The School District of Philadelphia (SDP), like many other urban school districts, struggles to increase its hiring and retention of experienced and highly qualified teachers in its low-performing/high-need schools. Excluding its charter schools, SDP serves approximately 165,000 students, largely from high-poverty (76%) and minority (85%) backgrounds, in nearly 300 schools. In 2003-04, teacher quality was a persistent problem. Less than 60% of new teachers were certified, and only 43% of new teachers were retained after 3 years. There was a shortage of teachers in high-need subject areas and in low-performing schools. In such hard-to-staff schools, there were significant gaps in teacher qualifications and experience. Toward the goal of improving teacher quality and the experience balance, particularly in hard-to-staff schools, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) and SDP agreed to a set of innovative approaches in their 2004 contract. That contract included new policies for school-based selection of teachers and the provision of incentives for teachers who seek employment in selected "incentive schools," in selected subjects, and to teachers new to the district's schools. Although similar hiring and/or incentive policies have been used elsewhere, little is known about the role that districts and principals play in implementing these policies and how they affect teacher recruitment. Therefore, at the request of SDP, the Urban Education Collaborative (UEC) at Temple University's Institute for Schools & Society conducted a study of SDP's effort to implement these new policies during 2005-06. This research brief reports, in particular, on how SDP's principals responded to the district's newly created hiring and incentive policies. [For the full report, "Principals' Hiring of Teachers in Philadelphia: A Research Report on Improving Teacher Quality," see ED532053.]