“We’re getting support from teachers all over—Alaska, New Mexico, Oklahoma. ... These places are saying, ‘We know that if they’ve done it in West Virginia, we can do it here too,’ so I think [this strike] is going to start spurring some action in other states,” Annette Jordan, a teacher at Hedgesville High School in West Virginia’s Berkeley County, says.

The strike in West Virginia, which in 2016 ranked 48th in the nation for teacher pay, wasn’t aimed only at securing higher salaries; it also sought to raise awareness about the countless burdens teachers shoulder, and at demonstrating that kids’ learning and long-term outcomes suffer when educators are stretched too thin. “Teachers in other places in the country are looking to West Virginia teachers because they are taking a stand and asking for a livable wage and for better benefits,” Karla Hilliard, an English teacher at Spring Mills High in Berkeley County, told me last week when I visited the picket near her school. “What teaching encompasses today [anywhere in the country] is so different than what it did 20, 25 years ago; with every continued mass shooting, with the tragedy of Parkland, there’s more recognition of ... all of the different parts and facets of our job.”

As I reported last week, teachers’ demand for a 5 percent pay increase was secondary relative to their calls for better health-care benefits through the state’s beleaguered Public Employee Insurance Agency. Those demands were accompanied by concerns that the state is devaluing the teaching profession with legislation that would lower educator qualifications and eliminate seniority protections. In fact, despite an indication last Tuesday from Governor Jim Justice that the strike would end after he agreed to the 5 percent pay raise, the state’s Republican senators initially refused to sign off on the proposal, and teachers insisted that they wouldn’t back down without a stronger guarantee that their demands would be met. The walkout continued for another week.

The likelihood that the demands will be met beyond better pay remains unclear. For starters, an agreement hasn’t yet been reached on PEIA. Justice, a Republican, has promised to convene a task force as early as this week to figure out a way to resuscitate the insurance agency, whose severe funding shortfalls have resulted in rising co-pays and other health-care costs not only for public-school teachers but also for state employees across the board. Compounding the uncertainty around PEIA is teachers’ perhaps deeper dissatisfaction with how much West Virginia’s political and judicial branches value the quality of their work, and in turn the long-term prospects for the state’s young people—concerns that resonate with educators across the United States.

Joshua Weishart, an associate professor of law and policy at West Virginia University whose research centers on education law, believes that the strikes may represent a new dynamic in the fight over what right children have to an education. Historically, when courts have found that such a right existed—something that varies state by state—they have ordered schools to undertake certain equitable and adequate financing measures, Weishart said. But after nearly five decades of litigation, the judiciary was accused of overreach, and unequal funding (and desegregation) is still pervasive. The courts have since retreated from that responsibility, he continued, and judges today are more hesitant to order specific integration remedies or stipulate how much money state legislatures should appropriate for education.