Because teacher salaries, like the salaries of people here, should be determined by the market not by warm and fuzzy feelings.

Market solves everything! Like that train derailment in Ohio! Certainly no need for a collective organization to step in to oversee clean up or preventative measures in the future.

Okay then. What is the market value of a well-educated society?

The market is too cruel to be left to take care of America's children.

Why? the market has huge flaws. For example, most money is held by a very small amount of people. Should the market solve for them or for the vast number of people?

The market has externalities, which is a huge flaw in pricing things. This is a known studied problem with markets.

Third, it's one of many optimization processes. If you understand machine learning, you understand that there are different models, different solution spaces, and optimizations (learning) on them requires different techniques. Why should we rely on a highly flawed optimization process like the market to decide these important things in society?

Democratic and consensus building is another way to come to these complex decisions without relying on 'spot trade' and pricing restrictions that the market has.

The market has plenty of evidence that better education leads to significant economic benefit[0]. Specifically, high quality education, which requires highly trained teachers, leads to higher economic growth (0.63 percentage points per half of a standard deviation of test scores, normalized against other factors)

0: https://www.educationnext.org/education-and-economic-growth/

If it was easy enough to create better education by simply paying teachers more, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Surprisingly, there’s evidence that paying teachers more does lead to better teachers. It makes the jobs more competitive, causing an increase in the qualifications and expertise needed to land a job.