Georgia kindergarten teacher Deanna Jump has earned more than $1 million selling lesson plans on a peer-to-peer site called TeachersPayTeachers. Since the site launched in 2006, 26 different teachers have made more than $100,000 each. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) launched its own site this summer, Share My Lesson, where teachers can share free lesson plans.
This is great for the teachers trying to make ends meet during a time of reduced funding to education, and another example (following eBay, Craigslist, Kickstarter, Etsy and others) of the power of peer-to-peer sales. Schools facing budget squeezes might want a piece of the action, though. A New York Federal court ruled in 2004 that schools have a right to some of the profits, if teachers produced marketable lesson plans as part of their regular work, even if it was on their own time. Will schools start suing some of these teachers for their share of the lesson-plan profits?
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