
Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans - Textarcana
http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/millionaire-teachers-rising-standards-have-led-to-a-lucrative-online/2320189
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pee_arrr
This is textbook PR, literally from the first word. The headline is crafted
specifically to engender resentment and outrage.

The intention is to reinforce the counterfactual narrative that teachers in
the US are overpaid, which is needed to depress opposition to the looting of
public school systems.

Now, a market for lesson plans _is_ interesting - and I'm much happier with
money going to entrepreneurial teachers actually creating content that might
otherwise end up in the pockets of the Blackstone Group or Holtzbrinck - but
the real point of this article has more to do with parochial politics.

~~~
tbihl
Could you point me to what you mean, or how you found that meaning here? I
grant that I probably bring my own biases to this interpretation, but the
article made me think, "teachers now have to spend their own salaries on
teaching material because districts only buy lousy, overpriced stuff (if that)
from textbook publishers. Worse yet, the jerks feel the need to attack the
teachers who are sharing their material, as if $40k p.a. entitled them to 168
hours of their employees' time each week."

~~~
sdflkd
Starting off with the title of "Millionaire" would definitely annoy people.

~~~
tbihl
Ahhh, so it's PR for people who only look at the title. Thank you; I totally
missed that, but you're quite right about it. (This from the guy who misses
important information in emails because why would I read the subject line if
I'm reading the whole message?)

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socrates1998
Man, I don't get why Teachers stress so much on lesson plans.

I was a high school teacher for about a decade and after the first three
years, it doesn't take long or difficult to have lesson plans available.

If you want ideas, the school district often has a crap load of them. And if
you are teaching a standardized course (like Algebra or Geometry) you are
essentially provided lesson plans for every day.

The website is an interesting idea, but it won't make a bunch of people
millionaires. It will make 2 or 3 teachers millionaires, with most people who
contributed probably losing money for the amount of time invested in creating
these lesson plans.

Really, the school districts biggest waste of resources are their teachers.
You could easily open source all the teachers lesson plans for the district,
then you could freely pick and choose from anyone in your district.

Also, you could do away with those crazy expensive textbooks. Get every kid a
$50 android tablet and get a team of teachers to come up with an open source
version.

It would take them a few weeks over the summer if you are dealing with
experienced teachers.

Then, you update the textbook every summer and the students download the
latest version in August.

The school district would save insane amounts of money.

But, they won't do that because the publishers and administrators have
corrupted the textbook buying process to a maddening degree. So sad.

~~~
coolgeek
Your profile notes:

> Owner/ Founder: Making-The-Grade Private Learning (Private Tutoring
> Services).

Your belief that there is nothing more to teaching than a lesson plan - "you
could freely pick and choose from anyone in your district" \- doesn't inspire
confidence in the services you offer.

You also note that you're a Wordpress (sic) contractor. WordPress (note the
capitalized P) is open source. Do you also believe that you could freely pick
and choose from anyone (i.e. anybody without prior training or experience) to
do WordPress development?

~~~
socrates1998
I know this is super late, but I will respond as I just saw it.

I have been an educator for over a decade, and lesson plans are very low on
the list of what makes someone a good or great teacher/educator.

Teaching successfully is a lot of things, but for me it is a presentation.
Making an interesting presentation and guiding students through a course
correctly is the true skill.

Lesson plans are mostly about inserting industry language and cool sounding
bullet points into pdfs so that your administrator will be impressed. They are
really useful to inexperienced teachers, but are largely an after thought for
many great experienced teachers. When you open source them to people in your
district, it would be easy for other teachers to get ideas from them and allow
them to actually be useful for even the most experienced teachers.

You clearly didn't understand my comment, so please enlighten me on what your
theory of teaching and education is and the role that lesson plans play in all
of it.

Your question, which was probably rhetorical, about Wordpress (note the
uncapitalized p) doesn't make any sense. If you want an honest debate,
rephrase it.

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MarkMc
This reminds me of what Michelle Rhee wrote in her book 'Radical':

\----------

Imagine a third-grade teacher whose class is working on fractions. She opens
up her laptop that the school has provided. She ventures into a teacher portal
that the district has set up to assist educators. The teacher types “adding
fractions” into the search engine. Up pop links to lesson plans that various
teachers in the district have used to teach the skill of adding fractions.
They are sorted by grade level. Each lesson is rated by a certain number of
stars, ratings other teachers have given the plan based on how well it was
written and how well it worked in their classroom. There are also links to
videos of master teachers presenting lessons on adding fractions. In these
videos teachers can hear narration by the master teacher, who is explaining
what happened in the room, and why she did what she did. There’s also a
message board that teachers can use to comment on the video and share ideas.

\----------------

When I read this, I thought "Yes! Stack Overflow for lesson plans"

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adwmayer
Glad teachers are finding a way to make some additional money especially given
how much time they spend on lesson plans. The licensing aspect seems
interesting and potentially problematic, but I don't see why the school
districts couldn't get into this too and do some sort of revenue share with
the teachers (ignoring the bureaucracy of actually setting it up). A more
"open source" version of this would be nice too but then you get into the same
kinds of funding issues that open source projects have. Seems like it would be
good to have teachers contributing back improvements though too. Does anybody
know of anything like this?

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bko
I don't see the downside here. Being able to sell lesson plans would be a nice
little bonus to often underpaid teachers. It would have the upside of having
teachers put in a little more work in developing their lesson plans if they
think they can sell them. Other teachers would be able to benefit greatly from
purchasing other lesson plans and saving time and effort.

I don't think it would harm the "traditional collaborative atmosphere of
schools". Creating an exchange, even with the option of payment would just
improve it

~~~
zardo
>I don't see the downside here.

The new thing here isn't lesson plans for sale, it's a marketplace with small
vendors. So this isn't a new downside, but sponsored content is a continual
worry.

A train carrying delicious Pepsi products is traveling from the Pepsi plant in
Pepsi-town to the Pepsi distribution center in Pepsi-city. What is your
favorite beverage?

~~~
dylz
Imported sparkling glacial water only, sorry.

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dubya
As a parent, I dread seeing worksheets come home with my kids that are
obviously downloaded from the web. It's mostly been busy work dressed up with
clip-art, or just totally unvetted by the teacher (e.g. "fun" word puzzles
with obscure words). There were a couple of history worksheets that made sense
to share, but the documents were apparently un-editable, so about 2/3 of the
questions were blacked out before it was copied. Which is fine, I guess, but
seems not exactly optimal.

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JKCalhoun
I'll be curmudgeonly ... can someone open-source lesson plans so the community
could work to improve them and they would be free? Teachers shouldn't have to
be paying out of pocket for this stuff.

Or does such a thing exist?

I guess I'm torn: I like that teachers are seeing compensation by selling
their lesson plans, hate that other teachers have to pay.

(I'm personally working on a site to eventually provide free primers to
elementary school age children.)

~~~
komali2
Ideally we'd abandon this weird psuedo-capitalist idea of education and just
convince our government that education _is the best investment a country can
make_.

An educated populace will devise better defense technologies and strategies.
An educated populace will create more efficient means of production. An
educated populace will strategize better trade deals. An educated populace
will create more cultural icons that attract foreign tourists.

In other words, yes, open-source the lesson plans, and increase the education
budget by 500%.

~~~
namlem
Throwing money at the problem isn't necessarily going to help. Tons of poor
school districts have gotten major cash infusions and produced nothing to show
for it. The money needs to be spent efficiently. Power needs to be taken away
from administrators and given back to teachers. Also, bad teachers need to be
fired.

~~~
komali2
Why do bad teachers exist? Why do we have tyrranical, shitty administrations?

Giving a million dollars to a homeless drug addict would kill him within the
week. You don't solve the problem by throwing money at it, now.

I said _increase the education budget_. That's not just money to schools,
that's money to education research, schools, teachers, after school programs,
parent outreach, and all the other weird little things people don't think
about when they think about education. It would shift our country's cultural
and political policy towards education - if teachers are pulling 120k
salaries, the expectations for their performance would be higher. More people
would seek out the extra difficult training to become a teacher because the
rewards are worth it, much like people are willing to spend 10 years slaving
through medical school for a prominent, well-respected, highly paid job that
involves helping people.

Right now the only people that teach are the genuinely good people that are
willing to take 24k/year salaries minus personal expenses on classroom
supplies, or yea, the shitty people who couldn't figure out what else to do.

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giarc
>Some legal experts argue that the resources teachers produce while working
for a school district may actually be the property of the school district.

I think as this industry grows, this becomes a huge issue for retention. Some
teachers may decide to leave the profession and produce content full time if
they can make more money (which isn't hard in some states).

~~~
germinalphrase
I doubt it can happen, but I believe we would be well served to more clearly
and firmly limit copyright within the classroom setting. I understand that
publishers need to protect their investment, but teacher actively and
regularly break the law in preparing curriculum for their classes.

------
giarc
Andrew at Mixergy did an awesome podcast on a similar site just recently. I
highly recommend listening to it, the co-founders are incredible.

[https://mixergy.com/interviews/flipped-lifestyle-with-
shane-...](https://mixergy.com/interviews/flipped-lifestyle-with-shane-and-
jocelyn-sams/)

------
germinalphrase
I've always felt that Teacherspayteachers is interesting, but it can’t be a
general purpose curriculum tool. The marketplace model also distorts (in my
mind) the incentives for sharing while limiting buyers/users to the
infrequent, desperate and/or inexperienced. The relationship between teachers
is purely transactional, so there is no collaborative development or
improvement of the content over time. Likewise, it is reliant on discrete
documents, which I find inflexible. This inflexibility might not matter if
you're working with young kids and just need a fun activity/game - but (as a
high school teacher) it is a significant hinderance to using this platform on
a regular basis.

All that said, sincere props to Paul Edelman for developing a strong community
around the site.

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snarf21
I say great for the teachers who found a way to make some well deserved extra
money for all of their hard work.

The thing that makes no sense is the need for it in the first place. The
constant changing of books for the curriculum forces everyone to reinvent the
wheel for their lesson plans. So much wasted time and _energy_ that the
teachers could be spending actually helping children and being more satisfied.
This isn't cutting edge ML research at MIT, it is helping 3rd graders learn
about planets, etc.

Why isn't this done at the state level Department of Education? Here is the
playbook, follow it and add/adjust as you need to based on your students. Huge
time and money savings for all. This is easy to solve with some political will
and give-a-shit.

~~~
panzagl
It's mostly driven by publishers who want to sell books every year instead of
every decade. Add some academics looking to justify their existence plus upper
administrators who are given big salaries to 'do something' to 'improve'
education and you soon have a system that's very willing to slosh taxpayer
money around.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
In other words, someone has a money incentive to change the game, and the
power to do it, and we're all worse off as a result.

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pesnk
This is great. I love to see this kind of news. Good teachers are very
expensive and there's a of schools that prefers to have mediocre ones and
capitalize their earnings.

I'm doing 4 to 6 online courses per year I think it's a great way to spend my
money. And I always have the same teachers with me

