Eh, I’ve had some really great teachers but I’ve had just as many shitty and even straight-up abusive teachers, plus plenty of in-between “meh” ones. A lot of school districts are really desperate for staff, especially in rural areas, the result being they’ll hire anyone with a pulse if they have the credentials, and won’t tend to let them go until they really do something bad.

Hell, even when they don’t have the credentials I can personally think of several cases where the school district pulled some strings to let an unqualified person teach under the “watch” of an actually qualified teacher, themselves of course busy teaching in the next town.

So coming back again, with teaching wages this low, a teacher may be doing the job selflessly out of the goodness of their heart, but at the same time there are too many people only in the job for the authority (because authority over kids is all they could scrounge up).

So I totally support raising teacher wages, not because they all deserve it but because it might attract some actual professionals.