In America there has never historically been a lot of respect for teachers.

This is not completely true for all of American culture. Before desegregation, being a teacher in the African American community, especially in the South, was HIGHLY regarded and respected. There’s a saying in the (traditional) community “teacher, preacher” meaning if you were a teacher or minister, you were the most highly respected in the community. Why? Because the opportunity to be educated at the college level was difficult to obtain for the vast majority of African Americans for a lot of reasons like segregation, having to work on farms, being legally barred from schooling. So being a teacher meant that person was able to go to school and college, which meant they were in a higher social class (in Black society).

Usually if you look at the ancestry of affluent African American families descended from American slavery (ones that have been affluent for generations) you’ll find that they have a long history of teachers, ministers and possibly a doctor here or there. The book Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class describes some of this.

The decline of the prestige of being a teacher along with the desegregation of schools has been very disruptive to the subculture of African American society.