Kyle Cohen, a fourth-grade teacher in Cleveland, Ohio, posted a TikTok video about how much he made during his first year of teaching. The number got people’s attention.
“In my first year of teaching, I taught at a charter school here in Cleveland, Ohio, and I made $31,000 as a fourth-grade teacher with a class of 16 students with a wide range of special needs, and I had my college degree and experience,” Cohen, 26, said in a clip that pulled in more than a million views.
The comments split the way these things always do. Some people were sympathetic. Others rolled out the greatest hits of teacher-pay dismissal. One of the most common claims: teachers “only” work eight to nine months a year, so what are they complaining about?
Cohen decided to answer that claim with a calculator.
In a follow-up video that has been viewed more than 4.6 million times, he broke down his actual hours. “I work from about 7 to 5, which is roughly 10 hours a day. Multiply that by five, because there are five days in a week—that is 50 hours,” he said. Multiply that by four weeks, and you get about 200 hours a month.
Then he added the stuff that doesn’t fit into the school day: “I also am going to add 10 additional hours per week because, if I look at my calendar, I have a lot of meetings and events and things like that as a fourth-grade teacher that I’m required to attend.”
He gave a live example: It was 6 p.m. while he was filming, and he had parent conferences running until 8, with more conferences scheduled for the following Monday and Wednesday.
That brings him to roughly 240 hours a month, and he was clear that he considers that a conservative estimate once you factor in lesson planning, grading, and communication with families, coworkers, and administrators.
Then he did the final math. Even granting the “only nine months a year” framing, 240 hours times nine months is 2,160 hours. Take his $31,000 first-year salary, divide it by 2,160 hours, and you get about $14 an hour.
Fourteen dollars an hour, with a college degree, teaching kids with significant special needs.
Cohen’s experience isn’t a fluke. A 2025 report from the National Education Association found that starting teacher salaries nationwide still fall well below the average earnings of other jobs requiring a college degree. Research from the Economic Policy Institute found that teachers earn about 27% less, on average, than comparably educated workers, a gap that has widened significantly over the past few decades.
Cohen was careful to head off the “if you don’t like it, quit” responses.
“I’m not ungrateful because I absolutely love what I do, and I would not trade being an educator for anything,” he said. “But what I am hoping we have conversations about is the fact that teachers who are ‘only working for eight to nine months of the year’ are being paid inappropriately for the amount of work that they are doing.”
Speaking to BuzzFeed, he connected it to something bigger than his own paycheck: “Students are experiencing more challenges than ever before as a result of the pandemic. If we don’t address these issues, it’s the students, our future leaders, who are going to face the consequences.”
Cohen, who spent two years with Teach For America before moving to his current district, said the videos are meant to start real conversations rather than simply venting. The “nine months off” argument also conveniently ignores that teachers generally aren’t paid during the summer. Many take second jobs, and plenty spend chunks of that “time off” in unpaid training, preparing classrooms, or planning the year ahead.
The $14-an-hour figure is the kind of thing that’s hard to argue with once it’s laid out, which is probably why the video traveled as far as it did. You can debate a lot about education. The arithmetic is just the arithmetic.
