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Herewith inaugurating a look at the "Annals of Bureaucracy", a sad tale, via our friends at Hit & Run, of the government school bureaucracy in action.

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.

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.

It goes on and on, enumerating the ways unions, administrators, and legislators all contribute to a system that seems designed to insure that the best teachers do not get anywhere near the neediest kids.