There has been a lot of rhetoric bandied about over the strikes at the South Butler school district. One popular contention is that higher pay equals better teachers, and by extension, better schools. A report published by US news and world report shows some interesting statistics, that point to the fallacy of this contention.

USN published a list of the top 100 US high schools. It also published a list of overall rankings by state.

Out of the top 100 "gold medal" ranked schools, ONE was a PA school, in Philadelphia. There were eleven schools out of the 100 in Texas. However, if you look at the salary rankings by state, available on the American Federation of Teachers website, you will see that PA is ranked 10th in salaries, while Texas is ranked 29th.

When looking at the Overall rankings by state, PA somes in at #25. 16 states finished higher in the rankings than PA, while having lower average teacher salaries. These salary figures are "raw" figures, which do not take into account the cost of living factors. when those factors are taken into account, PA climbs from 10th in the nation to 5th in terms of average teacher salary with a COL factor.