Teachers are under funded in the US. In many states if your lucky teachers wages top out at the median income. And they often have little to no funding for class room decorations or much beyond very basic materials.

If we don't pay our teachers decently how can we expect them to put in the effort to do the very difficult task of raising the next generation? (And yes teachers raise their students just as much as parents do)

well, real value of salaries of teachers are plummeting. of course the same thing happens in other hard-to-scale demand-for-quality service sectors (like healthcare, but also construction work, where standards simply increased, which have a lot of associated labor, which now cost a lot more due to multiple factors, eg. less immigration, shrinking of the active population - end of the positive effects of the baby boom demographic boost, of course there's also the inescapable Baumol effect).