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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."
Robing Peter to pay Paul is pointless and stupid. Obviously lesson plans produced at government funded public schools should be kept free and open so that they can be effectively refined and tailored for specific environments. A shared resource granting a community benefit in creating and maintaining the best possible lesson plans.
The only thing greed ever feeds is more greed.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I fail to see how this raises any questions. The teachers put effort into developing a lesson plan and deserve to do whatever they wish with that lesson plan. I work at a coffee shop and from what I've seen and talked about with the teachers that regularly spend time there, they don't do lesson plans on the clock. It's something they do mostly outside of school.
Plus, teachers don't make a whole lot as it is. If they want to sell their expertise at putting together effective lesson plans, more power to them. In fact, I prefer this system over the traditional "do as the book provides" because it seems to the major text book publishers care more about milking schools for money than actually teaching anything. With a system like this, at least the money helps other teachers.
If teachers don't have enough money for school supplies, then we need higher taxes. Unfortunately, these days with people having children later as well as a significant minority of Americans who are very, VERY against the entire idea of humans having children (without a license from the government of course i.e. eugenics), it's really hard to push tax increases through.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Professors have been writing textbooks and getting royalties for centuries. What is the big deal?
Statesman
This is just a retarded question. Teachers make piss for money and now someone is complaining that they are actually doing something to compliment that? Teachers on average make less than $50,000/year doing one of the most publicly scrutinized, emotionally demanding jobs in the USA. They got a 2.6% increase last year but their buying power went DOWN according to the AFT Public Employees
.
We should be applauding these teachers for finding good ways to pass around good teaching material, not bitching that "the taxpayers pay you to teach so we own all of your creative works and you can't ever make money off of them".
For the record, NO I am not a teacher. I just happen to think that we should be doing everything we can to make sure our teachers succeed. Obama talks a big game and I hope he comes through for them but at this point it's been talk.
Piss off theodp and rtb61.
That there's no question as to who owns the materials, and teachers freely gave them away in the past. It was obvious that they belonged to the teachers. If they had belonged to the school, the teacher would have no right to give them away.
Fast forward to today... some teacher decides to sell theirs instead of giving it away. Suddenly leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms.
What's happening is greed and jealously at its finest: as soon as a teacher is perceived to possibly be profiting off a certain lesson plan, the school officials want to find any means they can to get their mits on the action, either to demand a cut, take the profits wholesale, or penalize the teachers, so they aren't profiting compared to the school officials.
Pure greed at play.
Teachers aren't paid to make lesson plans: they don't draft or write them in the classroom while they're teaching. Lesson plans aren't required to do the job of teaching. Although some type of basic outline might be required, it's distinct from the detailed lesson plans teachers develop.
They require a lot of work to develop into anything useful that someone else would want. Drafting these plans is generally done at home, or on break, using the teacher's own resources, while they aren't teaching: teachers need to plan ahead to do an effective job, and sometimes collaborate with other teachers possibly in the local community, but possibly quite remote distances away.
While they use the lesson plans at whatever school they teach at, it doesn't mean the plans are developed specifically for a certain classroom, or specifically for a public school classroom.
Nor does this imply any right of ownership to the school.
It's like hiring some guy at geeksquad to fix your computer, and when they do it, insisting you own the rights to the guy's personal notes/cheat sheet he developed regarding what things to check in what order, etc, etc.
Essentially: your employee's personal plans that they developed for their own purposes, to help them do the job you hired them to do better.
You don't own those, unless you made developing those plans a condition of their employment, part of the exchange of goods, and paid them for all time and resources spent in developing those plans.
lesson plans are generally not produced at school, typically they are created off the clock at home.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I suspect because we (well generally the tax payers) paid the teachers to do this work, thus it should come under the public domain or government copyright, it is in effect a work for hire.
I know the bad ones copy the lesson plans out of the back of the text and are headed out the door as soon as their union obligated hours are done. The good ones spend countless hours of their own time at home, on the weekends, during winter, spring and summer break, creating new and innovative ways to engage their students.
The best of the best pass those ideas down to other teachers, through workshops and other means.
But, I cant fault someone for wanting to get paid for there time.
Teachers on average make less than $50,000/year doing one of the most publicly scrutinized, emotionally demanding jobs in the USA.
Wrong link. You meant to point to this page, I think. (Your page addresses the salaries of probation officers, agricultural inspectors, and lots of other jobs, but not teachers.) The AFT's numbers show that schoolteachers, on average, make -slightly more- than $50,000/year. While I agree they're badly underpaid, one should also bear in mind that they don't work year-round and get much more vacation than most workers. They do work long hours, but so does everyone else.
Again, I agree their pay is abysmal when compared to their responsibilities and the qualifications we need from them. I can't help but feel our schools'd be in far better shape if we fired, say, 80% or so of the administration and gave their salaries to the teachers.
Given the exorbitant, outrageous, and staggering prices that even first year post-secondary text books sell for, this doesn't seem worth a moment's thought.
Once you've figured out how to price text books about the same as a best seller hard-cover book instead $100-200 a copy, I'll be willing to worry about teachers selling lesson plans.
Three Squirrels
We need phDs in high school and true masters in our colleges. We should be paying teachers twice what they are now and expecting the very best for it. But more teachers, too, so that students are not overly inaccesible -- and involving people of the community to come and teach about their jobs and lives. Teach about regular things that people do, don't give the kids a robo-baby in Home-Ec (they did that with me), take them to a nursery and bring in local moms with babies.
Education, community, and communication are the way to understanding and peace. We should do this first, food and basic shelter as well. Our armies are amazingly equipped, we don't need to spend so much there anymore. I would know, I'm a veteran and with what we've already got we can basically run anyone into a meatgrinder in the blink of an eye. No, we don't really need a new fighter jet that costs 200BN to develop (discussed here on slashdot a few months back). Our current jets are amazing.
We can do this. We can spend money where it helps and is actually needed.
Critics: please don't tell me you saw some 20/20 special that said it isn't the money that makes schools good. We've got schools with Taco Bell ads on their roofs so they can afford supplies and TVs donated by advertisers requiring the kids to watch at least a short advertisement viewing to use them for class purposes. The money does matter when its pissed away on new ways to kill people.
It's not work for hire.
If you're a music teacher hired by a school to teach students to play the instruments but you write a melody on the side on your own time the school doesn't own copyright to the song. It's a resource which you can bring to school (sheet music) and use as an educational tool.
Lesson plans aren't the work being hired. You aren't hired to create a lesson plan, you're hired to teach children.
Similarly if you hire me to create a house and I also manufacture a hammer off the clock you don't own my hammer. If I'm an author and I'm hired to lecture on my research the school doesn't magically inherit rights to my research because I gave a lecture. We once did work for hire and the company asked for all of our computers at the end. We just laughed all the way out the door. If you bring a monitor to work and use it instead of the small crappy corporate monitor--the company doesn't own your monitor just like it doesn't own your tie or your shirt or your shoes. You bring them to work to facilitate working. They aren't work property.
Schools pay teachers to show up and educate students.
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*. Look into it and you'll learn that "entrepreneurs" have been making a lot of money off of educating your children.
* On a slightly unrelated note, some districts even have policies that tell teachers they may not deviate from the lesson plans. I even know teachers that have been fired over this issue.
The person you are replying to here is also apparently unaware that teachers often (i.e. usually) do not have sufficient time allocated during school hours to produce lesson plans. Their time is taken up with marking and other activities.
So if they produce lesson plans and resources on their own time, there's no question of anybody being robbed. It's the teacher's own work, and s/he has the right to use or profit from it has s/he sees fit.
Well at my high school there was:
A principle, vice principle/academic councilor, librarian, janitor, I think two accountants and a secretary. Not sure where I would have cut 80% of that.
And I know my mom would LOVE for there be more money spent on administration at her schools since she spends so much time filling out paperwork wasting tons of tax payers' dollars to ensure precious tax payers' dollars aren't being wasted.
Teachers make piss for money and now someone is complaining that they are actually doing something to compliment that? Teachers on average make less than $50,000/year doing one of the most publicly scrutinized, emotionally demanding jobs in the USA.
In which they only work 180 days a year, get rock solid job security after a few years, have great family health coverage, and are provided a pension plan that absolves them from having to pay the social security "tax" every paycheck like the rest of us who probably won't even get anything out of it.
It's not as bad of a deal as you would think (why do you think so many people do it?) and it's not bad pay actually if you break it down on a per day basis, and your pay is guaranteed to increase over time as well as increase even more if you further your education. You can continue working over summer if you want more money or you can go on a 3 month trip to some foreign country you've always wanted to visit like my mom does every summer because teachers get such a massive amount of time off they can do stuff like that.
Maybe the government needs to stop subsidizing poor educators and abolish the union. Teachers make the wages they do because of master agreements that doesn't take the individuals into account.
Did you know para-educators don't receive an increase in pay for having a bachelor's degree? Yet, they can receive tuition reimbursement. Their master agreement greatly follows the teacher's.
Meanwhile you have teachers who are flat out no good at their job (due to incompetence or complacency) making the same wage as an equivalently schooled and experienced teacher who is a natural and actually does a good job.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I'm not convinced they're paid only for teaching. I'm not payed only for writing code either, though that is the expected end result of my work. My mom used to teach and at least in this corner of the world the teachers are required to do planning work necessary to teach and are considered to be compensated for that time in their salary. Hence the extra material they create / plans should should be considered public property or at least be shared among colleagues. It's tougher for teachers just starting out with new material and gets easier once you've done planning and extra material, so you can reuse it the next course / year. At least here I would very much frown upon someone trying to profit from something they've done while being paid for it and not sharing it.
Quite honestly, as long as it helps improve the quality of education - and making them public plus opening competition via a marketplace is likely to do that - what the fuck do you care if someone profits? Have we dropped so low already that we're jealous of the winner, even in a win-win situation?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Do like Japan and teach the kids cleaning responsibilities and that their actions have consequences: They clean the schools.
Disclaimer: I lecture and tutor at university.
I think your approach misses the key point of teaching: the teacher. A good lesson plan is like a good document template or assignment specification: it assists the user to do their job. However, I would strongly doubt that a lesson plan alone is sufficient to make a bad teacher a good one.
To that end I see little point in requiring unique lesson plans, unique lecture slides or unique text books. All of these are simply tools used by the teacher to assist in aiding the students' education. While it may be lazy to simply copy another lesson plan (or other teaching aid) without adapting it to your own unique class, if there is no individualisation to the situation then it will not be as effective. So I would encourage teachers to find lesson plans from other sources as well as adapting their own, the bad teachers might just learn something new, and the good teachers will take the best of the different approaches to compliment their style. Taking this away would only hamper teachers in doing their job.
As a teacher in a relatively poorly funded and equipped school, I'd like to say "anyone who isn't a teacher or hasn't been a teacher at some point, STFU." But that'd be rather glib of me.
Suffice to say there are plenty of free lesson plans out there for those of us unwilling or unable to come up with our own. If a teacher finds a lesson plan that they feel is worth paying for, go for it. I personally wouldn't pay for a lesson that someone else wrote, but that's just me.
Until teachers are paid--not just paid, but respected--commensurate with the job they're doing, to wit: raising your dumbass kid while you bitch about your tax dollars, I don't see how anyone not in our shoes has any right to tell us how to make ends meet. There is a serious disjunct between what is expected of teachers by society and what many parents are willing to do at home to assure their child receives a worthwhile education.
If teachers were paid on performance, they'd be earning zero per year. But hey, if you think they should be earning $100k/year for 9 months of work while your kid learns nothing, then you pay for it. I certainly won't.
If it were as simple as that. The reality is a classroom id often full of kids who don't really want to learn, expect to get an A just for trying, and have parents who whine and cry whenever their little darling get's less than a 100 despite not actually doing the work. Oh, yea, it's the teacher's fault that students don't learn. Discipline them for acting up? How dare you; obviously it's your fault he or she did what they did. Frankly, some of the things I've heard teachers say they've been called would earn you a fist in your face in most other environments. Sure, there are bad teachers, but there are many more who really care and try and finally get fed up and quit because the crap they put up with isn't worth it. Maybe if parents actually took an active interest in their kid's education things could get better; but I've come to the conclusion most parent's simply don't care. Unfortunately, it is simply less hassle to pass them and let life eventually hit them with a clue by four than actually hold them accountable to some semblance of performance.
Of course, it's getting worse - I've spoken with college professors who say they get calls from parents complaining about kid's grades and expecting them to do something about it.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The idea that higher taxes are needed is purely ignorant of the problem. How can rural schools consistently spend less than many big cities per pupil yet turn out better educated students? It happens across the country.
The real money problems in public education are simple.
1. Non teaching positions, usually used to give jobs to friends and family of local lawmakers.
2. Overly generous pay to teachers with seniority without regard to ability
3. Over priced administrators.
4. Ridiculous retirement packages.
Did you notice anything about the list? Its all focused on who works there and not why they are there in the first place. Education has become a jobs program.
The reason its hard to push increases of taxes through is because most people are tired of it. Tired of seeing it wasted on the Federal level people naturally take it out where they can have effect. Tired of watching huge buildings named after living politicians instead of being used where it should be.
Tire of seeing threats of cutting police, fire, and teachers, when every little budget problem comes across instead of cutting non essential (crony employment jobs) and vote buying benefits programs.
Taxes are the last thing we need more of for this problem, but considering the state of education I can see how many would come to that conclusion, they were not taught to think
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Nope, parents would never go for their children doing something so degrading. Their child is the next astronaut/President/CEO... Which is probably the biggest problem with the American education system. There is no enforcement at home, and parents aren't willing to believe that they need to put an effort into raising their children. They don't support schools or schooling, they don't encourage their children to complete the coursework, and any attempts to grade a child at his level is often met with the teacher being hauled in front of an administrator to have a meeting with an angry parent about why she's not being fair to poor Johnny the astronaut.
When I told my mother (a retired teacher) about this notion of selling lesson plans to other teachers online, she replied, "That's silly!"
That's because my mom knows that teachers are the original open-sourcers. We routinely create lesson plans, worksheets and other classroom materials, freely give this material to other teachers, encourage them to adapt it, and assume that they will freely provide the material to other teachers. Sound familiar?
We've done this for decades because, frankly, we have to. Time constraints and the need for quality free material forced it on us.
That's why these sites have been around for years, but have never really taken off. They never will. If I meet a teacher who sells their plans to this site (and I haven't yet) I will gently remind them of the strong tradition of open-source material in education.
Maybe if parents actually took an active interest in their kid's education things could get better; but I've come to the conclusion most parent's simply don't care.
My Grandmother, Wife, and several close friends are teachers. That is the single gripe that is consistent across all teachers I know. My grandmother and wife had issues with the administration, and my best friend had issues with other teachers, but every teacher I know gripes about the attitude of parents. They want their kid to get A's, but not to be challenged, disciplined, or even disappointed.
It's nothing new, but it is getting worse as far as I can tell. I remember kids goofing off in class and then bragging about how their mother/father came in and read the teacher the riot act to get them out of trouble. I on the other hand, was far more afraid of my parents than anything the school could legally do to me. I fully intend to put the fear of God into my children if I ever find out they are getting in trouble at school.
The teachers authority comes from the Parents! If you don't support your teachers ability to chastize your child when necessary, they will not be able to teach your child effectively. That requires you to be the Bad Guy at home and force them to study, do homework, and respect their teachers.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
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*. Look into it and you'll learn that "entrepreneurs" have been making a lot of money off of educating your children.
In many (all?) states school teachers are supposed to be given planning periods. But these periods are often illegally filled up by administrator demands and meetings.
My English teacher wife would love to share her lesson plans, or even do collaborative planning with her high school teacher peers. But the entrenched refuse to change what they're doing, even if it's obviously poor or lazy teaching. She's left doing her own planning on her own time. She couldn't give her plans away to her colleagues. But I'm not surprised that there's a national market for packaged plans for those that need new material.
I was public school teacher for several years in Maruland, and there where no canned lessons plans made available.
I was teaching students math ( Algebra to Calculus) and Pascal. On the math side I thought it idiotic that I ( or other teachers ) had to reinvent the wheel just about every day in terms of lesson plans or ideas in how to present certain topics. I would have loved to have access plans and ideas to take as a base and adjust them to the people in my classes.
The only time there was real access to presentation ideas of certain topics was on one professional development day. That one day of presenting successful strategies for teaching certain mathematical topics was the only time such a resource was ever available in the 3 years I taught ( other professional development days had little or nothing in terms of this kind of topic).
These days I see my kids make use of resources on the Internet for supplemental material that would have been very useful to me back then. It seems to me that schools and teacher unions missed an opportunity in utilizing the Internet to make starting teachers more effective sooner.
So, I suppose that these teachers selling their knowledge is the first step in doing that in a capitalist way.
Who says Teachers make piss for money? Every teacher I know makes in excess of $40,000 per year. Most experienced teachers make more than $ 50,000 per year. They only work 9 months of the year. They have LOTS of vacation and days off (way more than most jobs).
If the teacher developed the lesson plan on their own time, it belongs to them. If they developed it on school time, it belongs to the public. Simple as that.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
$50,000/year is not piss poor money for most of the working class. Teachers also have the best benefits and also 2+ months off per year. Most teachers either have lesson plans handed down to them by retiring teachers or they develop the plan and don't update it for years. Most recycle tests and exams over and over as well and kids that obtain older copies tend to do better in their classes than kids that don't of the same level of intelligence. There jobs are stressful don't get me wrong but playing the poor mouth isn't washing very well.
Teachers have *minimum* 4 year degrees, the median household doesn't. You can only pro-rate a teachers salary like that by counting days, not hours - and teachers are paid hourly.
Teachers have *minimum* 4 year degrees, the median household doesn't. You can only pro-rate a teachers salary like that by counting days, not hours - and teachers are paid hourly.
Did you miss the part where the average salary with a bachelors degree is $45000? And why can't you pro-rate the salary? On average teachers make over $51,000 a year. That means when you add up the money they get paid for their hourly wage the average teacher makes a little over $51,000 a year. If they worked the additional hours the two to three months they have off at the hourly wage they are paid, they would make approximately $68,000 a year. Teacher's are well paid, as they should be.
The problem with education in the U.S. has nothing to do with teachers' salaries.
All that being said, the copyright on the lesson plans developed by a teacher should belong to the teacher. If someone wants to pay that teacher for that lesson plan, that money belongs to that teacher, not the school.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I don't know about you, but my job cannot claim copyright or ownership of any of the work I do outside the office. And of the couple dozen teachers I know, only a couple of them write up their lesson plans during "contract hours" (the hours they are contracted to work).
If someone makes a lesson plan at 9pm at night, why in hell does the government have any say in how its used?
Now, I'm a fan of openness and sharing and I'd love to see a Public Domain (or GPLed) repository of good lesson plans, but your argument that the government has any ownership of these ideas is based on the (laughably) misguided idea that teachers write lesson plans during the day.
And, as for your "supply and demand" comment, I could argue the exact opposite: If teachers were paid more, more qualified people would consider it as a career option instead of anything else. The rate of attrition for teachers suggests that view is perhaps a little more reasonable.
Most school districts have separate administration buildings. In general, those working there are worthless people in fully politicized positions. The 20% that would be kept are the people you were talking about, and perhaps a treasurer for the school district.
As far as I'm aware, public school teachers keep their lesson plans when they retire/transfer. If a school teacher retires or changes jobs, her lesson plans stay with her. It's not like schools have backlogs and files of retired/fired/transferred teachers lesson plans. I don't see why they can't sell them. Schools have never owned/took possession of these lesson plans anyway- why should they start now? If that was the case, why would every teacher have to make them? Wouldn't it just be the case that the school kept the lesson plans of their best performing teachers and redistributed them to any newbs they hire? People that equate lesson plans with a day's coding are delusional. I am a programmer myself. Quit being so self-centered and anti-social; not every job is like IT.
"We should be paying teachers twice what they are now and expecting the very best for it."
I agree. But that is not going to happen until we can get rid of the teachers unions. They ensure that bad teachers do not get fired, and that all teachers are paid the same without regard to talent. Basically the opposite of a meritocracy.
Expecting anything other than mediocrity under those conditions is a denial of reality.
1) You are assuming someone could get a comparable job for just 3 months (more likely, they'd be lucky to even get a minimum wage job for that length).
2) You assume that during those 3 months, teachers are on vacation just like the kids, and not doing any training, lesson plan improvements, etc.
3) You miss the GP's point that you are only taking days into account, if you count the hours teachers work, their hourly rate would be much lower as plenty of teachers (my wife is one) work 10+ hours each day, and exceed that numerous times throughout the year (extra grading to do, parent teacher conferences, etc...)
I do agree to some extent with you that there are many problems with the education system that are not salary related, but they do contribute to the problem.
I know one other person who's hours, and stress level are the same as my wife's, and he makes quite a lot more then her.
How is it that every single teacher makes less than the average wage of a public school teacher? Based on the anecdotale evidence, there must be some tiny secret group of public school teachers that make several hundred thousand dollars a year.
Looking back over this post, it's actually much worse than I first thought. My first response assumed that teachers would just accept this new pay mechanism and not adjust to it.
The reality is that this would turn teaching into the worst kind of popularity competition: the kind where you're paid if you win.
Ignoring the fact that students are notoriously horrible at judging the quality of their teachers until much later in life (and sometimes: never), and that dozens of studies have shown that students behave better and show greater appreciation of attractive teachers regardless of their ability as a teacher, this idea is almost humorously bad on its face. Worded another way:
Teachers should be paid based on how many students say they like them.
Oh, sure, it won't matter when Jebidiah Bob Hickson comes through school. He'd get treated just like everyone else. But when Alistair Moneysocks writes a three page paper about how the Great Pyramids of Gibraltar were used to talk with the Prince of Atlantis, the teacher's not going to think twice about flunking his absurdly rich and profitable ass.
Yay! We've come up with yet another scheme to give rich kids an advantage! Thank god. They've got so much going against them...
You are a stupid fuck. Alright, now that that's out of the way, let's have a rational argument:
Creationism is not science, it's religion. You have no scientific evidence or support of creationism. Thus, there is not a valid challenge here. Science is still science because it does not address anything that cannot be investigated scientifically. Just as science cannot issue a valid challenge to religion (as any scientific claim is countered with "god did it that way to test us" or similar) religion cannot issue a valid challenge to science (as any religious claim can not be supported with scientific evidence).
Go ahead and teach creationism in bible study or a religious studies class, but it is not science and therefore should not be taught in science class.
Furthermore, evolution makes absolutely no statement about the origins of the universe. The theory you're looking for is called "the big bang", not evolution. Thus, any challenge religion attempts (I say attempts because it cannot, as shown above, actually issue a valid challenge) to have against evolution regarding the origin of the universe is invalid because it has nothing to do with the beginning of the universe. You might as well try to argue the creation of the universe against the intermediate value theorem (a calculus concept), it simply makes no sense.
As for the disclaimers put on textbooks, they make no sense either. Nothing in science can ever be proven absolutely for every situation. It's simply that the effect is observed and the calculations are shown to be correct for every imaginable instance and thus we call it a "theory". We cannot prove that gravity exists absolutely everywhere in the entire universe, but every single experiment ever conducted has shown it to be true. We see it here on earth, on the moon, we can see the effects of gravity on the stars, etc. It is possible, although very, very, unlikely that one day we will discover a piece of matter that does not act like it should with respect to gravity. If and when that time comes, the theory of gravity will have to be reworked.
However, it should be noted that science is not simply "I observe this effect, therefore we'll call it a theory". There is experimentation, calculation, etc. All experiments MUST be repeatable. All calculations MUST be verifiable. Religion is neither of these things. We can't test for god (or the lack of it). If we could, the experiment wouldn't be repeatable. For example, let's say there was a case of cancer in a patient that suddenly went into remission, 6 months later the patient is cancer free. You say "it was a miracle from god". We can't test for this. There's no experiment we can do that will show a divine influence on the patient. It's also not repeatable. If we give another patient cancer in the exact same way, the miracle would not happen twice. (We know this because there are a lot of people with cancer and this hasn't happened before).
In short, "god did it" is not science, it's religion.
As for abstinence only sex education. You're presenting a straw man argument. No one is encouraging teenagers to have sex before marriage. Furthermore, no one is suggesting that teen pregnancy is a good thing. These are not arguments presented by your opposition and therefore warrant no further consideration. (The fact that you mentioned them means that you are either confused about the arguments actually being presented, or that you are intentionally attempting to mislead your opposition).
Your statement about "most abstinence organizations... birth control methods" has no support. Please provide a link to some study that was done or something similar. unfortunately, I cannot take your word for it, just as I don't expect you to take mine if I were to say "most abstinence organizations do NOT teach birth control methods". I also cannot take your word that you are a former president of an abstinence organization, just as I don't expect you to take mine if I say "I am a former king of England
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.