An interesting topic, and I would like to contribute my opinion.
This is my sixth year as an educator in an urban middle school in a very poor neighborhood in Las Vegas. Sixty percent of the students at the school are hispanic. Sixty percent of the students receive either a free or reduced lunch, but nearly every student has a nicer cell phone than me. I teach seventh grade, but a majority of my students are reading at a 3rd-4th grade level. I don't even want to mention the 30 or so students with learning disabilities that I have in class that come with the extra headache of IEPs.
I only give textbooks out to the students who request them because I know that most of the students cannot read the text on their own. I hear from my colleagues that teach math that the students still count on their fingers for basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. 90% of the students cannot name one branch of American government, but they can name at least one judge on American Idol. If it isn't a video game or on a reality tv show the students probably have never heard of it.
I don't complain about my pay, but of course I would like more. You could pay me 10 times what I get now and I would not be able to produce better results than I have the past few years. I get paid for 7 hours of work a day for about 180-181 days a year. It comes out to about a $1 per hour per student. Could you find a babysitter for that rate?