It's not at all the case that teaching isn't competitive with other degree-requiring white-collar professions; depending on where you are in the CS/IT food chain, it's quite competitive with tech.
Defined-benefit pensions have become so alien to private market jobs that it's easy to overlook how valuable they are, or to forget that a lot of people are very happy to work towards a strong retirement.
IT in my area pays anyone with a pulse and basic computer skills $40k. A rookie developer from our land grant university can easily start at $60K with no experience. And that same developer can earn $100k with two years of good experience. Show me a 3rd year teacher pulling in $100k in my school district. No such unicorn exists.
The city doesn't have a DB pension, just a 403k.
Granted, the newbie teacher gets 1.5 months off in the summer, compared to 2 weeks PTO for the developer.
After 10 years, even assuming the teacher gets a Masters, the pay differential is huge.
How about you look at the number of teachers employed by OPS vs DC West? They have one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school in that district vs OPS serving an area encompassing hundreds of thousands of residents.
You were excited about 100k/year in California? Please tell me that's not the Bay area where that still leaves them unable to purchase a home anywhere near the area.
You also understand extracurriculars are a lot of extra time and work for a bit of extra pay, right? One of the biggest complaints I've heard is that teachers are being forced into running extracurriculars because they already work way too many hours for the pay and for any kind of work/life balance.
I don't know what "excited" means. By national standards, I've been extraordinarily lucky; a $100k/yr comp package wouldn't excite me right now. But I can compare what teachers make to what other white collar professionals make, and I understand how to account for the rest of the compensation package --- a defined-benefit pension in many major districts (actually, a defined-benefit pension would light me up right now) and an enormous allotment of vacation days.
Speaking only to my local school district, which breaks comp out, extracurriculars are not a "bit" of extra money; it's as much as a 20% pay boost. My real point though is simply that the base salary is where most teacher comp packages start, and there's other things that go into it.
I'm not saying "teacher" is the best deal in the whole economy, but in major metro school districts, it's not a bad deal.
And, just to be ultra clear: obviously there are a lot of school districts, especially rural districts, where this isn't the case at all.