We weren't sure whether to laugh or cry over Is it Better to be Good or Lucky, a painfully honest assessment of the hiring practices of a large urban school district.

Uber researcher Dan Goldhaber with Michael DeArmond and Betheny Gross interviewed the hiring committees at 10 elementary schools, serving up the utter dysfunctionality of how some public school teachers get hired. Luckily, no one's fooling anyone. None of the principals, parents, or teachers involved in the process expressed any real faith in their ability to identify a good teacher, often resigning themselves instead to just finding a nice person who would get along with everyone. In one classic quote, a principal says "I look for genuineness. I look for that individual that...has a tone of social justice."

And just because things are broken, why try and fix it? When asked about possibly requiring an applicant to teach a sample lesson, one principal responded that he liked the idea, but thought the "district wouldn?t allow it," clearly showing that he had done well in School Principalship 101, The Fine Art of Passive Aggression. Others responded more skeptically, thinking the request might "dissuade candidates from applying." In other words, someone who is applying for a job as a teacher and we?re supposed to worry that she?ll balk at having to demonstrate her teaching skills?

Honestly, it is the stuff of satire. One teacher makes a point of touring classrooms with the prospective hires, emphasizing the school's bulletin boards and their practice of changing them every four weeks, something she notes never fails to impress "for the attention to detail it implies." Alternatively, could it be they're just amazed over the excessive fascination with scissors, glue sticks and those pretty border papers?

And let's not worry about any curriculum expertise--or as one teacher puts it "I would say that spewing curriculum mumbo-jumbo is the least important to me in an interview"?but do let?s find someone who "knows her Bloom?s Wheel."

Christopher Guest, we've got your next script.

(Cinematic possibilities aside, Goldhaber and et al. do point to some of the schools as mounting more active searches for teachers and having more consistent hiring priorities than others. Those are steps in the right direction, but not enough to overcome the handicaps faced by schools in bad neighborhoods with students all from poor families. The ways and means of hiring simply must improve.)