and career pattern data for those who remain in the profession over the critical first few years of teaching.
To obtain data on educational activities and future plans as teachers’ and former teachers’ careers unfold.
To obtain data on attitudes about the teaching profession and job satisfaction over time.
NCES plans to have the Census Bureau conduct the survey under an interagency agreement.
b. Legislative Authority
The BTLS is sponsored by NCES, within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES).
The Census Bureau will collect the data for NCES by authority of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, Title I, Part C, Sections 151(b) and 153(a), and Part E, Section 183 of Public Law 107-279.
Section 153 of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-279, Title 1, Part C) requires NCES to:
“collect, report, analyze, and disseminate statistical data related to education in the United States and in other nations, including —
(1) collecting, acquiring, compiling (where appropriate, on a State-by-State basis), and disseminating full and complete statistics … on the condition and progress of education, at the preschool, elementary, secondary, postsecondary, and adult levels in the United States, including data on—
(A) State and local education reform activities; …
(C) student achievement in, at a minimum, the core academic areas of reading, mathematics, and science at all levels of education;
(D) secondary school completions, dropouts, and adult literacy and reading skills;
(E) access to, and opportunity for, postsecondary education, including data on financial aid to postsecondary students; …
(J) the social and economic status of children, including their academic achievement…
(2) conducting and publishing reports on the meaning and significance of the statistics described in paragraph (1);
(3) collecting, analyzing, cross-tabulating, and reporting, to the extent feasible, information by gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, limited English proficiency, mobility, disability, urbanicity, and other population characteristics, when such disaggregated information will facilitate educational and policy decision-making; …
(7) conducting longitudinal and special data collections necessary to report on the condition and progress of education…”
Section 183 of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 further states that
“…all collection, maintenance, use, and wide dissemination of data by the Institute, including each office, board, committee, and Center of the Institute, shall conform with the requirements of section 552A of title 5, United States Code [which protects the confidentiality rights of individual respondents with regard to the data collected, reported, and published under this title], the confidentiality standards of subsection c of this section [which prohibits anyone from using individually identifiable data collected under the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA) for any purpose other than research, statistics, or evaluation (with the exception of the Attorney General per amendment by the US Patriot Act) and prohibits the publication of information that could result in the identification of a person, and the person’s school, who provided data under ESRA.”
2. Needs and Uses
BTLS will provide national data from new public school teachers in elementary and secondary schools on turnover in the teacher workforce, including rates of entry and attrition from teaching, and characteristics and destinations of leavers, as well as provide data on teachers who return to the profession. Researchers have established the need for comprehensive data on teachers and their movement into, out of, and back into the teaching profession.1 In response to concerns over the past several years regarding the recruitment and retention of qualified teachers, State and local educational policymakers have sought more information about the composition of the school workforce and policies affecting the recruitment, retention, and retirement of teachers.
There are a number of reasons to believe that teacher attrition rates are not static. First, the age composition of the teaching force changes over time, so the proportion of the teaching workforce nearing retirement also changes. The median age of the public school teacher workforce in 2003-04 was 43 years. Policymakers are concerned about the pending retirement wave that will occur this coming decade. In addition, recent national data, as well as data from a number of States and school districts suggest that annual attrition rates are especially high for inexperienced teachers during their first few years.2 The experience composition of the teaching force -- also related to the age distribution -- may be an important (and changing) variable. Third, labor market forces in teaching and in the general economy undoubtedly influence attrition. When teaching positions are scarce, temporary exits may be fewer due to expected difficulty in reentering; when other opportunities are plentiful, career changes may be more likely. Finally, policy variables may also influence attrition rates. Policy initiatives such as mentoring, offering student loan forgiveness, or additional bonuses for teachers who gain national certification, may reduce attrition rates.
NCES is authorized to use data collected under ESRA for statistical purposes, providing that no published information can be used to identify a specific respondent or the respondent’s school. Furthermore, only individuals authorized by the IES Director may be permitted to examine the individual reports. To meet these requirements, direct identifiers, if present during data collection, are removed from each survey record; then all NCES data files that include any indirect identifiers that are considered to be potentially personally identifiable undergo a confidentiality edit. This edit is implemented using perturbation techniques to alter some of the responses in the individual data records prior to any release of data or data tabulations. Thus all released information is protected in a consistent way. Further, the perturbation techniques are designed to preserve the level of detail that exists in the information provided by respondents.
NCES publishes data collected under ESRA in tabular form. NCES makes data available for statistical uses in either a public use data file or a restricted use data file. In the case of public use data files, following the confidentiality edits, the individual records are subjected to additional disclosure limitation analysis that results in either further data perturbations or coarsening, or both. IES Disclosure Review Board reviews these analyses and the resulting data to ensure that appropriate protections have been implemented before they make a recommendation to release the data. Because ESRA prohibits the use of any data collected or made available under ESRA in any attempt to identify survey respondents and their schools, users of public use data must attest their willingness to follow the legal requirements imposed under ESRA before they may access the public use data.
In the case of restricted use data, under ESRA the Director of IES may authorize individuals to examine individual respondent records. Using this authority, NCES established a licensing system (see http://nces.ed.gov/statprog/rudman/toc.asp) whereby qualified researchers and their sponsoring institutions or organizations enter into a legally binding contract to protect the confidentiality of the individual respondent records and to abide by the specific terms of Section 183 of ESRA and those specified in the license document, the data security plan, and the affidavits of nondisclosure. After meeting these conditions and duly executing the legal documents, qualified researchers are permitted to analyze restricted use data in a physically and electronically secure space.
NCES also makes data available to external researchers through the use of on-line data tools. With these tools, the user can produce summary statistics, tabulations and analyses, but cannot access the individual respondent records. These data tools can use either restricted-use or public use data files; however, when a data tool is supported by a restricted use data file, additional protections are included in the software and limitations are imposed on the output to ensure appropriate protection to the underlying data.
Prior to being asked to participate in this study, NCES will mail a letter that will notify respondents about their selection for participation in the study. In addition to describing the purpose for the survey, the letter will describe the use of the data, the legal authority for the data collection, and the confidentiality protections, and the voluntary nature of the study is described. Furthermore, anyone granted access to these data, either public or restricted use, must agree that they will make no attempt to identify any individual survey respondent; unauthorized contact with survey respondents is strictly prohibited. (Please see item 10 below for a more specific discussion of the confidentiality laws.
3. Use of Information Technology and Minimizing Burden
NCES has attempted to minimize burden on the BTLS sample members through (1) use of a web-based instrument3, (2) pre-loaded data, and (3) online tools. The BTLS contains many complicated skip patterns. The web-based instrument will efficiently take respondents through the appropriate skip patterns thus eliminating the need of the respondent to determine the correct path for them. Data from SASS 08 and TFS 09 will be loaded into the database enabling respondents to verify and change data only if incorrect or in need of updating as well as skipping over questions that no longer are applicable based on previous experience. Several online tools will be utilized. For example, one of the tools will allow respondents to choose their school from a list school names and will then provide Common Core of Data (CCD) data, thus reducing the amount of information the respondent will need to type in.
Data collection will occur in phases; the first phase will allow sample members to complete a self-administered web-based questionnaire. During the second phase, the Census Bureau call center staff will call nonrespondents or those with incomplete questionnaires and complete telephone interviews and enter data using the same web-based instrument. All members will be mailed a letter requesting participation in the survey through the on-line instrument. Sample members who have provided e-mail addresses will also be contacted about the survey via two e-mails – one with the username, the other with the password. E-mail will also be used for reminders during data collection.
Information technology will also be used throughout data processing and analysis.
4. Efforts to Identify Duplication
Continuing discussions with State Education Agencies (SEAs) and other data providers and data users, as well as continuing review of other data sources within NCES and other Federal agencies and programs, indicate that there are two other sources of potentially similar data. The first is an NCES study of college graduates, with the ability to track teachers’ careers over time. Baccalaureate and Beyond (B&B) is a longitudinal study that begins with a cohort of college graduates and follows their subsequent transition into graduate study, the workforce, or family formation. B&B is representative of all types of college majors, and does have a sufficient number of graduates who prepared to teach to be able to follow that group over time. However, NCES collects B&B data about three times over the course of a decade after the cohort’s graduation from college, and there is no attempt to track all career transitions that occur between collections. NCES is following the most recent B&B cohort is from National Postsecondary Student Aid Studies (NPSAS) 2008 in 2009, again in 2012, and possibly a third time in 2018. That cohort would be college graduates in academic year 2007-08, whereas the BTLS cohort starts with those in their first year of teaching in 2007-08. The results of B&B would not be able to show teachers’ cumulative attrition over a 5-year period, for example4 (see Singer and Willett’s, 1994 discussion of measuring teacher attrition, whether on a periodic versus a cumulative basis). A major difference is that B&B data can document the percentage of those who trained to teach but were not currently teaching at selected years after graduating, while BTLS is gathering data on those who do choose to enter the teaching field regardless of training to be a teacher through traditional or alternatives methods. While B&B is an excellent source of data for investigating the transition of college graduation into the workforce, the data from BTLS can be used to report on year-to-year tracking of teachers’ career paths in and out of teaching. BTLS staff will continue to monitor the field of attrition and retention in preparation for subsequent administrations of BTLS.
The second source of similar data is from the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, a Harvard University Graduate School of Education study. The cohorts for this study were in their first or second year of teaching in 2002. This study used in-depth interviewing of first- and second-year teachers in four States: California, Florida, Massachusetts, and Michigan, with follow-up through their first 4 years of teaching. This project has been completed and the results reported (See "Who Stays in Teaching and Why: A Review of the Literature on Teacher Retention," a report sponsored by NRTA's Educator Support Network, January 2005, by S. M. Johnson, J. H. Berg, & M. L. Donaldson, http://www.aarp.org/nrta/teaching.html). One finding was that new teachers often experienced feelings of isolation from their colleagues (Kardos and Johnson, 2007), while another finding was that hiring decisions for teachers were often rushed and late in the hiring season (Liu and Johnson, 2006). Currently, there is another project about teachers in an intermediate or second-stage phase of their career underway by the same researchers (Susan Moore Johnson and Edward Liu of Rutgers).
5. Impact on Small Businesses or Other Entities
There will be no impact on small businesses or other entities.
6. Consequences of Less Frequent Collection
While the periodicity of the SASS has varied over time (3 three-year intervals, followed by a six-year interval, followed by 2 four-year intervals), a TFS collection has always occurred one year after each SASS collection. By continuing to follow the SASS public first-year teachers on an annual basis for a period of at least five years and possibly as many as ten, accurate data can be collected regarding reasons and attitudes of teachers who move into, out of, as well as back into teaching. Valuable attitudinal data may be lost if longer periods of time are allowed between data collections, due to the teachers’ inability to remember exactly how they felt several years in the past when they made critical decisions. In addition, maintaining contact with teachers who leave the profession or move to different districts or States will be increasingly difficult with each year of noncontact. Establishing a base of three years of contact information will increase the ability to locate the teachers as time goes on. Gathering this data in a timely fashion will enable policymakers and practitioners to have useful information on teacher attrition, reentrance back into the field and the reasons teachers make those choices. This same opportunity will not present itself until 2013-14, three years after the next SASS (SASS 2011-12).
7. Special Circumstances
There are no special circumstances that will require special data collection efforts.
8. Consultations Outside the Agency
The development of the BTLS has relied on the substantive and technical review and comment of people both inside and outside of ED as well as having the advantage of being built upon the TFS and the resources used in its development. Through an established series of meetings held with various groups, the plans for content, design, analysis, and reporting of BTLS data have been shared with researchers, policymakers, data providers at all levels, and data users. Their input has been important in designing the content and direction of the BTLS. Below is the list of those who have helped shape the BTLS from outside of ED.
Current Advisors are:
Prof. Richard Ingersoll
Graduate School of Education
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA
rmi@gse.upenn.edu
Michael Strong
Director of Research
New Teacher Center, UC Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Howard Nelson
Senior Associate Director
American Federation of Teachers
555 New Jersey Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001
Dr. Martin West
Department of Education
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
and for cognitive laboratory research:
Mr. Michael Long
Senior Manager
ORC/Macro
Calverton,
Maryland 20705
Michael.C.Long@orcmacro.com
A Questionnaire Review Board (QRB) was convened within NCES to review the survey items, suggest additional items, and determine if there was any overlap among surveys. The QRB consisted of Sharon Boivin, Chris Chapman, Stephen Cornman, Laura LoGerfo, Gail Mulligan, and Ted Socha. These members were asked to participate based on their experience with longitudinal surveys.
9. Provision of Payments or Gifts to Respondents
The Teacher Follow Study achieved an 84.8 percent response rate. Because BTLS is a longitudinal study, and all longitudinal studies experience sample attrition between consecutive collection waves, BTLS has to achieve higher response rate - ideally of at least 90 percent. Achieving and maintaining a higher response rate also minimizes the likelihood of bias in the data collected.
During this wave, NCES proposes to test the effect of providing different levels of a monetary incentive to help motivate participation and improve the response rate, encourage the respondent to complete questionnaires in future waves, and try to re-engage and interview first follow-up non-respondents. NCES proposes to test the effectiveness of employing an advance cash reimbursement of $10 and $20 mailed out in a letter with the respondent’s username, password, and link to the questionnaire to alleviate the burden caused by taking 20 minutes of their limited time.
The cases would be distributed as follows:
Teacher Status |
$10 incentive |
$20 incentive |
Total |
997 |
997 |
Note that each cell would include 577 or 578 current teachers, 151 or 152 nonresponding teachers, and 88 former teachers.
The test of interest is the $10 incentive group vs. the $20 incentive group for the total sample (n1=997, n2=997).
With an alpha of .05 and a beta of .8, this design is expected to detect a difference of 5.3 percentage points. With this design, the power of this test to detect a 5 percentage point difference with an alpha of .05 is .75. Under the same testing conditions; their power to detect a 5.5 percentage point difference is .84. If the alpha is relaxed to .10, this design is expected to detect a difference of 4.7 percentage points. With this design, the power of the test to detect a 5 percentage point difference is .84. The power to detect a 5.5 percentage point difference is .91.
The total cost of the incentive under this scenario is $29,910; however the marginal cost of the increase in the incentive from $10 to $20 is $9,970. IF this experiment is successful, it will yield more respondents than would be expected with a $10 incentive to all cases, and will provide information that is likely to result in an even larger response rate in the next wave if the $20 incentive is implemented.
10. Assurance of Confidentiality
From the initial contact with the participants in this survey through all the follow-up efforts, NCES will pay careful attention to informing respondents that NCES and the contractor will protect their personal data from disclosure to the fullest extent allowable under law. Under this plan, the BTLS will conform to Federal legislation and guidelines – specifically, the Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. 552a), Section 183 of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA 2002) Public Law 107-279, Section 183, the Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. 552a), Privacy Act Regulations (34 CFR Part 5b), Sections 444 and 445 of the General Education Provisions Act (20 U.S.C. 1232g, 1232h), the Computer Security Act of 1987, the NCES Statistical Standards and Policies handbook, and the Office of Management and Budget Federal Statistical Confidentiality Order of 1997. The Census Bureau will collect the data for NCES by the authority of Public Law 107-279, Title I, Part C, Section 183 of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (20 USC 9573), which guarantees the protection of respondents’ data from disclosure in identifiable form, except as required by law.
Consistent with the Privacy Act, these data will constitute a system of records, per the system of records notice 18-13-01 National Center for Education Statistics Longitudinal Studies and the School and Staffing Surveys.
NCES will inform all survey respondents that this is a voluntary survey with a letter signed by the Commissioner of NCES. The letter will also state that individual respondent or school results will not be identified in any reports.
All responses that relate to or describe identifiable characteristics of individuals may be used only for statistical purposes and may not be disclosed, or used, in identifiable form for any other purpose, except as required by law in compliance with the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA 2002) Public Law 107-279, Section 183 which, except as amended by the Patriot Act of 2001, states that
No person may--
use any individually identifiable information furnished under this title for any purpose other than a research, statistics, or evaluation purpose;
make any publication whereby the data furnished by any particular person under this title can be identified; or
permit anyone other than the individuals authorized by the Director to examine the individual reports.
NCES must collect some identifying information from teachers in order to: (a) follow-up with respondents who return incomplete surveys, so that missing and inconsistent data can be corrected, and (b) locate respondents for future collections. To accomplish these objectives, the instruments ask teachers to verify or update their names, home addresses, home and mobile telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses, as well as to provide information about family members who would be aware of their contact information over time.
NCES secure servers will house the web-based collection and NCES will export data on a regular basis through a secure file transfer operation. Only authorized individuals will have access to the BTLS data.
The Census Bureau will collect data under an interagency agreement with NCES. All Census staff members working on the BTLS project with access to the data (including monitoring of interviews) are required to sign the NCES Affidavit of Nondisclosure (see Appendix A). Notarized affidavits are kept on file at the Census Bureau.
11. Need for the Use of Sensitive Questions
BTLS contains sensitive questions that pertain to personal or family income, the number of people that the individual supports, and how many of these are dependents. The respondents are asked questions about their annual salary and other types of income during the school year and the summer. Those who left teaching (and are working) are asked about their annual salary and their combined family (or household) income. Data on income and compensation are important variables for analyses of average teacher salaries, overall teacher compensation, comparative income between current and former teachers, and teacher job satisfaction. Teachers are also asked for the number of people that they support and the number of dependents in the household. These variables will help NCES analyze financial burden of the teacher. It is important to have comparative income data and financial responsibility data between leavers and stayers or movers, as salary and financial burden may be explanatory variables in the decision to leave teaching or change schools. The family income and financial burden gives a broader look at the decisions made by teachers to stay in or quit teaching.
Respondents may deem items requesting personally identifiable information, such as name, telephone number, address, and e-mail, to be sensitive. Such items are never released, but are needed in the event that the respondent needs to be contacted to clarify some of his/her responses. Additionally, NCES will also ask teachers to provide contact information for a friend or relative who does not live with them. These data are needed so that NCES can locate respondents for future waves of the BTLS. NCES’s policy on the protection of personal information is discussed above in Section 10.
12. Estimates of Hour Burden
The projected sample size and the total estimated respondent burden for the BTLS are as follows:
Table A1 Details of information collection burden for BTLS |
|||||
Respondent type |
Survey path |
Sample size |
Number of respondents |
Estimated average response time per respondent |
Total hours |
Continued current stayers and movers |
Current teacher path |
1,147 |
1,032 |
19 minutes |
327 |
Continued current unknown for 08-09 |
Current teacher unknown 08-09 path |
113 |
102 |
19 minutes |
32 |
New leavers |
Former teacher path |
513 |
462 |
14 minutes |
108 |
New leavers unknown for 08-09 |
Former teacher unknown 08-09 path |
45 |
41 |
15 minutes |
10 |
Continued leavers |
Continued former teacher path |
213 |
192 |
7 minutes |
22 |
Continued leaver unknown for 08-09 |
Continued former teacher path unknown for 08-09 |
26 |
23 |
10 minutes |
4 |
Returners |
Returning teacher path |
38 |
34 |
16 minutes |
9 |
Returners unknown for 08-09 |
Returning teacher path unknown for 08-09 |
5 |
5 |
17 minutes |
1 |
TOTAL |
2,100 |
1,891 |
|
513 |
|
Sample size is based on the total sample size (about 2,100) for 2007-08 SASS first-year teachers and the number of respondents with an estimated 90 percent response rate. The estimated average response times per respondent for the current and leaver paths are based on the average response times to the TFS 05, TFS 01, and TFS 95 for those groups and adjusted by the number of items on the BTLS. The estimated average response time per respondent for the returner paths are estimated from the rate of total completion time of all respondents and the total number of items for both questionnaire types (current and former). Thus, the calculation for each of the rows is as follows:
Continued current teacher: 122 items in BTLS/(230 items in TFS 05/35 min) = 19 minutes.
Continued current teacher (unknown for 08-09: 126 items in BTLS /(230 items in TFS 05/35 min) = 19 minutes.
New former teacher: 73 items in BTLS/(130 items in TFS 05/25 min) = 14 minutes.
New former teacher (unknown for 08-09): 76 items in BTLS/(130 items in TFS 05/25 min) = 15 minutes.
Continued former teacher: 35 items in BTLS/(130 items in TFS 05/25 min) = 7 minutes.
Continued former teacher (unknown for 08-09): 54 items in BTLS/ (130 items in TFS 05/25 min) = 10 minutes.
Returning teacher: 105 items in BTLS * 0.15 min/item5 = 16 minutes.
Returning teacher (unknown for 08-09): 110 items in BTLS * 0.15 min/item) = 17 minutes.
The overall burden estimate of 513 hours is for the BTLS administered in 2009-10 only. The 2010-11 and 2011-12 collections will likely require similar hour burdens.
NCES’ standard procedure for estimating cost is to multiply the estimated total survey reporting hours (amount of time it takes to complete the survey) by the average salary of school employees (assumed to be $23.00 per hour). Following these assumptions, the total respondent dollar cost is estimated to be about $11,799 (based on about 1,891 respondents) per year for the BTLS. Respondents for this survey will not incur any cost other than the time it takes to respond.
14. Cost to the Federal Government
The cost to the Federal government for Waves 3-6 of the BTLS is estimated to be $1 million for the work conducted by the Census Bureau. Estimates were based on the sample sizes, the length of the questionnaires, and the data processing requirements. This includes costs for all aspects of data collection, data cleaning, coding, and processing. Administrative overhead and mailing costs are included. NCES has also contracted with KForce Government Solutions, Inc. to produce the on-line instrument for the BTLS. That work is estimated at $75,000. Finally, BTLS is accomplished with the support of the Education Statistical Services Institute (ESSI). ESSI will provide descriptive, explanatory, and longitudinal analyses; preparation of various project reports; and general project management and coordination with the government project officer. Approximately $500,000 will be spent on ESSI support for the BTLS. Altogether, then, the BTLS will cost the Federal Government about $1.575 million annually.
15. Reason for Change in Burden
This submission requires a change in burden for hours included in current OMB inventory from 0 to 513 burden hours since this is a new study. The annual cost is also new to ED.
NCES anticipates that a set of reports similar to those produced on other NCES national surveys will be prepared on an annual basis, including:
A Survey Documentation report that will summarize the procedures for sampling, data collection, data control, and data processing; and
A “First Look” report that contains tabular summaries of basic data for dissemination to a broad audience.
The table below provides the project schedule for the 2009-10 collection. Similar schedules will be followed for the 2010-11 and 2011-12 collections.
Teacher Locating |
10/5 – 12/18/09 |
Teacher Data Collection |
1/4 – 5/28/10 |
E-mail notification |
|
Send e-mail and letter with Internet questionnaire link |
1/4/2010 |
Send reminder with Internet questionnaire link |
2/19/2010 |
Telephone data collection with all nonrespondents |
3/1 – 5/28/2010 |
Process Data (edit, impute, weight) |
6/1 – 12/30/10 |
NCES Reports Results |
5/27/2011 |
NCES is not seeking approval to not display the expiration date of OMB approval.
There are no exceptions to the topics in Item 19 of Form OMB 83-1.
Appendix A - NCES Affidavit of Non-Disclosure
(Job Title) (Date of Assignment to NCES Project)
(Organization, State or local agency or
instrumentality)
(Organization or agency Address) (NCES Data Base or File Containing
Individually Identifiable Information)
I, ____________________________________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that when given access to the subject NCES data base or file, I will not –
use or reveal any individually identifiable information [including teacher and school names in the Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study (BTLS)] under the provisions of Section 183 of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (P.L.107-279) and Title V, subtitle A of the E-Government Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-347) for any purpose other than statistical purposes specified in the NCES survey, project, or contract;
make any disclosure or publication whereby a sample unit or survey respondent (including teacher and school names in BTLS) could be identified or the data furnished by or related to any particular person or BTLS school under these sections could be identified; or
permit anyone other than the individuals authorized by the Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics to examine the individual reports.
(Signature)
[The penalty for unlawful disclosure is a fine of no more than $250,000 (under 18. U.S.C. 3571) or imprisonment for not more than five years (under 18 U.S.C. 3559), or both. The word “swear should be stricken out when a person elects to affirm the affidavit rather than to swear to it.]
1 Beaudin, Former teachers who return to public schools: District and teacher characteristics of teachers who return to the districts they left, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 1995; Guarino, Santibanez, and Daley, Teacher recruitment and retention: A review of recent empirical research, Review of Educational Research, 2006; Stockard and Lehman, Influences on the satisfaction and retention of 1st-year teachers: The importance of effective school management, Educational Administration Quarterly, 2004; Watlington, Shockley, Earley, Huie, Morris, and Lieberman, Variables associated with teacher retention: A multi-year study, The teacher Educator, 2004;
2 ?See Marvel, Lyter, Peltola, Strizek, Morton, and Rowland, Teacher Attrition and Mobility: Results from the 2004-2005Teacher Follow-up Survey, National Center for Education Statistics, 2007; Harrell, Leavell, Tassel, and McKee, No Teacher Left Behind: Five-Year Study of Teacher Attrition, Action in Education, 2004.
3 An Excel spreadsheet and a flow diagram are included with this submission to demonstrate the survey instrument. The actual instrument will be completely web-based.
4 Singer and Willett, Methodological issues in the design of longitudinal research: Principles and recommendations for a quantitative study of teachers characteristics, Educational Evaluation Policy and Analysis, 1996.
5 The rate of the sum of completion time for all items of all respondents for the 2004-05 TFS.
| File Type | application/msword |
| File Title | tfs omb supporting statement [Memorandum] |
| Author | NCES |
| Last Modified By | #Administrator |
| File Modified | 2009-10-19 |
| File Created | 2009-10-13 |