You said 'rant' twice, not exactly polite disagreement.

The models are pretty simple - they are called supply and demand. They work for everything else in economics. Low pay for dangerous work is not so exceptional situation.

In poorer countries, there is even less pay for even more dangerous work, because education is even worse there. There's a few data points there.

And there's quite a lot of literature on the education system and teacher unions. To start off with their's Waiting For Superman (2010).