A new report looking at the salaries of the 75 largest school districts in California alleges there is no correlation between teacher compensation and higher student test scores.

Transparent California posted the report on its website’s blog on Wednesday morning. The report looks at teacher salaries in the state’s 75 largest school districts and compares them to the district’s 2013 Academic Performance Index scores, which are based on a combination of scores on various standardized tests. (That’s the last year that API scores are available, as the state has overhauled its standardized testing system to match up with the new Common Core State Standards.) API scores range from 200 to 1,000, with a target of 800 for all schools.

“The average full-time teacher compensation was $94,796 and the average API score was 795,” the report reads in part. “Compensation is defined as wages plus the employer-cost of health and retirement benefits. The average total employee cost per enrolled student was $6,946 and was negatively correlated against the district’s API scores.”

Transparent California is a website operated by the Tustin-based California Policy Center, a conservative think tank affiliated with the State Policy Network, which works to “limit government and advance market-friendly public policy at the state and local levels,” according to the SPN website.

“I guess you could say we’re a center-right organization,” said Ed Ring, executive director of the California Policy Center. “Those terms are becoming very muddled and we, frankly, try to stay as non-partisan as we can, because the issues we care about, we sincerely believe should concern left-wing citizens as much as right-wing citizens.”

He’d rather look at the report’s conclusion: “There’s zero correlation between how much teachers make and how the students are doing,” he said. “How long a teacher works and how many credentials a teacher acquires has no relationship to how students do.”

Transparent California looked at the employee compensation records of more than 740,00 K-12 employees, who account for nearly 80 percent of educators statewide.

The Ontario-based Chaffey Joint Union High School District is called out in the report for having the highest average compensation package for teachers in the districts examined — $119,942 — but having a sub-800 API score of 777. In contrast, San Ramon Valley Unified in Northern California had a 923 API score in 2013, with an average teacher compensation of $88,638.

“Something’s really wrong when schools are delivering API scores that low,” Ring said. “Why are we still paying teachers based on how long they show up, or on how many credentials they get that they can turn around and take back to the payroll department?”

Mat Holton, superintendent of the Chaffey high school district, is not a fan of the Transparent California report.

“This is a flawed comparison on many levels,” a written response from Holton begins. “API is an obsolete metric that was suspended unanimously by the California Board of Education earlier this year.”

Holton also notes that comparing the API scores of high school, elementary and unified school districts is a bit like comparing apples, oranges and peaches.

“Elementary school students were tested in a narrow range of basic subjects,” he wrote. “High school students were tested in approximately 14 subject areas with more difficulty and rigor than their elementary counterparts. Again, there is no comparison between the two.”

A more fair comparison, according to Holton, is other large high school-only districts.

The Chaffey district had 25,020 students in 2013. Their 777 API score that year beats the 769 API of Grossmont Union High School District in El Cajon (22,965 students) and the 741 API score of the Kern High School District in Bakersfield (37,070 students).

And four of the Chaffey district’s high schools made it into the top 10 high school API scores for San Bernardino County in 2013, the last year that the API score was calculated, Holton wrote.

And he disagrees that his district’s teachers are overpaid.

“I will never support a notion that our teachers are paid too much,” Holton wrote. “In truth, they are undercompensated for what they are doing in the lives of the students. The mission of their work is, in itself, priceless. Teachers in the Chaffey district are consummate professionals who are having an extraordinarily positive impact on the lives of our students and the well-being of our community.”

In the Chaffey district, more students are meeting the minimum requirements for entrance to the California State University and University of California systems over the past decade, according to Holton.

“In 10 years, the Chaffey district has grown from 20 percent of students meeting the requirements to an estimated 50 percent meeting the requirements in 2015,” he wrote. “Similarly, our graduation rate has grown from 84.2 percent in the 2010-11 school year to 85.8 percent in the 2013-14 school year and continuously ranks above county and state averages.”

According to the California Department of Education, 85.8 percent of the Chaffey Class of 2014 graduated high school, compared to 78.7 percent of their peers in San Bernardino County and 81 percent of their peers statewide.

“We’re incredibly proud of the impact all of this is having in our communities, where the possession of a bachelor’s degree among adults can be as low as 12 percent” in some communities, Holton wrote.

Another of the school districts called out in the report was Fontana Unified, where the average teacher compensation is $100,708 according to Transparent California, and the district got a 757 API score in 2013.

That sort of salary is important for attracting the best candidates for the job, according to Oliver Wong, chief of staff in Fontana Unified.

“Clearly salary is a factor when people apply for a job,” he said.

And with the changes coming to public education, including the now-implemented Common Core State Standards and upcoming new standards for science and social studies, attracting and retaining quality teachers is going to be critical, according to Nancy Hofrock, vice president of the Fontana Teachers Association, the union for teachers in Fontana Unified.

“You get what you pay for,” she said. “You’re going to bring people in who really want to stay and make sure that Fontana’s kids are successful.”

The now-outdated API score isn’t the best measure of how students are doing, according to Hofrock.

“Looking at a test score and evaluating a test score just gives you a small piece of the puzzle,” she said. “Looking at what a student knows and what they can do on a daily basis is a critical element of evaluating what a district does.”

And teachers, as important as they are, aren’t the only factor in student success, according to Hofrock.

“You also have to look at a student’s background, their support at home, their socioeconomic status,” she said.

The report’s conclusion is no surprise, according to Frank Wells, a spokesman for the California Teachers Association, the umbrella organization for most local teachers unions in the state.

“The study operates on the widely discredited view that student API scores are a reliable measure of teacher performance, and if carried to its logical conclusion, means you could just flip the staffs of a ‘high performing’ and ‘low performing’ school and get equally transposed achievement results,” Wells wrote in an emailed response.

“The news release, as you can’t really call it a report or research, conflates labor market pressures on competitive compensation with the complexities that affect student performance and commits the cardinal sin in the world of statistics of confusing correlation with causation.”

Ring would like to see teacher compensation tied to student outcomes, a popular conservative idea.

“Let’s be fair about how we measure student progress and come up with something as accurate as we can,” he said. “It all comes back to having inspired, capable teachers that are accountable.”

Holton’s not against accountability; he just rejects the API score or a revived version of it under another name.

“Chaffey district staff are held accountable to two main, non-negotiable goals: improve instruction and improve student achievement,” he wrote. “The multiple metrics for these two goals include the rate at which students qualify for university admission, attendance rates, many types of standardized test scores and the rate at which students progress towards graduation each year.”

But Wells said this isn’t a case of what’s good for the goose also being good for the gander. “Pay tied directly to explicit measures of employee or group output is actually even very rare in the private sector as well,” Wells wrote.

“For example, in 2005, only 6 percent of private sector workers were awarded regular output-based salaries. (It’s most used in finance and real estate sectors.)

“And research shows that’s because when applied in the public sector, it promotes,” he said, misleading information to the public.”