Hey, if a fellow wants to act as a straw man, who are we to disagree?
My wife just left the classroom after 13 years of teaching 9th & 10th graders. She worked the pay scale hard, maxing out units and getting a Master's etc. Summer school, leadership programs, curriculum development, etc etc. She was cool with all that, and kept pace with my private sector earnings for the most part. Kids were kids - some good, some so rotten she'd come home and cry - some great that actually appreciated what she did for them. We subsidized her classroom out of our own pockets to the tune of a couple hundred bucks a year.
All that, and yet the reason she left was because of the adversarial relationship between teachers and administration. Fault falls on both sides. The teachers were suspicious of anything handed down to them by principals - administrators were insufficiently supportive of their staff (not dealing with problem kids, letting harrassment get out of hand, not backing the teachers when baseless complaints were made against them), and the secretarial staff were apparently drunk with power over who got copies made, or replacement keys, or attention from maintenance. All that at a fairly highly-ranked school. Stacey wanted the school to act as a team to provide education to the kids. What she got was factional infighting where the kids were peripheral "problems" to be handled.
Or at least, it was like that often enough for her to want to get out. She just started a new job in a different county teaching new teachers how to work in teams for developing curriculum.