Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is married to a teacher. His mother-in-law was a teacher. The Smallholder is a teacher. And out there in the great ether that is the internet is Minion Molly, who is also a teacher. Minion Molly is a teacher in the greater Houston, Texas metropolitan area. Now your Maximum Leader isn’t sure if Minion Molly is affected by the changes he’s reading about in teacher pay, but he figures he’ll point out and opine on this article.

Now let your Maximum Leader go on the record and say that he believes, as a general rule, that teaching as a profession is under-funded. This is to say that teaching fills such a vital role in our society that teachers ought to be paid more than they are. But this general rule is tempered by a number of other factors. Among these factors are that many people who go into the teaching profession are idiots. As your Maximum Leader said, he knows lots of teachers personally. Many of them are dim bulbs. He means this in a general sense. He’s been informed by Mrs. Villain that some of the teachers he’d categorize as dim bulbs are actually great subject matter experts and work with kids in their field of expertise quite well. Your Maximum Leader accepts that in many situations. But he also musts point out that Mrs Villain exercises a considerable amount of influence in assuring that the Villainettes get the “right” teachers. Generally the “right” teachers for the Villainettes are not the dim bulbs of whom your Maximum Leader was just speaking…

Another factor that tempers his rule concerning teacher pay is the fact that teaching is taxpayer funded. This big factor is an amalgomation of many sub-factors that all impact teacher pay. In being taxpayer funded the teaching profession is insulated from many market forces. While certain supply-demand market forces are at work on the teaching profession, many others are not. For example, pay for performance. (Which is the focus of the article about the Houston school district.) In the private sector it is generally demonstrable that workers who perform better than others will earn more money. It is also demonstrable that in the private sector incompetence or underachievement can cause one to lose one’s job. This is not often the case in teaching. Surely new teachers have a high “wash-out” rate, but if you can make it past the first few years you are a lifer.

It must be mentioned that as a taxpayer funded function teaching is subject to many outside pressures that other industries are not. Namely that taxpayers want to “have a say” in what teachers teach. This, in your Maximum Leader’s estimation, is not always a good thing. Alas, the voters that get most upset about what goes into the curriculum are also the very same voters that will be disfranchised and sterilized in the MWO.

Here in the great Commonwealth of Virginia, we used to have appointed School Boards. This meant that elected officials of both parties would sit down and appoint people to serve on local School Boards. Appointments were done on a “bipartisan” basis. Furthermore, appointees were almost always learned people who were genuinely interested in creating a good curriculum and doing well by their districts.

Unfortunately, we now have elected School Boards. Oftentimes your Maximum Leader finds that the people running for School Board (and their supporters) are the very same voters who, in the MWO, will be disfranchised and sterilized. When you have partisan races for School Board you have partisan outcomes in your curriculum. Excursus: Before any other citizens of Virginia start to write their Maximum Leader and say that School Board races are non-partisan as party affiliations are not listed allow him to advise you to stop sucking on the crack-pipe. School Board races are highly partisan and party affiliated - but the candidates just can’t tell you openly if they are Republican, Democrats, or other.

Now allow your Maximum Leader to engage in a little dichotomy here. While he dislikes the political process by which he gets to choose his School Board, he demands that the curriculum be accountable to political bodies. This is to say that if his tax money is going to support some function, then by gum he’s going to want to hold some elected person responsible for what goes on. That said, he prefer to hold someone a little higher-up the food chain of politics responsible and have an appointed School Board of “worthy” people. But as it stands he has to vote out idiots who actually run for the office.

So now lets return to teacher pay… As your Maximum Leader said, he thinks teachers are paid less than they ought to be. But he doesn’t like just giving teachers pay hikes without some sort of indicator that his tax dollars are being well spent. This is where “merit pay” comes into the picture. Your Maximum Leader would gladly pay higher local taxes to support schools that could supply evidence that they were doing a good job teaching kids. This means benchmarking and standardized testing. Now your Maximum Leader knows that there are all sorts of different kids in the world and some test well and some don’t. Further he knows that standardized tests - like the politized curriculum from whence they spawned - are in many ways deeply flawe. But in the end you have to establish some sort of global assessment standard by which you can determine if you are “making progress” towards better educating our kids.

So, we have standardized test and we have kids getting tested. Why shouldn’t we reward teachers and districts that do well? We should. But we should also be very critical of the tests, the curriculums that are formed around the tests, and the methods used to determine the benchmarks.

All that said your Maximum Leader would like to point out one more thing… The photo Houston area teacher Kim Hennis is unflattering. Yeah, yeah, your Maximum Leader knows she is reading a story (with emphasis and interpretation) to first graders. But the editors could have found some better photo.

Carry on.