Sogolytics 2025–26 Benchmarks Highlight Large Perception Gaps Between K‑12 Staff and Students

New benchmarks from Sogolytics for the 2025–26 school year show sizable gaps between how adults in schools view leadership and student support and how students perceive those same areas, raising questions about communication, trust, and how districts measure school climate.

By Where Should I Learn Editorial · 2026-09-27

Sogolytics' 2025–26 K‑12 benchmarks reveal a striking divergence in how adults and students describe the same schools: principals rate leadership substantially higher than district leaders on an identical question, while campus-based staff see students as having trusted adults on campus far more often than secondary students report for themselves.

The two reports — The State of Employee Engagement in K‑12 Districts and The State of School Climate in K‑12 Districts — draw on different but overlapping samples. The employee engagement benchmark is drawn from up to 18,307 employees, while the school climate report is drawn from up to 552 schools and more than 90,000 combined parent, staff, and student responses, according to the material released by Sogolytics out of Herndon, Va.

On an identical question about leadership, principals outscored district leaders by 27 points. The release does not provide detailed subgroup breakdowns or the exact question wording in the summary, but the magnitude of that gap is large enough to suggest a disconnect between campus-level leadership perceptions and district-level assessments of leadership performance or effectiveness.

A second headline finding points to a similar rift on student support: campus-based staff outscored secondary students by 29 points on whether a student has a trusted adult at school. In other words, adults who work most directly with students report a much higher rate of trusted-adult relationships than the students themselves report experiencing.

Those two gaps — 27 points on leadership and 29 points on trusted adults — are notable because they measure perceptions of the same phenomena from different vantage points inside the same system. Where adults and students differ so widely, schools may be missing early warning signs about student well‑being or overestimating the reach of their own support structures.

There are several plausible explanations for such gaps that do not require new data to consider. Proximity and daily contact can shape perceptions: principals and campus staff see many interactions that demonstrate leadership or support in context, while district leaders view performance through aggregated metrics and policy priorities. Secondary students also experience school differently than adults observe it, and their criteria for who qualifies as a 'trusted adult' may be narrower.

The implications are practical. If district leaders are rating leadership more unfavorably than principals do, it could indicate communication or expectation misalignment between central offices and school sites. If students report fewer trusted adults than staff believe exist, interventions designed to boost student support may need to be redesigned with student input to reach the young people they intend to help.

The reports' combined sample size — more than 90,000 responses across parents, staff, and students and up to 18,307 employee responses — gives the findings scope, but the summary release leaves open many questions about representativeness. The phrasing 'drawn from up to' suggests participation varied across questions or districts, and the release does not list which districts or regions contributed data.

That lack of granular transparency is an important caveat for readers and policymakers: benchmarks can be valuable for spotting trends, but local contexts and response patterns matter when translating benchmarks into policy or practice. Districts considering these findings should examine whether their own survey tools ask comparable questions and whether similar perception gaps exist locally.

The Sogolytics benchmarks add to a growing body of evidence that school climate and staff engagement are multi-dimensional and experienced differently across roles. For educators and school boards, the central challenge is not only to measure these dynamics but to create mechanisms — student voice surveys, structured principal–district conversations, and cross-role focus groups — that surface why gaps exist and how they can be narrowed.

Taken together, the 2025–26 benchmarks provide a clear reporting lead: adults and students are not always describing the same school. Bridging that divide will require attention to measurement, to the lived experiences of students, and to the lines of communication between campus personnel and district leaders. The benchmarks offer a starting point for districts that want to compare perceptions across roles, even as questions about sample detail and local applicability remain.