State oversight for teacher preparation programs mostly ignores the impact of graduates on the K-12 students they teach, and it gives little attention to where graduates teach or how long they remain in the profession. There is no evidence that current state policies hold programs to high standards in order to produce teachers who can help students achieve. Moreover, every state does its own thing when it comes to program oversight--another barrier to effective quality control. New ways of preparing teachers have been created in the last few decades in large part because they offer solutions to serious problems that many university-based teacher preparation programs appear unwilling to address. Academically strong college students as well as school districts, foundations, and policymakers are proponents of initiatives such as Teach for America, the New Teacher Project, other teaching fellows programs such as those of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and teacher residency programs. Despite these competitive developments, however, states have done little to focus traditional preparation programs on issues like selective recruitment through high standards for entry into programs, carefully constructed and monitored clinical experiences for teacher candidates, and program evaluation focused on important outcomes. The redesigned accountability system proposed in this paper is an effort to direct regulatory oversight to things that matter: whether or not K-12 students are learning, how well teachers have developed the classroom teaching skills to be effective with their students, a graduate's commitment to teaching as a professional career, feedback from graduates and employers, and high-quality tests of teacher knowledge and skills that are tied to classroom teaching performance and K-12 student learning. (Contains 35 endnotes.) [For the executive summary, see ED518519.]