After all, what kind of world is it where a basketball player can make $10 million a year while a teacher only makes $30,000 a year? That, on the surface, strikes many people as a reasonable question.

But the problem with that is that you end up having to make a value judgment on which jobs are more worthy than others.  Basketball players make a lot of money because professional basketball, as an industry, generates a great deal of money for the owners of basketball teams. Those owners make their money largely based on how good their team is. Therefore, they must compete against one another for the best players in the world, the price for the world's best players drives the price up.

In contrast, teachers, a worthy profession, are much more common. And because the government runs schools via tax dollars, there is no "profit" in the education "business". Therefore, it's a simple supply demand equation. The number of teachers or potential teachers is very high and therefore their salaries reflect that.  Those who wish teachers to be paid more should demand that the government get out of the education "business" and let private industry run a highly regulated education industry. There, schools would compete against one another to get the best scores in various areas. That in turn would create competition for getting the best teachers.

Now before someone emails me telling me of the dangers of making education a private enterprise, my point isn't that we would be better off as a society, only that teacher, or at least good teachers, would very likely get paid more than they do at present. Any goal is going to have negative side effects.

I personally don't have a problem with the public school system. It works adequately. But then again, I don't have a problem with teachers not being paid as much as professional basketball players.