Using five AERA presidential addresses over the past half century as landmarks, this essay traces the evolution of research on teaching and teacher education as well as some critical impacts the research has had on policy and practice related to teacher education and teacher evaluation in the United States. The discussion shows how these addresses both reflected the progress and challenges of research on teaching and teacher education at the times they were delivered and identified paths that the education research community could take to address the challenges. It traces key influences of these lines of work on the quality of teacher preparation, assessment of teaching effectiveness, and competing conceptions of teacher accountability. It ends with a discussion of the role of politics in setting educational policy, a call for education researchers to become more knowledgeable about and more capable of engaging in political and policy arenas productively, and a reminder that public scholarship is the goal of the 2016 AERA Annual Meeting and the topic of the next presidential address.