Comment by OrsonSmelles

Surely you could have made essentially the same point without regurgitating one of the most perniciously derogatory lines ever concocted to describe teaching?

All of the market forces you describe are real, but they are partly sustained by cultural templates that make teaching a low-status job among those with technical qualifications and lead to an assumption that every teacher is either (a) internally motivated and doesn't "need" competitive compensation or (b) a washout from a more prestigious track and doesn't "deserve" competitive compensation. This affects administrators, policymakers, voters, and teachers themselves, giving us the status quo where teachers are paid and treated like shit (ask a K-12 educator about the most psychotic parent they met this year and whether admin had their back) so that even many people who love teaching gradually evaporate out of the field if they can.

I suppose I'm not even arguing that the material result is much different than you describe it, just that it's lazy, amoral thinking to frame it as a market quirk or the immutable nature of teaching rather than a slow-motion sociocultural trainwreck over which we can exercise some iota of agency. (One such iota might be to simply not say "those who can..." in earnest ever again.)