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Public School Teachers Selling Lesson Plans Online
theodp writes "Thousands of teachers are using websites like Teachers Pay Teachers and We Are Teachers to cash in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare. While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, raising questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms."
The teacher owns the material, it is they who develops it and in no way has to do with the schools.
The teachers developed workable lesson plans. Unless things have radically changed since I last taught, the time to develop lesson plans is probably not built into the schedule. You do that on your own time, or in a very short time period like a 30 minute 'planning period'. If the government would like to own these lesson plans then perhaps they should consider paying for the time used to develop them.
they aren't charging the students, they are selling plans to other teachers. so that less experienced teachers can free up time and buy a plan for something they are having a tough time coming up with good ideas for.
this marketplace should be very good for both new teachers needing ideas and experienced teachers with the skills to put together great lessons.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
That's not true, most courses in the US use canned lesson plans that the district pays a small fortune to obtain. My father is a school administrator (and has been for districts large and small) and I can tell you a significant portion of the budget goes to buying lesson plans*.
Put your dad on. I want to hear about these lesson plans they are buying.
I think there seems to be a huge disconnect in this discussion. There is a difference between "lesson plan" and "textbook." Your dad buys textbooks and workbooks. Those are not lesson plans. Those are the seeds of lesson plans.
Lesson plans are what the teacher does with those seeds and, in many cases, they have to supplement with stuff they've made themselves (to be honest, I'd love to work somewhere where I just follow some external lesson plan--I've never heard of such a place and again think you mean "textbook"). Teachers share this stuff around all the time, edit, and use as necessary. All these pay sites are doing is adding a little money to it, and as a teacher, I'm all for it. I don't mind kicking a little dough to a compatriot-in-arms for their good ideas, and I might even throw some stuff up there myself.
Now, I am a university professor, so my situation is different, but if anyone asked me to sign an IP waiver that said that whatever materials I made belonged to the school, I'd laugh and walk. That is my bread and butter. Teachers are free agents; we usually move around. If something happens and we need to change jobs, we're not re-inventing a 20-year-career; we're taking the stuff we made.
Hell, I take stuff I didn't make, but use. There's no controls on this stuff, and until it gets published (which is usually never), people do whatever they want.
At a meeting at my last school, the head of the department responded to a question about ownership of materials we were making for the department with this, "Well, those are all property of the university, obviously." I chortled, and I was sitting right next to him. He looked at me, shocked, and I said, "where did it say that in my contract?" This was about half a second before the room erupted in a mixture of scoffing, laughter, and loud complaining.
When the noise died down I said, "That's fine if that's what you want to do, but that is the kind of thing that would need to be stated explicitly in our contracts. There are two sides to that, of course. On the one hand, you'd be safe from anyone ever taking stuff they did here and publishing it, which might make it hard for you to use for free anymore, but on the other, well, I'm not making anything for any of my classes anymore, unless you pay me per lesson or something." No clause was ever added to the contract, and I am using a lot of the materials--some of which I didn't make--at my current job, edited for the new situation. There is no way that I could re-do those years of work while moving my career ahead. Some of that stuff is now in my permanent bag of tricks.
So, there's how it works, and I suspect your dad would agree with me. I'm pretty sure it's you who doesn't get it.
Unless the employment contract explicitly transfers ownership of creative works to the employer then the lesson plans legally do not belong to the school.
That's simply not true. The employment contract doesn't need to explicitly mention anything about ownership of creative works. If you are simply an "employee" as opposed to an independent contractor, your work falls under the work for hire doctrine, and your employer owns the copyright.
In the world of copyrights and contracts this stuff is cut and dry, the default in all cases - including software development - is for ownership to rest with the creator, full stop.
No, it's not cut and dry. See, for example, the Community for Creative Non-Violence. And the "default" would depend on whether you're an employee or a contractor. If you're a coder who's been hired as a salaried member for some company and that's your full time job, the "default" is probably that you're an employee and you're creating works for hire, so ownership rests with your employer, full stop.
That said, at least at the university level, the culture is that works by professors are not works for hire. I'm not sure if there really is a sound legal basis for that (probably depends on their employment contract), but any university who tried to assert ownership over professors' work would find itself being attacked on all sides.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
It's laughable at the number of people here who think that teachers get time to create anything during public school hours. My wife is a third grade teacher. She spends literally all of her at work free time in meetings. Parent meetings. Administration meetings. Team meetings. She gets zero time to grade papers, produce teaching plans, or anything else at school during her regular working day. She makes a whopping $45k a year which for the Atlanta area will barely rent a one bedroom apartment and keep up a run down car. If it were not for my job we would have to move just to make ends meet. Not to mention that she has $60k of education debt @$350 a month. Plus she still has to do continuing education and pay for it out of her pocket. It takes roughly 15 to 20 hours of her time at home per week to grade papers and do lesson plans. It's just this school perhaps? Not on your life. She has worked at 4 different schools and every one of them is exactly the same. Ask any teacher, I bet you get nearly the same results. I agree the public school system is crap. But it's not the teachers fault. They have to teach what the national, state and local school board(s) tell them to teach. Not to mention that they have to try and get Johnny who doesn't speak English and is dumber than a box of hammers up to the same level as the rest of the class. For which the rest of the class suffers, because the teacher has to spend one on one time with him. Before you go bagging on how it's always the teachers fault, perhaps you should put your brain back in and actually think of who controls what the teacher does. Because they sure don't get to teach what they want to. If they did, kids might actually get a quality education.