Would like to reiterate, I'm generally in the middle. Teaching is an extremely important job for any society to succeed. I'd be fine if we paid them 30-50k more, of our tax money.. PROVIDED that we weed out the bad ones, the lazy tenured teacher, the ones who just aren't cutting it.. like any job. If you implement politics into the classroom, you're out. Teaching sexuality to 2nd graders, you're also out.
As for teachers complaining, the way I see it: Teachers are professional/career students and have a bit of a warped sense of how things work. Teachers have spent their entire lives in the education system. They've likely never seen anything else. Compared to the rest of us who did K-12, many of which did another 4 years of college, and then went on to the working world in some regard. For the rest of us, we've seen how things operate on both ends. I think teachers don't understand that we know more about the education system then they realize.. while they know less about the "working world" than they realize.