Scott Cochran yearned to make a difference in the lives of his students. After graduating with distinction from the University of Michigan's School of Education, he landed a job teaching middle school students in the resort town of Charlevoix, Mich., but he thought he could do more good in inner-city Detroit.

When he called the Detroit school system in 1997, he was told that he would have to drive five hours to the personnel office to get an application. He called four more times, trying to persuade someone to mail it. Gradually it dawned on him that Detroit, despite a need for well-trained and dedicated teachers, was in no rush to hire him, so he stayed at the Northwest Academy in Charlevoix.

Applications and letters of interest from idealistic teachers continue to pour into inner-city school systems across the country, and many candidates, like Cochran, are being ignored or contacted much too late to do any good, according to an unusually detailed study by the nonprofit New Teacher Project.

A new report on the study, "Missed Opportunities: How We Keep High-Quality Teachers Out of Urban Schools," concludes that those school systems alienate many talented applicants because of rules that protect teachers already on staff and because of slow-moving bureaucracies and budgeting delays.

"As a result, urban districts lose the very candidates they need in their classrooms . . . and millions of disadvantaged students in America's cities pay the price with lower-quality teachers than their suburban peers," wrote researchers Jessica Levin and Meredith Quinn, who were given rare access to the inner workings of school districts in four U.S. cities.

Levin and Quinn promised not to reveal the cities, but some experts are making educated guesses. D.C. Board of Education member Julie Mikuta (District 1), a former teacher, said that "it didn't take too many brain cells to figure out" that one of the four is Washington.

A New Teacher Project spokeswoman in New York, neither confirming nor denying the District's inclusion, said: "Show this report to teachers in most large urban districts and they would probably think it was their city also."

Levin and Quinn examined three large districts -- one each in the Southwest, Midwest and East -- and a mid-size district in the Midwest. The average size was 73,000 students, with the largest having more than 150,000. The percentage of non-white and Hispanic students ranged from 62 to 85 percent, and two-thirds to three-quarters of the students were poor enough to qualify for federal meal subsidies.

The researchers also surveyed more than 300 applicants for inner-city teaching jobs who withdrew out of frustration with the hiring process. Those applicants, compared with others around the country, "had significantly higher undergraduate GPAs (grade-point averages), were 40 percent more likely to have a degree in their teaching field, and were significantly more likely to have completed educational course work," according to Levin and Quinn's report.

Many of the applicants said they 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."

Just as significant, 37 percent to 69 percent of those who withdrew applications out of frustration -- percentages varied by districts -- were candidates for "hard-to-fill positions."

In each city, Levin and Quinn encountered "poor design and execution by [school] 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."

It was standard procedure to let impressive applications sit in file drawers for months, the researchers found, while the candidates, needing to get their lives in order, secured work elsewhere. One district, for example, received 4,000 applications for 200 slots but was slow to offer jobs and lost out on top candidates.

In some cases, the report said, big-city school boards -- with teachers union support -- approved vacancy notification policies that allowed veteran teachers to announce retirements or resignations late in the summer, long after many good potential replacements have given up and accepted other jobs. Three school districts in the study had either a summer deadline or no deadline for notification by departing teachers.

State lawmakers and budget officials also were notoriously late with the projections that school superintendents needed to figure out how many teachers they would be able to hire, according to Levin and Quinn.

Meanwhile, collective bargaining agreements between unions and school boards sometimes required principals to hire transferring teachers, which in turn led some principals to delay posting jobs in hopes that teachers they didn't want would go elsewhere.

Some teachers union officials say the report's complaints are exaggerated. Joan Baratz Snowden, director of educational issues for the American Federation of Teachers, said established teachers should have the right to take a better job whenever they want -- just like newspaper reporters. She said the problems are rooted in poor school district management and hiring practices, coupled with the snail's pace of state budget decisions.

Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, blamed "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."

Mikuta said the situation cannot be fixed unless school systems restore trust between teachers and administrators. In the District, for instance, teachers have until late spring to declare they are not returning. "Many teachers are opposed to an earlier notification date, because they believe they would face retribution from principals if they indicated they were not returning in the fall," she said.

Cochran, now the principal of the small Michigan public school where he got his start in teaching, said he hopes something is done soon.

He asked, "How many other certified, qualified teachers or principals have tried to get involved in a positive way and been rebuffed, while the system continues to struggle and take kids down with it?"

Copyright © 2003, Washington Post