You can absolutely hire a programmer for $70k if you're willing to significantly relax your standards. On the other hand, you probably wouldn't be able to hire enough teachers at existing teacher salaries if you significantly raised your standards for what counts as "qualified".
Tech companies have to use a relatively high bar, because bad developers will drive them out of business, but such market forces don't apply to schools. Unless you want to completely privatize education (which has its own set of issues) we have to use the political process to drive schools to raise their both their salaries and hiring standards.
Most work in Tech companies even the top FAANG ones these days is crud work.
These people can only afford to pay well, because they make their money through advertising scale. Companies which depend on paying users, can't afford to pay that kind of salaries, nor waste their time interviewing people on rounds and rounds for proxy skills which have nothing to do with the job on hand.
In short only VC companies without profit pressure or web advertising companies pay well. Others don't have this luxury.
Anecdata: Schools that won't hire more qualified candidates (e.g. graduate degrees complete) instead preferring more green applicants because the latter are contractually cheaper.
That is, in some instances schools could hire better for the same money but cannot because of labor contracts.
For example if you didn't really care the much about building a software project, but had to do it, you could probably find some 'developers' who would do the work for the same salary that teachers work at.
I'm not sure how the outcome would compare to that of public schools.
I think the challenge is just measuring and comparing education. If we could, reliably, then we’d likely pay tons more for teachers.
I do want to point out that these two points aren't actually related. Just because the US pays more for lesser outcomes does not mean that teacher pay is anti-correlated or uncorrelated to outcome.
I do think it’s fair, unless I see data that shows it, that pay is not correlated to outcome.
I think there are multiple factors for outcomes and I think further research will help figure this out. But for now, I think it’s false to say that we will get better outcomes if we increase pay. I can think of a few outcomes, but have no data, that would result in higher pay with worse outcomes (eg, higher pay crowds out more passionate but less credentialed teachers who aren’t in it for the money).
Add to this, demand for teachers is directly tied to population growth rates. If more teachers are being produced compared to growth of class rooms the pay falls further.
Society doesn't "decide". It's a decided by the labor market. Nobody wants to pay programmers six figures.
It's a myth that we think teachers are less important than programmers because they make less on average. There is just a larger supply of qualified teachers willing to work at lower prices.
Wait until you find out how little art history masters holders make. Amount of training is irrelevant to how much money you get.