Thirty Two Dimes

In which I confess my ill-gotten gain.

“Follow the money.”

You may know that for some anti-reform crusaders, the “follow the money” mantra has produced, well,… great money. One particularly famous education historian weekly collects expensive speaking fees and sells many thousands of books by mainly claiming that the ‘billionaire boys club’ wants to reduce our children to robots and spends hundreds of millions to achieve this aim.

So herewith my confession.

For a very long time I’ve taken a perverse pride in this claim:

“I’ve never made a dime in education”.

Sometimes, I annotate this by pointing out that I’ve had a number of tasty free lunches, and quite a few free donuts via educational organizations and ‘billionaire’ foundations.

But mostly, my out-of-pocket expenses (gas and auto mileage, hotels, web hosting, software, per diem, …) far exceed the cost of the tasty treats consumed. So I don’t always quibble on the in-kind gross income of wine and cheese.

Today that changed.

Today, I discovered that three people have shelled out for four copies of my draft book. And, I confess, I charged them a ‘profit’.

Now, no one who understands accounting would call this is any way a profit. But some education historians might. So I want to be as up front as possible. Those books only cost $4.19 each to print. And I charged those who would learn what I had to say $4.99.

There is it. $.80 of profit. Four books. Straight into my pocket.

Thirty two dimes.