NATION Study finds urban schools alienate the better teachers

Researchers examined districts in the Southwest, East and Midwest.
By JAY MATHEWS
WASHINGTON POST
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.
New report
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. Julie Mikuta, a member of the Washington, D.C., board of education and 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."
Targeted districts
Levin and Quinn examined three large districts -- one each in the Southwest, Midwest and East -- and a midsize district in the Midwest. The average size was 73,000 students, with the largest having more than 150,000. The percentage of nonwhite and Hispanic students ranged from 62 percent 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.
Disappointment
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."