This report offers an insider's perspective into the world-leading Shanghai education system. After more than 40 years of reconstruction and reform, education in Shanghai has achieved remarkable results. In the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) 2009 and 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), 15-year-old students in Shanghai topped every league table by a clear margin. This report details Shanghai's transformation from a province that closed all of its schools in the 1970s to one with near-universal participation in primary and secondary schools and secondary student performance that tops the world. Central to this transformation has been the creation of a high-quality teacher workforce. The teacher development system that was built over this period reflects not only years of careful and incremental reform, but also the design of a self-reinforcing system that continually improves. This report first briefly reviews the history of teacher development in Shanghai since the end of the Cultural Revolution before turning to how the current system operates. The report envisions teacher development in Shanghai as a triangle, with the teacher career ladder, in-service training and development, and performance appraisal as the three sides. The three components combine to incentivize, motivate, and reward teachers throughout their careers. The system's carefully structured incentives also allowed Shanghai's government to use relatively limited public financing to build and sustain a very high quality teaching force in a relatively short period of time. This report is one of a series of reports on teacher quality systems in top performing countries commissioned by the Center on International Education Benchmarking® of the National Center on Education and the Economy®.