While the importance of good teaching may be intuitively obvious, only over the past decade has education research begun to quantify the high economic stakes around teacher quality. In a world where the goals of national education systems are being transformed, from a focus on the transmission of facts and memorization to a focus on student competencies?for critical thinking, problem solving and lifelong learning?the demands on teachers are more complex than ever. Governments across the world have put teacher quality and teacher performance under increasing scrutiny. The Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region is no exception to these trends; indeed, in some key areas of teacher policy, the region is at the vanguard of global reform experience. The study aims to benchmark the current performance of LAC?s teachers and identify key issues. It shares emerging evidence on important reforms of teacher policy being implemented in LAC countries. The study also analyzes the political room for maneuver for further reform in LAC. They focus on teachers in basic education (preschools, primary and secondary education) because the quantitative and qualitative challenges of producing effective teachers at these levels differ in key ways from university-level education, which has been addressed in other recent World Bank publications. An index is included. (Individual chapters contain references.) [This book was written with: Soledad De Gregorio, David Evans, Marco Fernández, Martin Moreno, Jessica Rodriguez, Guillermo Toral, and Noah Yarrow. This research was made possible by generous support from the Netherlands Government through the Bank-Netherlands Partnership Program and the Spanish government through the Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund and Spanish Fund for Latin America and the Caribbean.]