Americans don`t respect their teachers
the US has always had conflicting ideas about education. Part of this is related to the frontier experience (which had a tremendous effect on creating general American cultural norms).
On the one hand there is respect for education and recognition of how necessary it is for societal improvement, and on the other hand on the frontier formal qualifications matter less than practical skills...
This is why in contexts where Europeans talk about 'qualifications' (usually meaning documents confirming completion of courses Americans traditionally like to talk about skills, practical abilities gained through direct experience.
Also, since the neoliberal Reagan revolution of 1980... public education has been the target of the crazy rightwing (who think education should be privatized as much as possible) and the tool by which the crazy leftwing wants to fundamentally change society... both approaches are catastrophic for education and have resulted in the ever lowering opinion of education and educaters...
Crime and racial discriminbation are not really factors here beyond the uncomfortable fact that not all sectors of American society respect education which causes increasing racial achievement gaps (blacks largely gave up on education in the 1990s, hispanics have never been convinced about its importance and Asians, if such a thing is possible, have too much respect for education).