It was all there on the resume she tried to give the New Orleans schools human resources department when she walked into the system's sprawling building in 1998. But the receptionist was not impressed. "There are no job openings," the woman said. Cooper was astonished. "But I'm special ed, I've taught science."

The woman's expression did not change. "There are no job openings."

It was not that big of a problem for Cooper. She was quickly hired by the Isidore Newman School, a private school whose splendid reputation stems from being able to know a good teacher when one walks in the door. But like many fine teachers, Cooper regretted not being allowed to teach the low-income urban kids who most needed her, and she wondered if other people like her were having the same experience.

Boy, were they. A remarkable new report (www.tntp.org/embargoed-report.html) by Jessica Levin and Meredith Quinn of The New Teacher Project (TNTP) shows that urban school systems have become depressingly adept at alienating good teachers who want to help their students. Few of them are as bad as New Orleans was, refusing even to accept a resume while hiring unqualified teachers with friends in the system. But Levin and Quinn show it is standard operating procedure to let impressive applications sit in file drawers for months until the applicants, needing to get their lives in order, find work elsewhere.

TNTP was given rare access to the inner workings of four urban districts in return for promising not to tell which woebegone systems these were. Levin and Quinn say they found "poor design and execution by district human resources offices, a cumbersome application process, too many layers of bureaucracy, inadequate customer service, poor data services and an overall lack of urgency."

What was particularly heartbreaking was the quality of the teachers that these very needy districts lost by waiting too long. Levin and Quinn surveyed more than 300 applicants who withdrew from the hiring process and found that they "had significantly higher undergraduate GPAs, were 40 percent more likely to have a degree in their teaching field, and were significantly more likely to have completed educational course work than new hires."

Kati Haycock, director of the Washington-based Education Trust, is on the TNTP board that did this study. It is a non-profit consulting group based in New York City that helps districts improve their process to find and hire teachers. Haycock long ago explained to me that high grades and test scores in college, plus a degree in the field they are teaching, are among the strongest predictors of success as a teacher.

Cynics may suggest that these bright young applicants never wanted to teach in the inner city, and only applied as a fallback in case they couldn't find a job at a good suburban or private school.

But many of the teachers Levin and Quinn surveyed say that they, like Cooper, were disappointed not to get a chance at a challenging assignment. "Despite the difficulties and delays they experienced, four out of five of them said they would like to be considered again for a teaching position with the urban district," the report said. "Almost half said they definitely or probably would have accepted an offer from the urban district if it had come earlier. Equally significant, between 37 percent and 69 percent of the known withdrawers [different percentages in different districts] were candidates for hard-to-fill positions."

The report's conclusions may be new, but it is an old story to anyone who has spent much time in urban education.

Although the four districts examined were not identified, they fit the profile of many well-known American school systems.

There were three large districts, one each in the Southwest, Midwest and East, and a midsize district in the Midwest. They averaged about 73,000 students each, with the largest district having more than 150,000 students. The percentage of non-white and Hispanic students ranged from 62 to 85 percent, and between two-thirds and three-quarters of their students were poor enough to qualify for federal meal subsidies.

What is particularly disturbing is that all of these districts were doing a great job recruiting teachers. One district received 4,000 applications for 200 slots and the other three had about 750 to 800 applications each -- five to seven times as many applicants as there were available jobs. Up to 37 percent of these candidates were trained in areas where most urban districts have shortages, including math, science, education of English language learners and the special education skills that allowed teachers like Cooper to help students with learning disabilities.

Given that TNTP is working with many districts who have these problems, I think it was brave of Levin and Quinn to discuss the powerful villains of the story -- school boards, state officials and teacher unions.

School boards, with union support, have approved vacancy notification requirements that allow teachers to announce retirements or resignations late in the summer, long after many good replacements have given up and taken jobs elsewhere. Three districts in the study had either a summer deadline or no deadline for notification by departing teachers. Although the fourth had a more sensible May deadline, it was rarely enforced. Indeed, in some cases conscientious teachers who gave plenty of warning were punished by the rules because they lost summer benefits or jobs.

State legislators and state budget officials are notoriously late with the projections that allow school superintendents to figure out how many teachers they will be able to hire. Having the fiscal year end on June 30 is a problem, and those fun-loving legislators, like errant 10th graders working on history papers, often get an extension on their budget bills.

Collective bargaining agreements between unions and school boards sometimes require principals to hire transferring teachers, which in turn leads some principals to delay posting their jobs in hopes transferees they don't want will go elsewhere.

So the agreements, to frustrate that bit of bureaucratic maneuvering, give the transferring teachers a long time, sometimes until just before school starts, to pick their new jobs, reducing further the chance that the principal will be able to hire someone talented and new like Cooper.

Some experts think many of the report's complaints are exaggerated or unfair. Joan Baratz Snowden, director of educational issues for the American Federation of Teachers, says established teachers should have the right to take a better job whenever they want.

She blames the local management and hiring practices coupled with the snail's-pace of state budget decisions for most of the problems the report describes.

Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, says, "I can't see that unions have anything to do with a district's inability to hire. We want the best teachers for our students because we know that an excellent teacher is what benefits all students. Why not place the blame where it is due -- the systematic and historic lack of funding that has most districts struggling to meet the needs of students -- this includes money woes that result in last-minute hiring decisions."

Levin and Quinn make many detailed recommendations, and cite examples of good procedures in Clark County, Nev., San Diego and Rochester, N.Y. But they don't give much advice on how to overcome the political forces that keep a lot of these rules in place.

It is not much comfort to point out that eventually things get so bad that somebody does something about them. Cooper, I am happy to report, was hired this year to teach deaf children at Banneker Elementary School in New Orleans.

She credits this change on the arrival of Anthony Amato as the new superintendent. He made hiring reform a priority, and when Cooper showed up at a recruitment fair in April the district officials not only took her resume, but said they would call her. And a week later, defying what appears to be standard procedure in many districts that need good teachers the most, that is exactly what they did.

Copyright © 2003, Washington Post

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