When you underpay teachers, people who hate teaching, and hate being teachers, will become teachers because all the people that had better options did something else.
And then you will have people who absolutely love teaching, and are willing to live in poverty to do so, speckled around that cess pool of mediocrity. It reminds me of high school actually.
This was far more of an option in the 1980s and earlier; a CEO being compensated 20-30x a line employee was pretty standard around then; now it's closer to 250-300x. I think there's more optionality than we may assume, we've just left the structural incentives that drive that difference in place.
Absolutely dumb take. There are plenty of very bright and talented people that would have made excellent teachers but chose different career paths because - surprise surprise - the pay is better.