That’s horseshit. The public schoolteachers I know closely are dedicated professionals who work 70-hour weeks, agonize over their students progress and personal situations, and buy classroom materials out of their substandard salaries because their schools are broke.

The hard work, mediocre pay compared to alternative professions, and lack of autonomy and social respect they receive takes its toll though, and teacher attrition is higher than ever. Instead of “playing chicken” as you suggest, experienced teachers are retiring in droves and top potential teachers are scared away by poor career prospects, and as a profession teaching is hollowing out. Most states cut education budgets sharply after the 2008 recession and in general those budgets still haven’t recovered. I fear that in another decade or two public education will be in a very tough place, having lost a huge proportion of its human capital with no easy way to get it back. In parts of the US this is already a crisis, but the political response has been to further demonize teachers and push for more standardized testing, voucher programs, charter schools, and so on.

The problem is that teacher compensation has not scaled with educational spending over the past few decades in the US. K12 spending in the public sector has increased faster than inflation * population growth everywhere, yet median teacher pay has gone down (I think average is stable but that's because some senior teachers get really sweet packages).

Even if states cut education budgets sharply in 2008 it shouldn't have been a problem, because it's not like teachers 30 years before that were suffering under much more parsimonious spending. It's just that when they cut those budgets, someone decided to pass the pain on to the teachers instead of figuring out where the real waste was.

The atrocious thing is that the teacher's unions keep clamoring for more educational spending instead of higher teacher pay. Empirically speaking in the US, more educational spending will correlate with lower teacher pay.

There have been proposals to sharply raise pay as part of reforms that make it easier to hire and fire teachers. Teachers' unions have always been extremely opposed.

It's probably accurate to say that the blame lies more with administrators than with teachers, and more with the American public than with either of those parties. The term "hollowing out" is really just another sort of demonization. It doesn't matter though. Taken as a whole, USA public education consumes more resources per student than it did a generation ago, with steadily declining outcomes. There is no law of nature ensuring that children can only learn in such dismal conditions. "In another decade or two", students will get their educations in some other fashion. Hey, it happened to travel agents!