#TeachersAreProfessionals: A Movement.
Stop paying out-of-pocket.
We have decided that enough is enough and, in partnership with educators, we are starting a movement, #TeachersAreProfessionals... a drive to empower educators, support them as the professionals they are, and help them bring valuable resources to their classrooms. Interested? Interested?
While we are in the business of helping educators crowdfund to offset additional costs, we also can't help but to be enraged by the lack of respect for those who dedicate themselves to the field of education. We've heard from thousands of teachers and over 80% of them are paying more than $250 a year out of pocket. More than 30% are paying between $500 and $2,000. On top of the hundreds of dollars educators spend out of pocket, add in the cost of EdTech tools and that price will soar even higher.
Together, let’s change the culture around teachers paying out of pocket.
We already know that most teachers pay out of pocket every year for their classroom, and this tells us these expenses are not wants but needs. Teachers NEED unrestricted funding each year to make their classrooms the best learning environments for their students. We want to help you with this. We want to help you with funds to spend on your classroom: NO RECEIPTS. We trust you with our kids, we can trust you with spending on your classroom. We want you to choose the EdTech tools you want to use. Research shows that technology provides no significant difference in learning when we use it the same way we were using non digital tools. To make a real impact the technology has to be used in an innovative way by a passionate teacher. No product is a magic bullet, the magic bullet is YOU the teacher.
"High quality products require talented people to create, market, sell, maintain, and provide professional development around. Unless you are a billion dollar company that can afford to spend millions on giving away EdTech to schools, free is not a business model." - via Alice Keeler @alicekeeler
It's not that EdTech companies are being stingy, but rather that educators are not provided the appropriate funds to maintain their products and subscriptions. In addition, many of the great EdTech companies are struggling to stay in business due to educators not being able to afford their products! The #TeachersAreProfessionals movement will work with EdTech companies in various ways to provide and maintain a more affordable way for educators to access and use these valuable tools.
Educators are professionals and are qualified in the art of teaching. How many professionals do you know of, aside from independent contractors, that pay for their own supplies - the supplies necessary to complete their job? We know many educators who struggle to acquire the materials they need.
The more responses we receive and the more data we capture, the better we can work together to achieve our goal! By signing up you will be notified when we enter the next phase of this project which will include business cards, more information about the project, and the ability to create an account for classroom funding. In the short term we can work with EdTech companies to leverage volume discounts to reduce how much you pay out of pocket.
