If you want teachers to be paid more, increase the requirements to be a teacher. I’m a proponent of requiring at least n years experience in real world work, plus education in a hard science or trade.
Not everything can be looked at from a macro econ 101 supply and demand take; the real world is much more complicated than that.
ie. I'm saying that we don't have to put our hopes in the basket of hoping that economic pressures force higher wages if we make teachers less prevalent; we can simply pay them more.
The voters are the customers.
"We can't hire enough teachers" -> "Let's reduce the requirements" -> "These teachers aren't very good or qualified, there's no reason to give them a raise" -> "We can't hire enough teachers!"
Trite as it may be to say, there's an obvious value to attracting a larger amount of people to teaching, it's just hard to quantify and takes longer than most politicians' term limits to see the larger benefits.
And in communism value is defined as what will get you promoted.
And in autocracy value is loyalty to the party line
And in Neo-Nazism value is what kills the most Jews
And so on and so forth, let's not pretend that people making short sighted decisions for personal gain is limited to a single economic system it may be more visible or exactrebated by one system or another but it isn't like Lusheynkinism was pushed because it helped the students of the USSR better feed their people.
One could suggest the opposite problem, we don't have enough markets in eduction and could do more with charters and vouchers, or programs like magnet schools.
Education certainly produces community value. Moving around what column the cost and benefits should be attributed to is a kind of social gerrymandering.
It's a function of ideology and power asymmetry. A well educated populace will of course be better off.
You're not going to find out why police make twice as much as teachers with neoliberal economics. Fabulists depict things this way to remove human agency and make specific legislative and policy decisions take on the authority of natural law, as if it's a scientific absolute.
It's just a slight of hand. All these things can be changed and the sky will not fall.
Not everything follows the rules of capitalism, especially when public school teachers are paid by the government. There are giant teacher shortages across many locales in the US, so according to you we should see skyrocketing teacher pay, but that hasn't happened (pay has gone up in some locales but nowhere near the amount needed to fix teacher shortages).