end all federal encouragement of basing the pay or continued employment of teachers on standardized test scores.

The Obama Administration should abandon its push to force school districts to pay teachers and fire or retain teachers based on standardized test scores. Research does not support the use of test scores for teacher evaluation, and previous attempts (in DC, Chicago, Atlanta, etc) have led to widespread fraud. Grading both students and teachers based on the same test is inherently unethical because it deems both groups responsible for each other's performance. Further, researchers studying previous merit pay programs have found teacher rankings to be unreliable year to year. Low reliability in rankings means that Value-Addd Measures are not valid assessments of teacher performance. For these and many other reasons, we call on the Obama Administration to end its support for teacher merit pay.