National Council on Teacher Quality - Yearbook
In for a good read? If you only peruse the national report, your state's and one other state for comparison, you're still in for close to 400 pages of study results on Teacher Quality. In all, there are 51 volumes, for about 6000 pages or so, so you might want to brush up on your speed reading.

In general, the report is not very rosy, but much of the pessamism also stems because the researchers don't feel they have enough quantifiable research data. Well, we can tell if a kid can't read or do algebra, but I'm not sure that all these measures are really the road to good teaching.

As to the topic of Federal government induced teacher quality, teachers better start finding ways to better police their own profession. (Oh, maybe, say, by using the web to more creatively educate and evaluate teacher's subject knowledge?)

In truth, though, I just posted this because of the cool Javascript applet on the report home page. It's a sweet way of comparing a lot of state by state data, you could use it to talk about slavery, religious tests for office, poll taxes, you name it.