What's really going on is that you're trapped in your own world view, validated by people like you, all alike in your social circles.
My advice: at least try and get out of it a little. I'm up to my gills in the high-tech culture, working at a startup in the Silicon Valley - but my wife is a teacher. I went to a Halloween party hosted by some of her co-workers - it's a tremendous difference in terms of culture, ideals, etc. It was literally like meeting people from a different country.
Metrics aren't the final answer to every question. When dealing with people (which is what education is doing), a simple, single, narrow number used to reduce everything to a handy metric can be incredibly misleading.
Whenever I head some folks saying that we need more metrics and more competition to make the education system better, I just want to tell them: "thank you, but sit down and shut up, cause you've no idea what you're talking about."
I never said that metrics were the final answer to every question either. Teaching is obviously an incredibly nuanced profession. If, as Michael Lewis showed us, we can't even measure baseball player's performance very well then oh gosh it's going to be much much harder for teachers (or programmers too!).
But that doesn't mean there aren't any differences in skill either. There are great programmers. There are not so good programmers. There are great teachers. There are bad teachers. If we deny this reality and just pay them the same amount then eventually the good ones are going to figure out they're getting screwed no matter how much they intrinsically like the gig.
1. http://www.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/commun...
If you don't believe this think about how pissed you'd be if that idiot down the hall who couldn't write good code to save his life made as much money as you do.