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According the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) (2014), school districts will hire approximately 283,000 new public school teachers in 2018; yet, there is little research about new teachers’ preparedness to use student assessment or work product data. Since 2001, data-driven decision making or data inquiry has been an integral part of educators’ practice (Coburn & Turner, 2012; Farrell, 2015; Gummer & Mandinach, 2015; Little, 2012; Spillane, 2015; Wayman & Stringfield, 2006; Young, 2006). In fact, K-12 district and school leaders expect teachers to implement data to inform their teaching; however, teachers need data literacy skills and time to use the data inquiry process.
Institute of Education Sciences defines a new teacher as a new hire that has not taught in a school in the previous year or has moved from a private to a public school. New teachers add value to schools’ progress because teachers with one to three years of experience have a tendency to remain with the same school (IES, 2012). For example, Johnson and Birkeland (2003) had similar findings in their three-year study of 50 first and second-year teachers’ career decision-making; in their second year, 37 teachers remained at the same school, and year three, 28 teachers remained. They concluded districts can bolster new teachers by scaffolding their development and enhancing their experiences at schools. This consideration for new teachers is especially helpful for school districts and charter schools with high teacher turnover rates looking to minimize disruptions and stabilize school environments (Smith & Ingersoll, 2004, p. 687).
Equally significant, 51 percent of teachers leave the profession because of work conditions and lack of manageability of their workload (IES, 2012; Klassen & Chiu, 2010). K-12 teachers’ workload includes but is not limited to, lesson planning, analyzing and interpreting data, sourcing materials, evaluating student work, and managing student behavior. In addition to the aforementioned tasks, new teachers grapple with other aspects of the job like learning the curriculum or developing interpersonal relationships with colleagues, parents, and students (Dinham & Scott, 1998; Rieg, Paquette, & Chen, 2007). In any case, neither example considers the workload of teachers in turnaround schools nor schools set to close due to low student achievement. For instance, Anderson and Olsen (2006) found in addition to learning about the curriculum and building interpersonal relationships, early career urban school teachers contend with professional development in the context of where they worked. Furthermore, some urban teachers had too little professional development to support their work while others had ample. The practice of data use is continuous and a critical part of teachers’ work. Therefore, school leaders need to know the data literacy needs of new teachers in order to customize professional development to address their skills’ deficit; thereby, helping new teachers manage their workload (White, 2013).
With this need in mind, we sought to study the relationship between first-year teachers’ professional development experiences and their preparedness to use data through the teachers’ experiences organized by race/ethnicity. Because 76 percent of the teaching workforce is female and 24 percent is male, we wanted to determine equity in experiences by gender. Moreover, we chose race/ethnicity as a dimension given the diversity of the teaching population. For example, according to the federal government, the racial composition of teachers in public education in 2012 comprised: White, 82 percent; African American, 7 percent; and, Hispanic, 8 percent (U.S. Department of Education, 2016, p. 4).