While the importance of good teachingmay be intuitively obvious, only over the past decade haseducation research begun to quantify the high economicstakes around teacher quality. In a world where the goals ofnational education systems are being transformed, from afocus on the transmission of facts and memorization to afocus on student competencies for critical thinking, problemsolving and lifelong learning the demands on teachers aremore complex than ever. Governments across the world haveput teacher quality and teacher performance under increasingscrutiny. The Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) regionis no exception to these trends; indeed, in some key areasof teacher policy, the region is at the vanguard of globalreform experience. The study aims to benchmark the currentperformance of LAC s teachers and identify key issues. Itshares emerging evidence on important reforms of teacherpolicy being implemented in Lac countries. The study alsoanalyzes the political room for maneuver for further reformin Lac. They focus on teachers in basic education(preschools, primary and secondary education) because thequantitative and qualitative challenges of producingeffective teachers at these levels differ in key ways fromuniversity-level education, which has been addressed inother recent World Bank publications.