What Factors Really Set Apart Our Educational Differences?

So yesterday when our class' counselor came in to talk about our futures and plans in life, I heard an interesting statement made by her. It went more or less along the lines of:

"Those who want to be teachers don't go to good colleges because they don't want to spend that much money if they just wanted to be a teacher."

I found that to be true for most cases in American schools (of course with exceptions). Our school has a lot of teachers from lesser state schools like Portland State or Central Washington and schools like that. They are also usually teachers in their late 30s to 40s who teaches (first) just for the sake of getting paid rather than teaching kids. That's why there have been teacher strikes so big to the point that school gets cancelled and teachers from all over the state rally at the state capital. What kind of example does that show? Are they encouraging us to have a strike on eating lunch so that they can increase our lunch time? Because that's the example that teachers here show.

Furthermore, there are teachers (well respected teachers) who retire (even though they still had a good decade or so of teaching in them) just to come back and be a substitute teacher because they get better pay in most cases. This is a smart plan to have a better work-pay ratio, but who does it benefit? This shows how a lot of teachers here basically put their paycheck before their students.

This is where one of the main respects to the teachers in Shanghai (there are again a few exceptions). The teachers in Shanghai have not complained nearly as much about their paycheck than the ones in America have. There are more than plenty of teachers who have had a very good college education coming from top schools including Yale, Cornell, Northwestern, and the UCs. A lot of them come right after undergrad at the age of 22.