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FYI: Large urban school districts are plagued by shortages of qualified and proven teachers, but they’ve got no one to blame but themselves, a new study argues. The New York-based New Teacher Project studied four (unnamed) representative urban school districts—one from each region of the country—and found that they got plenty of qualified applicants but couldn’t make the hire because of their slow processes. All four districts in the study received hundreds more applicants than positions they had to fill—as much as eight times as many as needed. But all four waited until late summer to make job offers, by which time 30 to 60 percent of the applicants had withdrawn to accept other offers. More than half of the withdrawn applicants in each district cited the late hiring timeline as their reason. [9/24/03]