Rewarding Innovation or Facilitating Conflict? Exploring the Legal Implications of Teacherpreneurship

Abstract

This article explores the legal implications of “teacherpreneurship”, and presents a hypothetical case study to show how teacher code of conduct guidelines can be breached when a teacher accepts corporate sponsorship, even when it’s directed for the benefit of students. Such behaviour also triggers supervising administrator concerns, children’s advertising rules and standards, and intellectual property ownership ramifications. This article will also review several teacherpreneurship cases, and discuss policy issues such as the impact of technology, and poverty, on learning and student performance, and technology’s impact on the future of jobs. As will be shown, teachers who accept gifts from corporations trigger a host of non-trivial legal concerns. Teacherpreneurship may reduce funding disparities in lower income schools; however, the evidence on technology improving classroom performance is mixed. Given the benefits and costs of teacherpreneurship, a potential balancing solution is to use “regulatory sandboxes” (as developed in the financial technology sector) where teachers can experiment with entrepreneurial ventures that may benefit students, in a monitored way, to ensure that conduct breaches and other legal ramifications are mitigated, understood and fully transparent.

Keywords: education, fintech, regulatory sandbox, teacherpreneur, teacher conflict