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.)
As a teacher, I find it absurd how much redundant labor takes place in classrooms. When I was just starting out I'd find myself making something simple - like a comprehension quiz for 'To Kill a Mockingbird' - and just swearing under my breath. What I was doing must have been done thousands of times over the years. The silo'ing of curriculum in filing cabinets and hard drives helps no one.
This is likewise true for assessment. Another HN member and I have been developing an assessment creation tool that makes use of a library of shared assessment elements. Still really early in the development process, but it takes aim at this exact issue (while, hopefully, building in some additional benefits: save time, easily generate multiple versions of the assessment for different skill levels, iterative improvement with use, etc). If it comes together, we're intending to branch into general purpose curriculum and lesson performance tools as well.
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%.
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.
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.
Open Education Resources (OER) is already a thing - but access is so fragmented between different websites and organizations that I've never found it particularly useful.
Additionally, it often takes as much time to find & modify OER to fit my classroom needs as it does to simply make it from scratch on my own.
Assuming you're talking about the US, we already spend more per student than pretty much anybody else. I'd argue we spend plenty, but if we're going to inflate education spending, why stop at 500%? Why not 5000%? We can print as much money as we need!
My experience is that this stuff is used piecemeal instead of as a main curriculum- maybe you need a differentiating activity for a few students, or something for a weird chunk of time caused by testing or something.
You used to just grab this type of stuff out of the 'resource room' every school has, but between the combination of Common Core making old material 'obsolete' and the big educational publishers locking down more material through stringent copyright assertion it's become more necessary to look elsewhere.
I'm not sure you are on firm ground here legally. You can't be selling work you have done for your employer without getting something drawn up that allows that.
This might be different from district to district, though it's certainly a concern. I know that my last school district not only accepted, but help facilitate, my taking digitally created curriculum to another district when I changed jobs.
Edit: I also wondering if sharing vs selling makes a legal difference? If teachers cannot legally share curriculum materials then every single teacher in this country is breaking the law.
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.)