2026 NYC teacher survey: teaching, collaboration and leadership

The topic pattern is more revealing than a composite

Instructional leadership has a median score of 92 and peer collaboration 90. Teacher influence and classroom behavior each have medians of 68; preventing bullying is 67. Different questions underpin these measures, so these gaps are descriptive, not a controlled comparison. Still, they make the case for showing separate dimensions rather than averaging everything into an upbeat headline.

*25th–75th percentiles of published record scores; this is spread, not a confidence interval. Missing values are excluded separately for each topic. Source: official K–12 teachers summary sheet ↗. Equal weight per source record, including unmatched records.

Teacher influence varies across schools

The distribution below shows the range of published Teacher Influence scores, not a ranking of principals or an estimate of teacher retention. A low score can be a prompt to ask how staff contribute to decisions. It cannot tell us from this dataset alone whether a particular policy caused dissatisfaction, whether teachers will leave or whether academic outcomes will change.

High outreach does not answer every communication question

Outreach to Parents has a median published teacher score of 98. That is encouraging as a description of responding staff, but it is not proof that every family receives information in the form they need. Use the family survey alongside it as a separate perspective. If the two accounts feel different, ask about translation, communication channels and how concerns are followed up. Do not calculate an average across the two instruments.

Coverage is part of the interpretation

Some topics apply to a narrower set of schools. Early Childhood Instruction appears in 423 records and Safety in 941, while several broader topics appear in about 1,762. A median based on a narrower group is not directly comparable to an all-school measure. The tables show the reporting count for each topic so that a tidy bar chart does not imply identical populations.

What to ask—and what not to infer

Ask how new teachers are supported, how staff plan together and how teachers influence school decisions. Ask for a concrete example of a change made after staff feedback. Do not use this survey as evidence of staffing stability, individual teacher quality or a causal effect on test scores. Those questions require different data. For your shortlist, the survey is most useful as a window into the working environment behind instruction.