This year's Quality Counts, Education Week's comprehensive overview on the quality of American education, focuses on the relationship between teacher quality and the growing academic achievement gap. It includes profiles of hard-to-staff schools, state alternative certification programs, and surveys of the 50 states on recruiting, supporting, and retaining qualified teachers for high-need schools. It presents data from the 1999-00 Schools and Staffing survey and from a survey of the nation's largest school districts, examining public school students' access to qualified teachers. It examines the teacher gap, state and district policies, and indicators of states' public education systems. Results indicate that states and districts are taking steps to recruit and retain competent teachers, but these efforts are generally not aimed at finding teachers for high-poverty, high-minority, and low-achieving schools. Overall, students in high-poverty, high-minority schools are more likely to be taught by inexperienced teachers and out-of-field teachers. Teachers in high-poverty and high-minority schools report much more difficult working conditions than do teachers in other schools. Articles include: "The Great Divide" (Lynn Olson); "Swimming Upstream" (Lynn Olson); "Skirting Tradition" (Julie Blair); "The Job Seekers" (Bess Keller); "Increasing the Odds" (Jeff Archer); "Off Target" (Susan E. Ansell and Melissa McCabe); "The State of the States" (Kathryn M. Doherty and Ronald A. Skinner); "State Report Cards;" and "State Policy Updates." (SM)