Should Public School Teachers Be Paid More?

Ohio teachers unions want to tie student performance to teachers’ pay. But NPR and State Impact found that standardized test scores don’t usually correlate with evaluations by parents and students.

Washington D.C. tried to tie teacher salary to student test scores in 2012.

Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington teachers union, protested that the value-added pay scale doesn’t consider other challenges to student achievement, such as poverty.

“The penalties are so immediate and so painful, not just immediate in terms of paycheck, but also immediate in terms of their careers,” Saunders told CBS News.

To find out whether teacher pay affects students’ test scores, Patch compared the average starting teacher’s salary in every state to the average 8th grade math and reading scores. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, we’ve found that there isn’t much correlation between student scores and teachers’ pay.

Note: The scores are out of 500, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.