In the winter and spring of 2008, The New Teacher Project (TNTP) partnered with San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to investigate the impact of the school district's policies and practices on the ability of schools to build and maintain strong instructional teams. TNTP's analysis reveals that schools struggle to build and maintain strong instructional teams under current SFUSD policies and practices. The analysis points to four specific areas of significant concern: late teacher hiring, forced placements, ineffective evaluations, and retention difficulties. Collectively, these challenges result in a system in which the most important factor in student success--teacher quality--is taken for granted.