Beyond “Fine”
About the Demographics of our Sample
Since 2021, the Leaps Student Voice Survey has been used by over 70,000 students. This report contains analysis of the most recent responses collected between August 2022 and June 2025, which includes over 70,000 unique student responses from district, charter, and independent schools, as well as out-of-school learning environments.
The vast majority of survey participants were all enrolled in a school or learning environment that partnered with Transcend in some form. These partnerships varied widely in focus, duration, and intensity; some were quite deep partnerships in which the Leaps Student Voice Survey was used as a formative assessment tool to guide ongoing improvement efforts, while others were relatively light partnerships that only included administration of the Leaps Student Voice Survey. In a small number of cases, survey respondents were not enrolled in schools engaged in a partnership with Transcend, but instead in a partnership with a third-party organization that had sub-licensed use of the Leaps Student Voice Survey from Transcend.
The sourcing of the schools in our sample also has implications for the generalizability of our findings. The racial and ethnic composition of our sample represents an oversampling of students of color compared to the demographics of students nationwide. For instance, 24% of the sample are Black or African American students, and 34% are white, compared to the NCES national public school averages of 15% and 44%, respectively. Our sample also contains a higher percentage of students experiencing poverty than national averages (although these data has become increasingly difficult to obtain, given the transition of many districts to universal enrollment in free and reduced lunch programs). We did not adjust our results to control for this over-sampling, since doing so would have diminished our ability to highlight the experiences of students of color and students experiencing poverty.
These aspects of our sample may also have introduced biases that are relevant for the interpretation of our results. For example, schools may seek to partner with Transcend because they are dissatisfied with the current state of experiences, which would cause our sample to be biased downward compared to nationwide results. In contrast, Transcend’s partner schools may be disproportionately likely to be utilizing innovative or student-centered designs that create an upward bias in results. The direction and intensity of any bias are difficult to determine based on available data. However, we seek to expand the scale and diversity of our sample in future years, which should help correct for these issues.
The survey is administered electronically and uses a five-point Likert scale for students to report on their perception of the degree to which their experiences aligned with each of the six Leaps toward Extraordinary Learning for All, with between four and eight questions representing each Leap.
Transcend is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit that operates nationally.
