Harris Poll School Pulse

A Management Tool for School Leadership

A school district must have a clear understanding of "educational quality" as defined by each of its stakeholder groups. A school district must also be concerned about the experiences that students, parents, and employees have with the district each day. Each of these experiences has a direct impact on student motivation and achievement, employee productivity and effectiveness, and parental support and engagement.

This educational research program allows districts to:

• Involve its most important stakeholders, parents, students, staff, and the community in district management
• Establish benchmarks
• Sharpen strategic planning and processes
• Understand the key drivers of satisfaction
• Be presented with a set of priorities to lead school leaders to increase satisfaction
• Collect trend data at both the district and building level
• Compare themselves to "similar" districts using Harris Interactive's database with the most recent school year data

Our Approach

This proven tool is based on the standardized online and paper questionnaires that are a result of the hard work of, to name a few, school administrators, teachers, parents, and consultants in the education field. Our instruments contain experiential, attitudinal, and demographic measures. Most importantly, Harris Interactive uses scales that make it possible to model the data from the study. This "key driver" analysis is critical to the study to understand which experiences drive customer satisfaction in order to recommend actions that improve it.

Results will indicate which items on the questionnaires, if improved, will have the greatest impact on student, teacher, and parent satisfaction. The specific areas of the school experience that are covered by the School Poll survey include: