The Miller/Pelosi NCLB reauthorization bill will make it harder to attract and retain quality teachers in California classrooms
- It creates a new federal mandate to pay and evaluate teachers based on student test scores. Test scores don’t fairly measure student achievement and cannot accurately evaluate and pay teachers.
- California needs 100,000 new teachers in the next 10 years. This proposal will make it harder to get the quality teachers we so desperately need in our classrooms.
- Paying teachers based on student test scores will result in more teaching to the test and will end up driving teachers away from lower-performing schools – the very schools that need help the most.
- Research shows that merit pay schemes tied to student test scores have not improved student achievement and have been abandoned in many states where they were tried, because they were not working.