The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

I think they are paid about right, given the business model. If we had a private run education system, we would see much higher salaries (and attract much smarter people to the career).

Schools in poor neighbourhoods needs more money if we want the kids to get an education of similar quality.

The reason being that running a school with students from poor households to a standard that gives the same education as students from rich households costs a lot more money. Some examples (based on my experience in the UK) of the extra costs schools have or may have with lower income families (some of which are covered with extra grants from the local council in the case of the UK, some of which they have to cover from discretionary funds):

* School breakfast or dinners. This is perhaps one of the most vital ones. If you charge for meals in the school, either you need to provide vouchers or some other means to make it accessible to poorer families, or their kids fall behind as a result of some of them not eating through the day. If you don't serve meals in school, including breakfast, you can assume that kids from poor families will perform substantially worse on average. My sons school to their credit chose to prioritize free meals to all students to avoid having to deal with visibly separate treatment of the kids.

* School trips. My sons school asks for a specific "donation" instead of demanding payment whenever possible, again to avoid having to means test and deal with excluding kids from trips because of parents who can't or won't prioritise the cost of the trips. They'll make it very clear that too few paying will lead to cancelled trips, but so far that has never happened, but they do have to regularly dip into discretionary funds to cover shortfalls.

* Families with disabled or special needs kids or disabled carers are more likely to either be low income (as a result of parents with disabilities that reduce their earnings potential) or have stretched finances (as a result of additional costs of care), and so more likely to live in poorer neighbourhoods. Same for families where the parents have all kinds of problems that affect the kids, such as alcohol or dug addiction etc.. This tends to result in substantially higher costs for all kinds of assistance programs for schools in poorer areas.

Even if you cover all of the extra costs, the kids in these families are still at a severe disadvantage on average due to all kinds of other factors (less likely to have role models with high education or that pushes them towards higher education, for example).

Giving kids actual equal education (instead of just trying to equalise access to same quality education) would require massive extra funding to poor neighbourhoods.

Commonly cited are campaign finance and lobbying and polarisation but those are merely the symptoms of the deeper problem which is the US constitution. A messy compromise, the US constitution effectively gives veto to tiny states (Senate seating). Gerrymandering at the state level ensures that safe seats, and worse, incumbents who have to defend themselves from the ideological 'purists' of their own party. Not a recipe for pragmatic government, vide Brownback, Kansas.

I still look forward to the spectacle of the 2016 general but even if Warren were to be the president (a far off prospect, even though she is what the US needs), little real and effective change would come about because she'd be stymied at ever corner. In view of the fundamental alignment of forces political and economic (increasing inequality in both), we can expect a return to a Victorian economy.