I agree with most of what you wrote minus the first paragraph. But it doesn't show that individual teachers add more value (in an economic sense) than investment bankers.
Yup, I'm not arguing that the facts prove that you are wrong. I am point out that you are making an assertion which is not supported by evidence.
I'd also like to add that I don't think a teacher's influence on any one student is as huge as you make it out to be*, at least for any individual student. I had dozens of teachers, most of whom were competent (the incompetent ones usually taught PE), a lot of whom were good, and a few who were really good. I think some great teachers must exist in public education, but most of them have likely found better paying and more stimulating jobs elsewhere. Plus, if I may add, administration has been working hard over the years to measure teacher performance in a variety of ways and provide some pay-for-performance compensation accordingly.
I had nearly uniformly mediocre teachers with a few stand out terrible ones. I still turned out okay which I attribute to a stay a home mother, two parents who both were very invested in and devoted a lot of time to my intellectual, ethical, and human development, with a decent side helping of good genes.
The good teachers aren't as important for people like me (and presumably you?), but for kids without the same level of support and investment at home, a few good teachers in the right years can certainly make the difference between a person working a decent job and paying taxes and a person who is a net drain on society their whole life.
But since above I'm pointing out that making assertions not backed by evidence (aside from potentially some circular economic reasoning), here is some evidence to back up my own statement: replacing a terrible teacher (bottom 5%) with a great teacher (top 5%) can increase the lifetime earnings of a single classroom by about $1.4M.* A standout teacher might over a lifetime, create $40-60M in value added for their students.
The big problem is that in order to reliably identify the best teachers, you need to wait and see how their students do over decades, at which point it's a bit too late to pay them more.** Identifying and eliminating the worst teachers is somewhat easier statistically, but unfortunately this is where unions step in and make it almost impossible to remove teachers simply for being bad at their jobs.
*Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43495328?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
**The same problem occurs when breeding dairy cattle. How do you tell a bull whose daughters will be good at producing milk from a bull whose daughters will be poor at producing milk. Wait a generation and see. Of course human generations is somewhat longer than those of cattle.
Fuuuuuuck yes.
As a little undiagnosed nearsighted and dyslexic girl, if it hadn't been for an astute teacher early on figuring out that I wasn't dumb as a post, I would probably have never excelled, and would have finished school at 16, which is common where I'm from.
So yeah, a grade 2 teacher completely changed the course of my life, and 11 years of university later, I can firmly say that many teachers since have been instrumental.
Also, the whole notion that people are as valuable as their incomes is patently nonsensical and I can't even believe we're debating it.
By that metric drug lords and the Olsen twins are practically saints, and the criminally underpaid social workers I've volunteered with who try to help sexually assaulted children are just losers that no one thinks do anything of value, otherwise they'd be paid more!
It's so ridiculous, I almost regret acknowledging it as a concept because to continue the debate makes my skin crawl. Big profit comes from scale, literally everyone in business knows that. Sadly, a lot of the most valuable tasks aren't scalable, like teaching, nursing, social work, etc.
I'm grateful every day for the people who choose to do valuable, non-scalable work over earning dollars because otherwise everyone's kids would be sick and stupid.
But hey! Those Kardashians sure are entertaining! The value!! It's amazing!
Screw those MSF doctors working for less than minimum wage, those idiots just don't understand the value of profitable work.
Fuuuuuucking hell.