Over the past 2 years, educational policy makers have focused much of their attention on issues related to teacher effectiveness. The Obama Administration has made teacher evaluation and teacher quality a central feature of many of its educational policies, including Race to the Top (RTTT), Investing in Innovation (i3), and the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grants. In response, many states and school districts are developing measures of teacher effectiveness to reward, tenure, support, and fire teachers. In response to these policies, many observers are raising questions and concerns about the measures of teacher effectiveness that inform high-stakes personnel decisions. Unfortunately, we have little systematic knowledge regarding the properties of most of these measures. This article has two goals: to explore elements of instruction that may be associated with improved student achievement and to examine the domains of teaching skills that are identified in the literature as important to high-quality teaching but that may not be highly correlated with value-added measures of teacher effectiveness. (Contains 2 tables, 4 figures, and 12 notes.)