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Several weeks ago, I spoke with Brianna Coppage [ [link removed] ], one of the St. Clair High School teachers who lost her job because she’d been making pornographic videos on OnlyFans to help make ends meet. (Since we spoke, she was featured on an ABC News [ [link removed] ] segment [ [link removed] ].)
More recently, I met with Megan Gaither—she was caught up in the same scandal [ [link removed] ], having started on OnlyFans for similar reasons. I met with her for the same reason I met with Brianna: her story gives her a national platform that few other teachers have.
We met at a Panera in Washington, Missouri to talk about everything that’s happened to her in the past year. One thing that was immediately clear: Megan wants to teach again. She trained to be a teacher, and she loves teaching.
But the last year has been hard for her, because her time on OnlyFans—one that has been lucrative for her—may have closed off a career in education.
We also spoke about the lack of support from school administrators, even though she loves St. Clair, her students, and most of the parents in the community.
As I did with Brianna, I spoke with Megan about student debt and the crisis that it’s created for teachers. We also spoke about bad pay, the need for better support for educators, and the treatment she’s faced—what amounts to online abuse at times—while teaching and since.
Fewer people are becoming teachers
The number of people who are becoming teachers in this country has been declining precipitously [ [link removed] ] for two decades.
There are different theories for why this is happening. Based on my conversations with Brianna [ [link removed] ] and with Megan, there are three that I will focus on in particular:
Pay is too low.
The hurdles to becoming a teacher are too high.
Respect for teachers is at an all-time low [ [link removed] ], and respectful conduct in and around the classroom—from students, from parents, from administrators, and from the community—all feel like they’re getting worse. Teachers have the highest burnout rate of any profession in the U.S. [ [link removed] ]
Paying teachers more
Respect for teachers may be at an all-time low, but even still, most Americans agree that we aren’t paying them enough [ [link removed] ].
In Part 1, I said that while Missouri should ideally be paying its teachers more, it’s probably not realistic [ [link removed] ]. (Not at the scale where it could make a lasting difference, at least.) Since then, the State Legislature is seriously considering a plan to subsidize renovations to the Chiefs’, Royals’, and Cardinals’ stadiums, potentially to the tune of $1 billion [ [link removed] ]. This is, of course, insane.
On the one hand, there are 68,700 public school teachers in Missouri [ [link removed] ], and rather than spend taxpayer money subsidizing the Hunt family [ [link removed] ], who own the Chiefs and whose collective net worth is $25 billion [ [link removed] ], we could literally give every teacher in Missouri a $14,500 one-time bonus.
On the other, what we need are lasting answers, not one-off bonuses. If we’re about to spend $1 billion of taxpayer money, I’d much rather use it to set up some retention bonuses for teachers, but even that is not fundamentally enough to change the crisis in education.
Reducing the hurdles to becoming a teacher
Brianna has a master’s degree; Megan has two. Listen to her discuss her decision to start creating content on OnlyFans, as she faced increasing student debt obligations.
I’ll reiterate what I said last time [ [link removed] ]: confronted with the reality of paying off student debt, paying off housing, and paying for childcare, I’m extremely sympathetic to their decisions to do what they’re doing on OnlyFans. There just aren’t a lot of good options.
Policymakers have to find ways to reduce the burdens as best they can.
Some of this—housing affordability, childcare affordability, etc.—are important but separate topics. But one we can address: we have to make it easier for people to become teachers.
In every state in the country [ [link removed] ], teachers are required to get a bachelor’s degree. But doing so is very expensive. According to data from the National Education Association, 45% of teachers have student loan debt, and the average debt burden is $55,800 [ [link removed] ]—consistent with what Megan and Brianna were paying down.
With fewer Americans going to college [ [link removed] ], and with fewer teachers entering the workforce generally, the solution here is to allow more people to teach with associate’s degrees rather than bachelor’s degrees. It will open up the pool of talent to a broader set of the population, and it’s a de-facto double-digit-percent raise for teachers carrying debt.
Not for nothing, this would have a particularly positive impact in rural areas, where fewer people are getting bachelor’s degrees [ [link removed] ], and the people who are getting college degrees are more likely to leave [ [link removed] ]. Some people, like Megan, choose to move home to teach, but when the pay is lower and the opportunities are greater elsewhere, many others make different decisions.
Greater respect for teachers
Getting better support from administrators
Megan talked about having almost no support from school administrators when she started teaching at St. Clair High School.
Much broader than that issue, however, is a lack of support from school administrators in the face of in-classroom challenges, confronting difficult parents, etc. We’ve all experienced greater hostility and antipathy out in the community since the pandemic; we’ve all seen videos and read stories of local school boards, once sleepy affairs, turning into all-out culture war brawls [ [link removed] ].
Listening to Megan, Brianna, and other teachers I know, it’s no surprise that the burnout is high.
Utah is doing something right. What can we learn from them?
Utah stands alone in strong student outcomes without spending much:
By any number of metrics—from average SAT scores [ [link removed] ] (4th) to eighth-grade reading proficiency [ [link removed] ] (3rd) to standardized test scores in math [ [link removed] ] (2nd) to high school graduation rates [ [link removed] ] (15th) to squishy subjective ratings [ [link removed] ] from U.S. News & World Report (2nd)—Utah is near or at the top of national education rankings.
Despite this strong track record of educational successes, Utah spent two decades at the very bottom of per-student spending [ [link removed] ]. Just recently, they moved up one spot to 50th [ [link removed] ], just ahead of Idaho.
What has Utah figured out? For starters, just because per-student spending is low doesn’t mean that teacher pay is low: Utah is 10th in the country for teacher starting salary and 23rd for average teacher salary [ [link removed] ]. Among other things, this suggests that Utah’s overhead and administrative costs are more efficient.
The state, in general, does a lot of things well:
Utah is ranked as the most affordable state [ [link removed] ].
The state values education. It’s hard to get at this exactly, but 51% of parents hold at least a bachelor’s degree [ [link removed] ], 8% above the American median and one of the highest rates in the country.
Utah has the highest rate of children raised in two-parent households [ [link removed] ], which correlates with all sorts of positive life-long outcomes [ [link removed] ].
Utah has, by far, the lowest rates of alcohol consumption [ [link removed] ] of any state and among the lowest drug overdose rates of any state [ [link removed] ]. Unsurprisingly, it is bad for children to have parents who are problem drinkers [ [link removed] ] and/or drug users [ [link removed] ].
While Utah is somewhat middle-of-the-pack when it comes to homelessness [ [link removed] ], the state is exceptionally good at addressing child poverty [ [link removed] ].
In short, some of what Utah does well in education comes from broader children-specific policy successes. And in fairness, some of it comes from LDS-specific cultural dynamics—two-parent households and low rates of substance abuse, specifically—that would be difficult to replicate elsewhere. (Outside of Utah, the LDS Church [ [link removed] ] is probably better known as the Mormon Church.)
But I think there’s a broader dynamic at play too.
A culture of mutual respect matters
Lastly—and for obvious reasons, it’s hard to get great data on this—I think Utah is on the whole a more community-oriented and kinder place, where the sort of abuse that teachers face at the hands of loud parents and others is less likely.
I’m always reluctant to include statements that can’t be backed by hard data. But let me try to give some examples of this:
These Forbes lists are inexact and imperfect, but on a ranking of which states are loneliest [ [link removed] ], Utah is dead last (i.e., Utah is the least lonely state).
Gov. Spencer Cox (R), facing the political minefield of trans youth in sports [ [link removed] ], chose to veto a transgender sports ban anyway. It’s worth reading his statement [ [link removed] ], which is long on the sort of empathy we desperately need in politics today.
During their 2020 gubernatorial campaign [ [link removed] ], the Republican nominee (now-Gov. Cox) and the Democratic nominee came together to film a series of ads to promote [ [link removed] ] civility [ [link removed] ].
The LDS Church, whose members make up between 55% [ [link removed] ] and 65% [ [link removed] ] of Utah’s population, takes a supportive position on gay marriage [ [link removed] ], which is not the case among many other Christian denominations in the U.S.
Utahns, in sharp contrast to the rest of the country [ [link removed] ] (and certainly other Republican states), overwhelmingly support opportunities for foreigners to legally immigrate to the U.S. [ [link removed] ]
I’m not saying that there aren’t crazy parents in Utah. Obviously [ [link removed] ] there [ [link removed] ] are [ [link removed] ]. Nor am I saying that Utah is perfect; it is not, in a million different ways.
But places that have fostered community, respect, and policies that help children also—unsurprisingly—have stronger school systems.
To avoid burnout and turnover, teachers need much more support, both via policy and from people in their communities. And students need teachers who are supported.
If Megan’s and Brianna’s experiences are any indication—and beyond their very public OnlyFans exposure, I think they are indicative—Missouri is falling short across almost every dimension.
“Kindness” isn’t something we can make happen by policy. So what can we do?
Megan is right that the loudest voices—which are best-case annoying, and worst-case threatening or dangerous—make up the minority. Most people are fundamentally good, but it’s also hard to speak up against the craziest people for fear of incurring their wrath yourself.
I don’t fault anyone for that, by the way—especially against the backdrop of a problem that has gotten more acute since the pandemic [ [link removed] ].
There are some policy solutions here to make things better for teachers and, therefore, for students:
Reducing the burdens to becoming a teacher by opening up the field to people with associate’s degrees.
Doing more to address teacher burnout [ [link removed] ]: more mental health support, for instance. With vacancy and turnover rates as high as they are, reducing the burden to becoming a teacher helps with this too. I’m skeptical that the whole don’t-fund-stadiums-to-increase-teacher-pay gambit I mention above is realistic, but I do think that money could be spent to reduce the burdens on teachers in ways that would be productive for educators and students.
A much broader topic, but the crisis of loneliness [ [link removed] ] is driving a lot of the meanness and crazy we see today. There’s so much to be done here—I’ll write more on that topic later.
But I’ll conclude with something that isn’t policy: kindness goes a long way. I’m not asking everyone here to agree with Megan’s and Brianna’s decisions, nor to agree with what I write, nor to share my views or politics.
And there is reason to be hopeful. The overwhelming majority of Americans—93% to be precise—believe that they practice kindness [ [link removed] ]. And yet most Americans don’t see that goodness in others, believing everyone else isn’t as kind as they are. In politics and beyond, a little more compassion and belief in the collective good would go a long way.
I’ll close with a quote from a man with whom I disagree often, Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox [ [link removed] ]: “When in doubt however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy and compassion.”
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