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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."
First they're going to sell the lesson plans like they are now. Then as it becomes more popular, the supply will grow and price will drop. Then the plans will basically be free, and there won't be enough revenue to worry about. Teachers everywhere will have access to better materials, which will help the children learn better. Except that instead the school districts are going to say "No, that's my money too!" They will shut this down as it starts to take off, and the teachers will be no better off than they are today.
Making lesson plans a work-for-hire is only going to make them more restricted. As it is now, most teachers are happy to share their work for free, and when they move from school to school or district to district, they are able to bring what works best for them with them. Once you start letting schools (or districts) consider this stuff proprietary/copyrighted information belonging to the school, they'll end up wreaking havoc (or at least trying to) trying to protect their interests whenever a teacher leaves their district, or helps someone at a conference by "giving away" the school's intellectual property.
It seems moot anyway. IANAL, but copyright law leaves a specific exemption for educational purposes. A teacher can copy whatever the hell he or she wishes for use in the classroom, and that seems like it would include lesson plans. I could see making your own plans available online and charging a small convenience/thank you fee for them, but if another teacher gets ahold of your lesson plans through some other means I don't see what recourse you would have anyway.
Teachers are being paid to teach. They are not being paid to create lesson plans. I am not a full time teacher, but I have taught, and I can tell you that when I do I regularly use lesson plans that I have created at previous schools or in my free time when I not working for anyone (but know I will be teaching again someday down the line). And, yes, sometimes I have even downloaded plans off of the web. How could a school I teach at claim ownership over this work? In my mind this would be like club owners claiming to own the rights to any music that is played at their venues.
Faculty at public universities still own their royalties. School teachers and university faculty are not so different. Both are professionals and both get tenure in most states. If a school district gave a teacher release time and specific instructions to develop a lesson plan, that would be work for hire. Much more frequently, the school district just assumes that the teacher will make preparations on their own time. In that case, it is not work for hire. If you want to pay teachers overtime for all the work they put in at home preparing for class, I am sure a lot of teachers would be happy to see the additional pay. But if the teacher does work on their own time, they should own their intellectual property.
Statesman
Here's the real issue:
"Teachers swapping ideas with one another, that's a great thing," [Joseph McDonald, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University] said. "But somebody asking 75 cents for a word puzzle reduces the power of the learning community and is ultimately destructive to the profession."
His statement roughly boils down to a desire for teachers to be the gatekeepers of knowledge.
In my humble opinion, his point of view is ultimately destructive to the profession.
And by "profession" I mean "teaching", not "teacher's union" which is what he seems to be worried about.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Yes that was the link I wanted, thank you. I don't know how I didn't notice the misinformation in my first link. Google linked to the one I posted from my search "Average Teachers Salary USA" and I should have read it more carefully.
Administration is definitely in need of restructure in American public schools. Though I think MOST professions can say that. There will always be ways to shuffle around the money that goes into the school system but those ways are MUCH more complicated and mistake-prone than simply raising taxes and pouring more funding into teacher salary.
Oh, and in an attempt to prove myself accidentally right about the sub-50k mark for teacher salary, that link DOES say that charter school teachers average about 41,000/year and that probably brings the TOTAL (public and private) teacher salary below 50k.
Though I am not often right, I am so sometimes by chance.
Regular teachers aren't on the clock, they're on a salary, and the lesson plan is not some optional extra they can do or not do, it is literally part of their job. Generally speaking you *must* have a lesson plan, and it must have good detail for at least the next week or two, so that if you get sick a substitute can actually take over and not just have kids lazing about for weeks while she sorts it out.
I don't think anybody teaching wants to go the route of "all my work must be conducted during scheduled hours" because what comes after that is that they get scheduled to come in and work on their lesson plans over winter and summer break. I think everyone is much cooler with having lots of vacation with some assumed time set aside for working on lesson plans.
Now what I do like about them selling lesson plans is that capitalism does what it does best and motivates them to come up with really stellar plans so they make lots of money.
What I don't like more than anything about this practice is that it preys on new teachers who make a lot less money by most tiering systems (say $20k per year starting off instead of the $40k they will be making in a year or two at the next tier). It is major suck if you are getting less money *and* have to fork out for supplementary lesson plans. Normally you would inherit a fair bit of curriculum from previous and existing teachers, but maybe once it's monetized the good natured charity which has previously existed will evaporate.
And it does seem kind of wrong that the teachers are being subsidized by tax payers to come up with these plans, but are also retaining the plans for their own private use and personal profit. On the surface it's nice to think about teachers being entrepreneurial and financially successful, but it's not exactly helping teachers out in general given that the only people who buy the plans will be other teachers, which does not result in a net influx of income to the teaching profession.
My suggestion is that the reviewing of a certain number of freely published lesson plans should be tied to keeping one's status in the highest pay-tier. That means the most experience/qualified teachers will be annually donating, say, a couple of really good daily lessons for the benefit of all teachers and students in the nation (and they're already getting paid extra for their alleged mastery in teaching, so no complaining!)
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
No disrespect to your father, but most administrators think teachers use that stuff, but only the worst teachers do. I've been on several textbook adoption committees where most of the supplemental materials are purchased, and I'll tell you those lessons aren't good for the actual classroom. Those materials are to appease administrators and purchasing departments, so it looks like they are getting a good deal. They aren't.
kklein is also right about this issue.
An important change for education.
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.
That surprises me. Most U's - certainly most research U's - do exactly that. They get first refusal on any patents, inventions, etc. They get credit on any publications (at least in the sense that you declare your affiliation, at most in the sense of acknowledging internal funding). IP may be your bread and butter, but most universities want credit for encouraging you and a slice of the pie if you make one.
It's interesting that most times the first /. thread under a 'university/IP' thread will be how anything produced in the course of government contract or employ should be in the public domain, but here is a thread applauding people for making a personal profit from that same material. Maybe it's the difference between poor, overworked teachers and rich, lazy professors. Maybe its the difference between patents and copyrights. It's just an interesting contrast.
I'm glad this argument unfolded exactly as predicted, with "they did it on our dime" vs. "they did it on their own time" arguments abounding.
The only thing I don't see here is a "they only work 8 months a year but get paid for the whole year, screw them" argument.
No one, including the original article, asks whose money is being used to BUY the lesson plans.
I agree - teachers are paid far too little (and no, I'm not a teacher either). How's this for a solution: upon graduation from high school you pick 3 teachers that have been the most influential in your life. 0.1% of your income thereafter (until all three have passed away) is divided amongst those teachers. With about 100 students per year, some of them presumably going on to become successful, it could add up to a fair chunk of change. Good teachers could actually earn a good wage that way (whoever Bill Gates chooses could become rich), and bad teachers would very quickly find themselves on the lower end of the income curve, perhaps making a system that actually removes bad teachers from the fold.
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
Way to troll, I had several PHDs teaching me through my education. Three in High School and one in middle school. At no point did creationism ever come up, evolution was taught by the biology teacher, and the heath class passed out condoms. Your opinion of our education system is vastly skewed by the media who over reacts (maybe rightly) to each incident.
Unbelievable. Why would somebody making a sweet $34,000 after a mandated four-year education feel the need to supplement their income!
We're paying them a fair wage for their work. Salary, so the "extra time" they spend outside of school (like they need that!) lesson planning, well, that's figured in as well.
Those greedy bastards. Trying to afford things like food, housing and clothes.
BTW: Google ad as I type this is Want to Teach Special Ed? Noooooooooooo. Nooo! No. No sir! No, I do not. No. Thank you.
Still not dead.
I would like to think I'm a decent teacher, and I loathe that there are teachers in the system stealing a salary, so in theory I love the idea of performance based pay, but the problem comes when you start to try and determine what are the indicators for good performance.
Standardized tests are what people generally assume would be the measure, but I have some issues with teachers beginning to teach the test. I hope that wouldn't happen, but I know some teachers that would do it for the money. Those are the same ones who get masters or doctorates from questionable universities rather than from a school that would help them do their jobs better.
More importantly, many good teachers, who work well with lower performing students, often get a disproportionate number of kids that have academic issues. Counselors and administrators tend to wink, wink those kids into a class with teachers they know are good. Not a bad move, but if we were paid based on students scores, the good teacher would be punished.
The major issue that causes the most problems is implementation. Invariably, states and school boards try very hard to make these things work, but they don't have the money or the follow through to create a valid measure of student success. So, unfortunately, even if there is in theory a great means of paying teachers based on performance, the implementation will almost certainly be flawed.
I'd like to see administrations have the ability for fire bad teachers which would alone get rid of a large part of the problem. Let's start there.
An important change for education.
The end result of my work is a working product. The end result of a teacher's work is an educated child. It's reasonable to claim the code I write at work as company property - not so much with the teacher.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Been there. Done that. Retired. There are a lot of unfounded assumptions in these posts. Basics if you choose teaching it will take some time and at first you won't get paid very well, but if you hang in there and get more credits, going to summer school for about ten years, you'll wind up doing okay by your mid thirties. In Seattle, a school teacher with 15 years experience (average age 37-40), with a BA, MA and +135 hours (all those summer quarters for 10 years) makes $75K (2009-2010 salary schedule) and gets summers off--because you've peaked on credits and don't need to do that any more, plus Christmas, Spring break, etc. and all the bennies you could want. Compared to private employment where you're lucky to get three weeks vacation a year that's close to $100K equivalent. But that's the big city, too.
Smaller districts often pay a bit less, but smaller districts are ALSO in more rural areas where the cost of living is less. In many places in WA, teachers are among the highest paid folks in town. All totaled it's a pretty decent middle class lifestyle.
Not saying it's all roses. Teaching can be a very hard job with lots of expectations from parents, lots of paperwork, and lots of extra time at night preparing for the next day. And frankly, there are lots of places I wouldn't want to be a teacher at all. You know what I mean. Also, it takes awhile to move up on the salary schedule to where you actually make ok money. The first few years can be pretty dismal.
Retirement is pretty good. In WA a teacher with 40 years experience (25-65) would get 80% of pay plus FICA. By the time YOU retire, there might be nothing! But that's the idea. You actually would make more money retired than working: $60K retirement plus $22K FICA.
It's one of those fields where, depending on where you are at and what you teach, it could be a GREAT job, or a piss poor one.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.