Yes, teachers are among the most important contributors to a society, and they should be very well paid for it. What the neocon (or as it's called in Latin America the neoliberal) movement does is this: it plays on the envy of many other people who earn less than teachers and uses that to give the impression that teachers are being coddled and given all kinds of unfair benefits. This is just more "divide and conquer" strategy by which the rich divide various groups in the middle and lower classes against each other and walk off with the gains for themselves. Similarly, they divide races against each other, religions against each other, genders against each other, age groups against each other, country people against urban people, residents against immigrants, gays against straights, and people of faith against atheists and agnostics.

The more divided the public gets, the stronger is the dominant position of the elite that rules over them, and the elite couldn't care less whether gays marry, babies get aborted or any of the other stuff they use to get people upset with each other. The more they can separate the country into many irreconcilable points of view, the better they like it. It keeps the attention of people off what they are really doing.

This was just as true back in the days of Tammany Hall. The same "divide and conquer" principles applied then, as now, but the geographical reach wasn't as great as it is now. It IS the very essence of multi-party political gamesmanship. If a public is not that divided yet, the parties MUST soon find a way to divide it...and they always do.