AP

Much discussion on the internet concerning the AP's new Pay By The Word policy. Gary Stager had this comment on Will Richardson's blog:

Why shouldn’t journalists and publishers get paid for their work?

Here’s a suggestion for edubloggers who believe that all intellectual property should be free - let’s stop paying teachers.

They just deliver content that is freely available elsewhere, right? Why is hard earned public money being given to teachers? They’re so 1.0!

C’mon teachers, get on board and do your job for free! Conferences can pay keynote speakers with links, rather than that tired old money.

Hello, Gary,

I know (or at least I think I know :) ) that you are playing devil's advocate here, but your comment is off-base. No one is suggesting that journalists and publishers shouldn't be paid for their work. On the contrary: some journalists and some publishers do an excellent job, and deserve every penny they earn, and more. They provide a valuable service by contributing to -- and in some cases, helping to shape -- the public discourse.

Delivering content is a service. Providing analysis on content is a service. Providing context on content is a service. Providing a service deserves compensation. Teachers do more than provide a service; at their best, they help students develop a set of skills that allow them to interact critically with the ideas they encounter, and articulate their thoughts effectively. This transcends delivering "content that is freely available elsewhere." In many cases, teaching is situational: an explanation gets created on the spot to help illustrate a point in response to a specific interaction among learners. Teaching isn't canned (unless, of course, you buy a textbook and deliver that curriculum via Blackboard -- but I digress).

Hence, your suggestion that teachers stop getting paid is absurd. But from reading your writing in the past, I suspect you know that already. Call me crazy, but I suspect you are employing irony (or is it sarcasm) for rhetorical purposes.

RE your suggestion: "Conferences can pay keynote speakers with links, rather than that tired old money." -- this, however, is an excellent idea. Most organized conferences are rarely worth the price of admission, unless you find value in having a vendor sell you a packaged version of a technology that was interesting three to five years ago. Anything that moves us away from the traditional format of Ed Tech conferences can only be a Good Thing.

And while I'm at it, the AP Technology News RSS Feed had the following stories freely available for distribution via RSS:

The following AP story, the rights of which are completely and fully owned by AP, was particularly interesting: "SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A federal appeals court has made it more difficult for employers to snoop legally on e-mails and text messages their workers send from company accounts...." You can read the full article here, from the link on the AP's web site. The AP reporters have done excellent work in researching this article, and you should read the entire article on their site. The same article can be read on Newsday, an organization who likely pays a fee to aggregate, republish, and rebrand AP content. This fits Gary's definition of delivering "content that is freely available elsewhere."

Gary, and others: It's called Fair Use.

A few weeks back, I left a comment on the Students20h blog in response to an a post written describing a student's thoughts on the college admissions process. The gist of my comment was that college is but a part of actual learning, and that where you go to college offers as many opportunities about where and how you want to live as it provides opportunities on where, how, and what you want to learn. In my comment, I dropped an aside about how I'd love to see an entire class of students -- nationwide -- boycott the SATs and the APs. Without the SATs and the APs, my reasoning (if you can call it that :) ) went, colleges would need to find a different method to evaluate applicants, because the overwhelming majority of colleges would be dead in the water without new tuition revenue.

I've had this idea for a while -- probably for over a decade -- and it always rattled around as something that is easy to say because it is easily dismissable. Clay Burell mentioned it in a blog post, and it landed with a faintly audible thud. This doesn't surprise me, because finding a better tool than the SAT and AP classes is a goal that many people would like to see achieved (a de-emphasis on testing) but that most people believe will never happen, at least without top-down change. Also, as I see it, we are looking at a testing beast with at least three heads: The PSAT, the SAT, and the AP. All of these heads attach to the College Board.

We'll be waiting a long time for top-down change to occur on this one, as there is no incentive for anybody to change anything. The College Board brings in good money via testing fees, and I'll do some napkin math on this in the next couple paragraphs. Colleges are comfortable using SAT and AP numbers in their admissions process for a variety of reasons, and change is both expensive and inconvenient. The US Federal Budget included a request for an additional $90 million dollars (on top of $32 million in 2006) for fiscal year 2007 and 2008 to expand the AP program. As you can see from the enacted budgets (an excel download of the 2007 budget is here, and the AP is line 195; an Excel download for 2008 is here, with the AP on line 212) the increases were more modest (an increase of $5 million in 2007, and of $6.5 million in 2008, to a total of $43.5 million), but the implication of the repeated $90 million increased spending request is clear: a standardized test -- in this case, the AP -- will provide evidence of student learning. In turn, this increased emphasis on AP courses is a nice windfall for those in the business of selling curriculum, as this federal money guarantees that school districts will have the need to buy AP curriculum and train teachers in its use.

Which brings us to some napkin math on testing fees: According to the College Board, an estimated 2.7 million students graduated high school in 2006. I wasn't able to get good numbers on the number of students who take the SAT more than once in the hopes of increasing their score, and therefore pay multiple testing fees, so for the sake of this rough estimate we will assume that 2.5 million students took the SAT. According to the College Board SAT FAQ page, the cost to take the SAT is $43.00. So, 2.5 million students taking the SAT would gross $107.5 million.

For the PSAT, I was not able to find good numbers on total number of students talking the test. However, the relationship between the PSAT and the National Merit Scholarship awards is clearly identified on the College Board web site, and this seems to be one of the prime motivating factors to take the test. So, in the interest of estimating low, let's assume that half of the 2.7 million graduating students took the PSAT at least once -- and it's worth noting that some students take the PSAT multiple times, some starting in the eighth grade. But, to generate a low (and therefore reliably uninflated) number, let's assume that 1.35 million students pay 13.00 to take the test. This would gross $17,550,000.00

Moving on to the AP, according to this article in the Austin Daily Texan, "(a)bout 610,000 of the roughly 2.7 million members of the class of 2005 took a total of 1.5 million AP tests." Each AP test costs 84.00 to take (according to the College Board, much of the expense is caused by the increased cost of scoring the AP relative to the SAT), so 1.5 million tests at 84.00 apiece grosses $126 million.

So, a low-end estimate of the gross from the tests is $107.5 million for the SAT, $17.55 million for the PSAT, and $126 million for the AP, for approximately $245.55 million dollars for one year. And these testing fees are completely independent of the different trainings offered for teachers, all with registration fees. And the numbers I generated above also do not take into account any revenue generated from selling test prep info to students directly.

Of course, other people besides the College Board are willing to teach you how to take that test. According to a Business Week article from February, 2005, test prep companies brought in "an estimated $702 million in 2003, and that's expected to grow to $960 million" in 2004. I wasn't able to find current estimates for 2005 through 2007, but I'd love to see them if anyone has them -- please leave them in the comments.

So here is my unrealistic dream. It will never happen, but it is incredibly fun to imagine.

Imagine an empty room on the Saturday allotted for the SATs. Imagine parents not spending over a thousand dollars on a SAT prep course. Imagine students outside, playing sports, doing theater, hanging out, doing just about anything rather than wasting time on SAT review questions. Imagine what could be done if the money earmarked for testing, curriculum to support testing, infrastructure to deliver tests, etc, could be spent differently.

When I was still teaching, I would run this idea past a class occasionally. Not surprisingly, the students generally got a kick out of it. It wasn't what they expected a teacher to say, for one thing. And most of the students came back to this place, more or less: "It would only work if everybody did it, and we couldn't trust everybody to do it." That, and "Our parents would kill us." I always expected a parent phone call after dropping this idea out there, but I never got one. The thing that was fun about these conversations, though, was that usually, a few days after the conversation, a kid would come into my office wanting to talk about it, and excited about the possibility that something like this just might work.

I know it will never happen. But just think about the possibilities if it could.