Jim Epstein on the $2 Million Teacher

When Paul
Edelman was working as a middle school teacher in New York City
during the early ’00s, his school gave him none of the lesson
plans, handouts, and workbooks necessary for running a classroom.
“When school ended at 3 p.m., it was really just the beginning of
my workday,” says Edelman. He says his first year was “brutal,” and
his second and third years were only marginally better.

Out of such pain came an idea: “What if we could create a vast
repository of resources that already worked for other teachers,” he
asks, “juiced with free market forces?”

In 2006, Edelman started Teachers Pay Teachers, an online
marketplace for educators to sell digital copies of their classroom
materials to each other for small amounts of money. “It’s booming,”
says Berner, the company’s head of community and editorial. Gross
sales ballooned from $900,000 in 2010 to $44 million in 2013, and
so far teachers have earned nearly $48 million on the site. There
are more than one million products to choose from, including lesson
plans, worksheets, flash cards, PowerPoint presentations, games,
quizzes, graphic organizers, bulletin board ideas, and parent
guides. And the materials are built by real teachers, so they tend
to be perfectly tailored to classroom use.

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