Report: Plodding costs city schools teachers

Monday, Sept. 15, 2003 | 11:03 a.m.

SUN STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

WASHINGTON -- For five years Roni Cooper tried to get a teaching job at a New Orleans public school. She had experience, credentials and an interest in working in the hard-to-fill field of special education -- just the combination schools want.

No one would even take her application.

Finally, at a job fair in May, she met the new leaders of the school district and gave them her story. It wasn't the first one they'd heard about a plodding, mismanaged process. Within a week they promised her work. She's now teaching deaf elementary school students.

"In some of these inner cities, it's just nightmarish," Cooper said of the hiring routine. "They're missing people who want to do this for tiny amounts of money."

A nationwide report released Monday supports her view: Urban schools are losing highly qualified candidates because of dysfunctional personnel departments and sluggish hiring timelines.

It's the central theme of the analysis by The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group that helps some of the country's largest school districts recruit teachers.

The report singled out the Clark County School District for praise, citing the intensive use of online technology for recruitment, including the online application process that accounts for 95 percent of all applications.

The district also sends automatic e-mail replies to website visitors, following up on teachers who have expressed interest but not yet filled out an application.

The nation's sixth-largest school district, Clark County has hired more than 1,400 new teachers in each of the last three years.

"In the old days we had to tell applicants not to contact us for 45 days," said George Ann Rice, associate superintendent of human resources for the district. "Now we can turn an application around in 24 hours."

In most districts, by late summer of a given year, when many urban districts make job offers, many candidates have fled for suburban systems that recruit faster, the report said. The lost prospects, it added, are more likely to have better college grades and a degree in their teaching field than those hired in the cities.

"Right in front of their faces are the very teachers these districts need to hire," Jessica Levin, a co-author of the report, said.

The findings are based on analyses of job applications at four urban districts in the Southwest, Midwest and East, all given access in exchange for anonymity. Project leaders also conducted phone and e-mail surveys and conducted focus groups with university faculty, teachers and others to put the findings in perspective.

The problems in the selected school districts are representative of many city school systems, Levin said. Cumbersome application reviews, poor customer service and a lack of urgency are common barriers, the report said.

But so are policies outside the control of personnel departments, it added.

Some teachers are allowed to provide virtually no notice that they plan to resign or retire, leaving schools in the dark about coming vacancies until the fall.

Often, the report said, schools must hire union-protected teachers who want to transfer from other schools, which slows the process and prevents principals from hiring whomever they want.

Many state and local budgets also aren't set until the end of June, if not later, causing financial uncertainty that put schools at a disadvantage, it said.

The report called for those policies to be changed, a task that a coalition of large urban districts called daunting.

"One can say, 'Well, just change it,' but sometimes that means either going back to the bargaining table or going to the legislature and changing law," said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools.

Casserly did praise the report for raising important issues and said his group will work with The New Teacher Project to pursue improvements.

On balance the report fairly reflects tendencies of urban schools and may even underestimate how poorly their personnel departments run, said Adam Urbanski, vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, the union that represents most urban teachers.

But Urbanski, a board member of the group that produced the report, disagreed that seniority should get reduced importance when teachers want to be hired at another school.

"It is unreasonable to expect that tenure within an organization, coupled with satisfactory performance, ought not carry some sort of assurance that you won't be replaced by someone walking in off the sidewalk," he said.

One city principal, Gwendolyn Boyd of John Marshall Metro High School on the west side of Chicago, said the report does not largely represent how hiring works at her school.

Boyd said she hired 20 top candidates in late summer and that union transfer rules have not presented her a problem. Chicago school leaders have taken a step the report recommends: offering an incentive for teachers to send notification earlier if they plan to retire.

Sun reporter

Emily Richmond and the Associated Press contributed to this story.

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