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When Missouri has been in the national news lately, it hasn’t been for anything good. When Missouri legislators tried to ban child marriage, the Senate said no [ [link removed] ]. One Republican gubernatorial candidate was an honorary member of the Klan [ [link removed] ]; another Republican statewide candidate thinks that Purina, the dog food company, is too gay [ [link removed] ]. The Legislature decided that, yes, 2023 was a good time to tighten its dress code for women [ [link removed] ].
There are plenty of other examples. But late last year, one Missouri story made bigger news than just about any other: in the small town of Saint Clair [ [link removed] ], about an hour outside of St. Louis, two teachers—Brianna Coppage and Megan Gaither—lost their jobs because they were filming OnlyFans videos.
A few weeks ago, I got lunch with Brianna. I spoke with her because her story—one that involves having been exposed as an OnlyFans content creator [ [link removed] ] before losing her job [ [link removed] ] at St. Clair High School [ [link removed] ]—has given her an enormous [ [link removed] ] national [ [link removed] ] platform [ [link removed] ].
The Daily Mail and the New York Post have covered this story exactly the way you’d expect: a focus on the salacious details, on the culture wars that plague American education, or on the money that Brianna and Megan are now making, for instance.
But at its core, this is a story about teacher pay.
In the last year of available data, Coppage made $42,000 [ [link removed] ], and Gaither made $48,000 [ [link removed] ]. Americans overwhelmingly agree that teachers should be making more money [ [link removed] ]. But here is what’s Not Quite Right… Even low pay doesn’t tell the full story.
Teachers are required to go to college, which for most of them means taking on (and then paying off) debt. Many are working second jobs. Most work long hours after school. And all of this is happening as faith in American education is at all-time lows [ [link removed] ].
It’s no wonder that fewer and fewer Americans want to become teachers [ [link removed] ].
Let’s break down teacher pay
Below, listen to Brianna talk about her decision to join OnlyFans, and why she opted for that as opposed to another more traditional job—waitressing, for example.
It’s worth breaking this down in a bit more detail. Brianna, according to Missouri public records, made $42,261 per year, which included a pittance of additional money for leading the cheer team.
But this doesn’t tell the full story.
Making $42,261, you’ll pay roughly $3,189 in federal income taxes [ [link removed] ] and $1,066 in state income taxes [ [link removed] ]. That leaves $38,006.
Brianna has a four-year college degree, a degree she is required [ [link removed] ] to have to teach in Missouri [ [link removed] ], and a master’s degree in education. She incurred $60,000 in student debt to get those degrees. If you’re paying down those loans over 10 years, that’s roughly $8,000 per year [ [link removed] ]. That leaves roughly $30,000.
She mentioned a pain point I hadn’t been aware of: according to the handbook for the Public Education Employee Retirement System of Missouri [ [link removed] ] (PEERS), employees are required to contribute 6.86% of their income to the pension, and that’s calculated off of salary and benefits like health insurance. I’ll estimate $3,000 since I don’t have good data on benefits.
That leaves roughly $27,000 in take-home pay for someone with a master’s degree. And this is before accounting for rent (roughly $1,000 per month in Saint Clair [ [link removed] ]) and childcare—Brianna worked full-time and has a child, so that’s obviously a consideration too (more below on that).
For context, the median wage in Missouri is $57,580 [ [link removed] ], and the median wage for someone with a master’s degree in Missouri is $90,324 [ [link removed] ]. Assuming the same levels of student debt, that means that the median person with a master’s degree in Missouri has a take-home, after-debt pay of roughly $67,000—2.5× higher than Brianna.
This problem is only getting worse, by the way. Teacher salaries over the past 25 years have increased appreciably less [ [link removed] ] than wages for other college graduates. By one measure [ [link removed] ], “the average salary of teachers has actually declined by an estimated 6.4 percent, or $3,644, over the past decade.”
Most teachers work second jobs (although those second jobs usually aren’t worldwide news)
OnlyFans aside, it’s worth noting how many teachers hold second jobs. A Pew survey in 2019 found that 16% of teachers hold second jobs during the school year [ [link removed] ], and the National Center for Education Statistics reports that 58% of all public school teachers earn income from sources [ [link removed] ] other than their base teaching salary, which generally means work during the summer.
Most, of course, are not producing pornography. I couldn’t find any good data on what second jobs and summer jobs for teachers are most common, but I imagine a lot of teachers are doing something similar to what Stacey Robinson [ [link removed] ], a teacher in Cooter, Missouri [ [link removed] ], said she was doing in a 2022 interview:
On top of teaching third and fourth graders full time, Robinson also works 10 hours per week as a school custodian, which brings in about $600 extra per month. She earns $25 for every school sporting event she manages, too, taking money at the door and operating the concession stand during three or four ball games a week. She cares for elderly patients, including her father, at an independent living company that pays her about $650 per month. She also paints houses for around $20 an hour.
Working other jobs means finding childcare, which is prohibitively expensive—if it’s available at all
All of this requires that you’re able to work after regular hours or during the summer, and for anyone with children, that means adequate access to childcare. But across America, there is not anything close to adequate access, especially in rural areas [ [link removed] ]. According to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, 59% of rural communities do not have enough childcare [ [link removed] ].
The cost of childcare has meaningfully outpaced inflation [ [link removed] ] for the last 35 years, right at the same time that the opposite is happening with teacher salaries. Today, families in Missouri with young children are spending close to $10,000 per year [ [link removed] ]—more, if you have an infant.
Here’s the other problem: the vast majority of childcare facilities are not open on nights or weekends [ [link removed] ]. So even if you could afford to pay for childcare, somehow, and even if you found a job you would want to work after school, it’s still not a viable option.
The significant challenges of rural schools
Obviously, I wish the solution here were simply to pay teachers more. But it’s not like Missouri schools are swimming money; in fact, across Missouri, 30% of districts have moved to four-day school weeks [ [link removed] ], which is an enormous problem in its own right. Listen to Brianna talk about broken and inadequate school infrastructure:
Or that her at-school meal options were undersized, overpriced, and—I mean this literally—moldy:
Between demographic shifts away from rural areas and low pay, recruiting teachers in rural areas is difficult enough as is. Surely we can find ways to serve teachers (and students) food that isn’t moldy.
It’s really hard for rural teachers to make ends meet
Brianna mentioned to me that far more teachers than anyone realizes are filming videos on OnlyFans. And after speaking with her, I get it. I get why so many teachers head down that path, if it’s an option for them.
Teaching is hard and underpaid. Working ancillary jobs at school—coaching, for instance—isn’t a meaningful additional source of income, especially given the additional hours it entails. Finding other more conventional work (as a waiter, for instance) is difficult, if it’s even an option at all with childcare constraints.
What good options do you have if you’re behind on rent? Or if you’re struggling to make student loan payments?
I generally have no problem with this sort of elective, consensual sex work, but teachers shouldn’t have to look to OnlyFans to make ends meet.
I can’t believe I’m even writing that; what a sad commentary on the state of education in America, and how we treat our teachers.
Brianna is happy with the income and stability, but she said that she doesn’t want to do this for more than another two years or so. And I get that too—yes, the pay is good, and yes, there’s good flexibility in how, when, and what kind of work you do. But I can imagine how hard it is to do this kind of work, and to have been exposed in such a public way. And I’m sure it is difficult in all sorts of ways that I cannot imagine or understand.
How do we fix this?
While I believe that paying teachers more is important, it’s probably not realistic in a lot of the country.
In Part 2, I’ll discuss how licensure is crippling our ability to recruit teachers (and professionals in other jobs). I’ll write more about rural labor shortages in education. I’ll write about what else we can be doing. And I’ll cover what we can learn from Utah—a state that has some of the lowest per-student spending but some of the best outcomes and highest educational attainment.
More to come.
Finally, a note for the swingers of St. Louis
I’ll end on a more fun note. Take a listen.
I’m sharing for the funny observation, but in all seriousness, the message here from Brianna is a good one. A little more empathy and understanding would go a long way—in politics and in the world—right now.
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