> software developers
Those are very different jobs, with very different skill sets.
I'm not sure how much you can infer about one from the other.
You can certainly infer how much a largely capitalist society values each skill set at this point in time. The GP is claiming that "suburban Chicago teachers make as much as Chicago-area software developers do", presumably implying that capitalist society in the suburban Chicago area values the labor of teachers and software developers equally.
This is a claim that I want to understand better, since I don't think it reflects the statistical reality. Typically, such claims cherry-pick tenured teachers with 15+ years of experience, and compare their wage with the average software developer wage, which is itself a very unclear number – for example, a lot of developers go on to be managers in 15+ years whereas teachers largely remain teachers.
Glad to be wrong on this though, and might consider moving to an egalitarian society like suburban Chicago.
In my state, older teachers get these, but newer teachers including some of my friends have been cut out of them and need to invest in a 401k like other job. Their wages are also much lower, around 35k/year to start with, peanuts when you consider that they take work home every night and weekend (correcting homework and lesson planning are mostly done on their own time).