Teacher Sells Ads On High School Tests To Pay For Printing

Tom Farber gives a lot of tests. He's a calculus teacher, after all.

So when administrators at Rancho Bernardo, his suburban San Diego high school, announced the district was cutting spending on supplies by nearly a third, Farber had a problem. At 3 cents a page, his tests would cost more than $500 a year. His copying budget: $316. But he wanted to give students enough practice for the big tests they'll face in the spring, such as the Advanced Placement exam.

"Tough times call for tough actions," he says. So he started selling ads on his test papers: $10 for a quiz, $20 for a chapter test, $30 for a semester final.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[CaptainHowdy]

They won't be happy until they can tattoo ads onto the insides of your eyelids.

Mark my word... it's coming.

[undeluded]

Pushing advertising at students who are captive - at least if they want to pass the class - should be illegal. There's far too much pressure in our society to treat citizens like consuming commodities, from the cradle to the grave, and Tom's chosen to embrace the darkness, albeit for laudable reasons. He gets an 'A' for creativity but 'Fails' when it comes to protecting his young charges from the insidious and ever more pervasive, corrosive force of advertising. Like so many of us in the U.S., he doesn't seem to realize that capitalism in the extreme, can and usually is destructive - think Wall Street meltdown - and this is an extreme case, on a small, but potentially open ended, scale. So keep brainstorming. (Hey, I'll bet all of his students receive text messages; maybe he should text message the tests to them :-))

[Mildmannered]

And Schwarzenegger, Republican State Senator Cogdill and the other republicans in Sacramento want to drastically cut the California education budget and further destroy the future of our young people and drive good teachers out of California.

[Perry Clease]

The test was made possible by Laramie Cigarettes and Duff Beer

[Egalitare]

A creative short term solution, but indicative of the failure of our collective will to properly fund public education, and all the other "Commons."

[NoToGOP08]

Free Market!

[Myshkin57]

No. This needs to be illegal. You can be more creative. Put the questions on an overhead and have the kids write on their own paper. That's what we did when I was in high school.

[berkeleygirl1962]

I've been prosituting myself a bit more directly, turning tricks in exchange for large donations to the PTA at our public elementary school. It's quicker and more lucrative than hawking wrapping paper or selling raffle tickets, and (admittedly) more fun.

When Schwarzenegger ousted Gray Davis, he cut auto registration/license fees and borrowed more (at a higher cost) than Davis was proposing. K-12 per-pupil spending in our once proud California education system has been far below the national average for years; several years back, prison spending began to outstrip state spending on higher ed. Now we're facing massive midyear cuts, and if the Governator won't agree to raise revenues, look for more desperate fundraising measures on the part of teachers and parents.

[Mildmannered]

We need your expert help down here in Los Angeles, berkeleygirl1962.

[NoMoFearNoMoHate]

Two axioms for you:

A society that imprisons its people shackles itself.

and

Freedom can never be found at either end of a gun.

[fcsakes]

Yet we do not quail at the obscene salaries we pay to professional sports players or the dollars spent enticing high-school seniors to go to this college or that where we drool all over "our team" as if they weren't in for the bucks.

And teachers go begging. Same old story, different tune. This teacher could be making some money showing the 'big 3' how to trim costs. I'm glad he made the decision to teach instead.

[horsey]

Sounds like a pretty smart guy, maybe Obama should hire him to help the gov't cut some costs.

[GeoLee]

I served in three different capacities in my public school career.: Teacher, counselor and social worker. Often in the latter two roles, my budget was $25.00 a year. Classroom teachers got around 250. I averaged well over a thousand a year for supplies necessary to adequately do my job. I kept every receipt for a pen, staples, paper, boxes of kleenex, you name it for tax deduction purposes just hoping one time I might be audited and I would arrive with a bucket full of receipts and domp them on the auditors desk. Never hapened...IRS knows most of us are funding our own jobs. I am just surprised we don't have to bring our own toilet paper with the attitude of tax payers about properly funding public schools...especially those who no longer have kids in school but who seem to have forgotten it was their parents, grandparents, etc who paid their way though school back when teacher expenses and parent expences were very minimal by comparison, usually only a small fee for everything if charged at all. My cousins in Texas in the 60's did not even have to buy their own pencils and paper and were surprised in Kansas that we did.

[CaptainHowdy]

It's not the fault of the taxpayers. It's the fault of the corrupt school boards.

[Retrofuturistic]

Teachers have to prostitute themselves every day, break copyright laws, or use hundreds of dollars of their own money in order to get what they need for their students.

One time I wanted my students to paint, but we had no paper, so we had to paint on the floor. And then I was the one who had to scrub it off.

I wish I would have thought of selling ads myself. I would have done it....