Abstract: The National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) is a system of related questionnaires that provide descriptive data on the context of elementary and secondary education while also giving policymakers a variety of statistics on the condition of education in the United States. The NTPS is a redesign of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), which the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) conducted from 1987 to 2011. The design of the NTPS is a product of three key goals coming out of the SASS program: flexibility, timeliness, and integration with other Department of Education collections. The NTPS collects data on core topics including teacher and principal preparation, classes taught, school characteristics, and demographics of the teacher and principal labor force every two to three years. In addition, each administration of NTPS contains rotating modules on important education topics such as: professional development, working conditions, and evaluation. This approach allows policy makers and researchers to assess trends on both stable and dynamic topics. The NTPS utilizes primarily internet and paper data collection instruments. The NTPS is a large sample survey of America's public and private elementary and secondary schools. Charter schools are included in the study. The NTPS consists of four questionnaires: A Teacher Listing Form to obtain a list of teachers from each school. To reduce burden, a sample of teachers is selected from this list of all teachers at the school; A School Questionnaire that obtains information on the characteristics of the school; A Principal Questionnaire that collects information on the principal; A Teacher Questionnaire that collects information on the sampled teacher. The NTPS design produces estimates at the national level and is designed to support analysis of a variety of subgroups including: elementary, middle, high, and combined; federal free or reduced-price lunch program; urban, suburban, rural, and town; and traditional public and public charter school types.