Also, I bet bank & oil execs believe they make the world-go-round and add a lot of value too. After all, banks & oil touches pretty much all our lives as much as computers do, right?
But that would involve hiring different people (who would probably demand higher salaries), not paying existing teachers more.
The fact is that some people are more valuable than others. Not in an existential sense, but in the sense of how much their labor is worth the market.
Senior management are a special case. I think many of them are people with exceptional ability, but it is harder to argue that their wages are "market wages" because they tend to determine their own salaries. There are many market frictions that are particular to the shareholder-manager relationship. These might potentially allow senior management to extract "economic rent" i.e. wages that are beyond the value they produce.
Well, it varies by region. There are some areas where teachers get $1,000/day compensation packages. But they don't really earn that money, they just use state violence to take it from people who earned it.
Teachers work about 186 days a year, so the magic number we have to get to is $186K.
Let's say the high school gym teacher. Late 30s, been there for 15 years. Base salary, $125K.
Health benefit package worth $18K a year. Pension benefits worth maybe $40K a year.
He also gets $7K in SS taxes paid, and other assorted taxes we'll ignore.
125+18+40+7 = $190k
(I suppose to be fair we must deduct union dues from the total. I have no idea how much union dues are.)