Survey suggests better teacher rewards don’t guarantee better student performance

What’s “best” for teachers may not be best for students, a new survey shows.

The annual “Best and Worst States for Teachers” survey is designed to “help America’s educators find the best opportunities and teaching environments.”

But an analysis by The Lion finds the best and worst states for teachers, as measured by consumer finance company WalletHub, don’t correlate to the best and worst academic results for students, generally.

The survey measured 24 metrics – such as salary, salary growth and potential, pension and pension funding, tenure, and the academic and work environment – to find the most and least teacher-friendly states.

“The states that make a teaching career the most rewarding are those that compensate educators well, invest heavily in educational resources, pass laws that improve school-system quality, and provide supportive conditions that lead to low turnover,” said Chip Lupo, a WalletHub analyst, in a summary of the results.

The best states for teachers in 2024 were New York, Washington, Virginia, Utah and Maryland, the survey said, while the worst states were Tennessee, Nevada, New Hampshire, Hawaii and Maine.

But by looking at several different metrics, The Lion found what many researchers have understood well for decades: Teacher pay and other benefits don’t necessarily correlate with student achievement.

Below is a chart of the top-ranked states by WalletHub and their corresponding rank by state in SAT and the 8^th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessments in math (8M) and reading (8R).

Of the top 10 states, only Utah consistently lands in the top 10 of academic scores nationwide. 

Likewise, the bottom nine states for teachers as ranked by WalletHub don’t show that low pay or working conditions for teachers automatically punishes students academically.  

This doesn’t mean that better teacher pay, lower turnover and better working conditions can’t benefit students, but no strong correlation is present. 

Unions obviously spend a lot of time lobbying for higher teacher pay, but on the other hand, they reject arguments that pay for teachers should be merit-based.  

In fact, the research report cited above by The Lion, which shows there’s little proof that higher pay equals better academic outcomes, is one such effort by academics to discredit merit-based pay. 

Previously, WalletHub did a survey about the best and worst school systems ranked by state. The results were interesting, but they put a lot of emphasis on factors that don’t always correlate to academic success. 

The top schools in that survey, for example, appear to be clustered in New England and the Northeast, including Maryland and much of Virginia. 

Thus, parents who pay attention such surveys may want to consider the surveys’ limitations.