The year 2011 was no ordinary year for teacher policy. In fact, it was a year like no other chronicled by the National Council on Teacher Quality's (NCTQ) "State Teacher Policy Yearbook". This fifth annual edition of the Yearbook documents more changes in state teacher policy than NCTQ has seen in any of its previous top-to-bottom reviews of the laws and regulations governing the teaching profession in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. In this report and in the 51 companion state volumes, NCTQ once again presents the most detailed analysis available of each state's performance against and progress toward a set of 36 specific, research-based teacher policy goals aimed at helping states build a comprehensive policy framework in support of teacher effectiveness. The 2011 "State Teacher Policy Yearbook" is a full encyclopedia of teacher policy in the United States, totaling more than 8,000 pages of analysis and recommendations in individualized state reports. States receive an overall grade for their teacher quality policies based on five "sub-grades" in each of five core organizing goal areas: 1) Delivering well-prepared teachers, 2) Expanding the pool of teachers, 3) Identifying effective teachers, 4) Retaining effective teachers and 5) Exiting ineffective teachers. The state grades, along with detailed analyses of state progress goal-by-goal, give readers a clear picture of state efforts to ensure an effective teacher in every classroom through the policies they set for teacher preparation, licensure, evaluation, career advancement, tenure, compensation, pensions and dismissal. Key findings include: (1) New state policies for identifying effective teachers and exiting ineffective ones contributed to the highest "Yearbook" grades NCTQ has given to date. Florida, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Tennessee lead the nation on teacher quality policy; (2) But dramatic progress isn't the only story of 2011. Many states still have a long way to go, including some states that made no teacher policy progress at all; (3) There has been a sea of change in teacher evaluations, with unprecedented efforts across the states to adopt policies that use student achievement as a significant criterion in measuring teacher effectiveness; (4) A new era in teaching has begun in which performance evaluation will no longer be regarded as simply a formality and teacher effectiveness in the classroom will become a matter of consequence; (5) States still have a long way to go to harness the potentially rich information that evaluations of teacher effectiveness can provide and to use it for a host of policies that could improve teaching practice; (6) The "Yearbook" includes numerous teacher policy goals that would be furthered a great deal if coupled with state efforts to measure teacher effectiveness; (7) While states have made progress on evaluating the effectiveness of their existing teacher workforce, they've done much less to ensure the quality of teachers entering the profession; (8) New NCTQ "Yearbook" goals on secondary teacher preparation in science and social studies show a striking willingness on the part of states to ignore the need for specific content knowledge; (9) At the middle school level, many states fail to ensure that teachers are prepared to teach appropriate grade level content; (10) While some states are doing more to hold teacher preparation institutions accountable for the effectiveness of the teachers they produce, most states do almost nothing; and (11) The financial health of state teacher pension systems is a dramatic area of policy decline and a growing crisis that has serious consequences for attracting and keeping effective teachers in the profession. (Contains 153 figures.)