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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."
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!
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 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.