I’ve long argued that, at current levels of school spending, the typical teacher could and should be earning six figures right now—and that the salary for teachers in the Big Apple ought to be $200,000 a year. Moreover, I’m a longtime champion of the entrepreneurial impulse in education, having made the case in books like Educational Entrepreneurship and The Cage-Busting Teacher. I love the idea of accomplished, entrepreneurial educators making a buck.
Maybe that’s why the flack promoting Erica Jordan-Thomas’s 7-Figure Educator pursued me so diligently. In any event, I was intrigued to check out the book, published by the heavy-hitting Penguin Random House, that promises to help educators turn their experience into “income, impact, and freedom” by running an education consulting enterprise.
Does the book deliver? Well, it does offer snippets of practical wisdom on spotting opportunities, cultivating clients, marketing, pricing, and hiring. To get there, though, readers must wade through pages of braggadocio, posturing, and claims of victimhood that read like what Donald Trump might write if he became an education consultant intent on channeling Ibram X. Kendi. I should also note that some readers may find this book—penned specifically to help aspiring education consultants earn seven figures—to be oddly narrow and far removed from the more pressing challenges in our schools and colleges.
The introduction opens with Jordan-Thomas explaining she earned just $33,000 as a teacher in 2017 but now “sometimes spend[s] $33,000 in a day.” She’d left college hoping for a career in fashion, only to learn that she was “great at teaching math.” Before long, she was a school principal who did “a lot of beautiful things.” She says she made $147,000 in consulting revenue in 2020 while pursuing her education doctorate at Harvard, but the “countless microaggressions” she endured from a supervisor convinced her that she had to work for herself going forward. Happily, she says, in 2021, her consulting work generated $63,000 in the same month she defended her Harvard dissertation, prompting her to decide that she didn’t want any of those lousy $120,000-a-year corporate jobs anyway.
As with Trump, it’s hard to tell how much of this story is bombast, how much is poetic license, and how much is intended as “you-can-do-it-too” inspiration. As Jordan-Thomas puts it, a big moment for her was realizing, “Holy shit, I am the 2%. I’ve BEEN the 2%. I got accepted to Harvard at 31. I became a school principal at 28 . . . I passed the AP Calculus test with flying colors.” She relates that she was a “New Teacher of the Year finalist” in her first teaching job and “recognized as 30 Under 30 by the city.” Heck, today she’s so important that she can “choose not to own a car.” Rather, as she puts it, “Black car me, please.”
The reader is to understand this all makes Jordan-Thomas remarkable, but it’s also apparently supposed to convey that you, too, may be in the remarkable 2 percent (especially if you’re a black professional with an advanced degree). And it’s important to be in that special 2 percent, because “90 percent of business never make a milly. And, chile, we ain’t even cut these numbers by race.”
This gets us to the whole Trump-channeling-Kendi thing. 7-Figure Educator isn’t just a generic self-promotional self-help book. It also drinks deeply from the dogmas of “anti-racism” and “white supremacy.” Early on, Jordan-Thomas name-checks Kyle Tran Myhre’s poem “How to Explain White Supremacy to a White Supremacist” as she’s warning her readers that they can’t afford to be daunted by the “societal system that privileges white, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, English-speaking, Christian men.” She claims to offer a path that enables “badasses like you and me” to escape the deep waters of racist oppression. (As a reader skeptical of this litany, I wasn’t quite sure whether to read all of this as a fellow badass or an agent of oppression.)
Readers who make their way through Jordan-Thomas’s weave will encounter a lot of affirmation and some dubious advice. Seeking to reassure those who may wonder if they’ve got what it takes to be a 7-figure educator, Jordan-Thomas cautions readers to resist thinking that you “have to work yourself to the bone to get what you righteously deserve.” In fact, she says that because “we’ve normalized overworking” for “marginalized folks,” her readers will find “your 50 [percent] is good enough . . . your C is somebody else’s A+.”
Jordan-Thomas is delivering a kind of odd corollary to the Protestant work ethic. Old-school self-help books presumed that readers had to work hard to succeed. Jordan-Thomas wants her readers to know that riches await even if they coast—because they’ve long been held back by shadowy sociocultural forces. Of course, the presumption that her readers are part of “the 2%” does a lot of work here, but flattering readers is probably a safer bet than telling them they’ll have to work harder.
In lieu of hard work, Jordan-Thomas offers an alluring alternative: The key to success is believing that you can succeed. (At this point, you may have flashbacks to Rhonda Byrne’s insipid 2006 blockbuster The Secret, with its promise that the “Law of Attraction” means positive thinking will bring good things into your life.) Jordan-Thomas illustrates this point by explaining how she stopped wearing her old college t-shirts to bed because she’d worn them as a $33,000-a-year high school teacher. When she “started to quote clients a price that used to be [her] old salary,” she had to change her energy by buying “a silk robe” and spending like she thinks a big-dollar consultant should.
Okay, so what of the advice itself? Jordan-Thomas recommends taking full advantage of the tax code, especially individual retirement accounts. She encourages readers to own their intellectual property. What does she mean? Well, in case you were wondering, “Nobody can use the term Wealthy Black Educator, because I own it.” (That is kind of next level, even for a Trump or Kendi.) She directs readers to calculate their “abundance number,” which is the amount of money they need to buy their dream house and all the luxuries they want in their life.
More prosaically, Jordan-Thomas urges educators to figure out their relevant expertise in terms of content, grade levels, and professional skills. She advises them to document the problem they hope to tackle and figure out how to demonstrate they have the experience and success to tackle it. She explains how to define a service model and offer tiered levels of service.
I came away thinking there’s a useful book to be written about this topic. After all, while I tend to view much education consulting as a grift, I have known thoughtful educators who’ve retired or stepped away from teaching and sought to consult with districts on instruction, curricula, or student behavior. Many of these have struggled to get clients, define their services, or decide how to set prices.
The problem may have been that they worked too hard, didn’t buy silk robes, or failed to calculate their “abundance number,” but in reality, I think this kind of work is a lot harder than Jordan-Thomas makes it sound. Indeed, in a rapidly changing world of microschools, supersized tutoring, education savings accounts, and shrinking districts, there are a lot of educators who could use grounded advice on how to do well by doing good—and not just chase their “milly.” Instead, we’ve a book telling would-be consultants that they should work less and feel more entitled. Swell.
It’s possible Jordan-Thomas didn’t want to show all her cards. The book closes by inviting readers to continue the journey by joining (for a fee, natch) her LaunchED Consulting Academy, Wealthy Black Educator Mastermind community, or (if you cleared over half-a-million in revenue last year) Lux Mastermind group.
I’ve long been struck by the uncanny resemblance between Trump and the “anti-racists.” Both camps have enjoyed great success commodifying victimhood without worrying overmuch about the toxicity of their grift. I came away from Jordan-Thomas’s book a little impressed (but mostly depressed) that she’d found a sly way to update Kendi’s education shenanigans by focusing more on promising gilt and less on assigning guilt. Good work if you can get it.
Perhaps all one needs to know about the book can be found in the acknowledgments, where Jordan-Thomas does something that I’ve never before seen—and that only Trump himself might be tempted to imitate. She acknowledges herself. She writes, “And last but not least, I want to thank me,” and proceeds to offer four paragraphs of self-appreciation for her vision, long nights, quiet discipline, and fearlessness.
Now, that’s chutzpah.
RICK HESS is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he is the director of Education Policy Studies, and an affiliate of AEI’s James Q. Wilson Program in K–12 Education Studies.
