The quality of the teacher workforce in the United States is of considerable concern to education stakeholders and policymakers. Numerous studies show that student academic success depends in no small part on access to high-quality teachers. Many pundits point to the fact that in the United States, teachers tend not to be drawn from the top of the academic performance distribution, as is the case in countries with higher student achievement, such as Finland, Korea, and Singapore. The evidence on the importance of teacher academic proficiency generally suggests that effectiveness in raising student test scores is associated with strong cognitive skills as measured by SAT or licensure test scores, or the competitiveness of the college from which teachers graduate. Over the past 20 years, there has been a strong policy push toward getting smarter people into the teacher workforce. Enacted in 2001, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), for instance, emphasized academic competence by requiring that prospective teachers either graduate with a major in the subject they are teaching, have credits equivalent to a major, or pass a qualifying test showing competence in the subject. Newly created alternative pathways to certification have sought to bring more academically accomplished individuals into the profession. Absent persuasive evidence on the impact of efforts to raise the bar, some people have speculated that the rise of test-based accountability associated with NCLB and the ongoing push to establish more-rigorous teacher evaluation systems have made teaching less attractive and thereby contributed to further decline in the quality of the teaching corps. So how has the academic caliber of new teachers changed over the last two decades? Has the policy emphasis on teacher quality led more academically talented people into the teacher workforce, or have accountability reforms driven talent away? In this article the authors use a variety of datasets to analyze trends in the academic proficiency of individuals at various points in the teacher pipeline over the last two decades. The findings are generally encouraging, although they come with caveats and an acknowledgment that there is room for improvement when it comes to drawing more talent into teaching. Focusing on the start of the teacher pipeline, i.e., on those who report applying for a teaching job or teachers who begin classroom positions in the year immediately after receiving an undergraduate degree, the authors find that teacher applicants and new teachers in recent years have significantly higher SAT scores than their counterparts in the mid-1990s. Contrary to earlier cohorts of college graduates from the mid-1990s and early 2000s, graduates entering the teaching profession in the 2008-09 school year had average SAT scores that slightly exceeded average scores of their peers entering other occupations. What is less clear is whether this improvement reflects a temporary response to the economic downturn or a more permanent shift.