Proposals to reauthorize No Child Left Behind seek to ensure "equitable" access to effective teachers. The U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top fund rewards state plans for "ensuring equitable distribution of effective teachers and principals" and for "ambitious yet achievable annual targets to increase the number and percentage of highly effective teachers...in high-poverty schools." These objectives pose a number of challenging questions. How readily can one identify effective teachers? And, perhaps most crucially, what are promising strategies for seeking to increase the number of effective teachers in high-poverty schools and communities? In this forum, the authors, who are two of the leading authorities on the topic, address these questions and discuss the evidence that inner-city schools are shortchanged on high-quality teachers.