Teachers have had enough. Since March, schools in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona Colorado and North Carolina have either been shut down or turned into sites of resistance. Poor pay, increased health care costs, and diminished pension plans are certainly core issues, but the tipping point may be that teachers are seeing their own experience be devalued by policymakers and other officials with little experience in the education field, and it’s not improving the education of their students. In other words, teachers are balking at the erosion of their status as professionals.

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Teachers have had enough. Since March, schools in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina have either been shut down or turned into sites of resistance. In Kansas, teachers are threatening to strike because their legislature continues to fund schools at a level the state Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional. One Brookings Institute analysis projected that teacher actions could spread to another 11 states.

Poor pay, increased health care costs, and diminished pension plans are certainly core issues — teachers in Oklahoma haven’t received a pay boost in a decade. But these problems alone aren’t driving the protests. In every state where teachers have recently gone on strike, demands for increase school funding have been made. Disinvestment in schools has also been central to teacher strikes that have occurred since 2011, in Jersey City, Philadelphia, Chicago (twice), Seattle, Portland and Wisconsin.

The teachers’ position is that, under the cover of a commitment to improving schools, school district and local governments have instead closed neighborhood public schools, opened charter schools, instituted standard curriculums, mandated poorly thought out high-stakes standardized testing, attacked teacher tenure, instituted merit pay instead of annual salary increments, restricted collective bargaining rights, and subjected teachers to questionable and punitive evaluation schemes. The result of years of “reform” has been modest improvement but little progress in national student performance.

This, it seems, is the tipping point and brings me to what I believe is at the heart of what is really happening here: Teachers are seeing their own experience be devalued by policymakers and other officials with little experience in the education field, and it’s not improving the education of their students. In other words, and as others have noted, teachers are balking at the erosion of their status as professionals. In fact, I would submit that it’s precisely because of their sense of professionalism that teachers are driven to an agonizing decision to withhold their labor. Teachers perceive themselves and their students being treated as fungible costs of production, cogs in a bureaucratic machine. To them, nothing less than the education profession is at risk.

What is professionalism exactly?

While there are varying definitions and disagreements among sociologists, a set of criteria put forth by Mirko Noordegraaf, a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, is helpful. The starting point, he says, is “typically an emphasis on ‘good work’ and the social mechanisms for accomplishing this.” He further stresses that a “professional does not merely work; he/she has to be educated and trained, (socialized) as member of an occupational domain, supervised by his/her peers and held accountable.” Noordegraaf then acknowledges an element to professionalism that serves as the locus of historical and contemporary struggle for teachers: “professionals succeed in realizing so-called professional control: they control themselves.” Professionalism demands the capacity to internally organize and protect “professional practices from external influences.”

The work of teachers also substantially accords with renown public administration expert Frederick Mosher’s definition of a profession:

“[…] a more or less specialized and purposeful field of human activity which require some specialized education or training (though it may be acquired on the job), which offers a career of life work, and enjoys a relatively high status. It normally aspires to social, not selfish, purpose. Usually, but not always, it requires a degree or certification, and credential of some kind. Often its members join in a professional organization, local, state, or national, which enunciates standards and ethics of professional performance sometimes with the powers of enforcement.”

This definition is echoed by a 2013 national survey of 20,000 conducted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It found that 6 out of 10 teachers went directly into teaching after earning their undergraduate or graduate degree. They taught because they wanted to provide a valuable public service. Eighty-five percent of teachers said they went into the profession because they wanted “to make a difference in children’s’ lives,” beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. The survey reported that 99% of teachers “strongly agreed or agreed” with the statement that “teaching is more than academics; it is also about reinforcing good citizenship, resilience and social skills.”

Education, then, is not usually an incremental step to a better way to make a living life or a waystation to another career. Teaching, like pastoring, is often a “calling.” So it stands to reason that teachers themselves are the appropriate people to define the best “educational practices, entrance routes, credentialing requirements, continuing training options, codes of conduct, and methods of enforcement.”

Except today, they’re not. A form of the classical structural-functionalist theory of professionalism prevails. This sociological view, first formulated by Talcott Parsons, holds that a profession is a static thing with attributes that apply without exception. Here, professionalism is a skill that can be practiced and learned over time, by anyone, with success and failure measured based on an agreed-upon objective standard. The recent history of the teaching profession helps explain why this version has come to dominate.

When teaching became “automated”

In 1983, President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, a much debated and often mischaracterized call-to-arms. The authors sent a clear distress signal: “We report to the American people that… the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” After A Nation at Risk was widely popularized, it became conventional wisdom that education was, in fact, in crisis. Task forces and commissions claimed to have evidence of failing students, obstructionist teacher unions, and poorly performing teachers. The constant saturation of negative school headlines took its toll: The public’s approval rating of public schools fell from 58% in 1973 to 29% in 2012.

It was then that a belief in external controls began influencing the industry. In this view, an independent and external body best regulates teachers, in which teachers are part of an accountable and efficient production system. Schools needed to function more like businesses and successfully compete for students. To this end, teachers’ work has subsequently been the subject of major restructuring over the past three decades. Teachers are increasingly directed to follow a mandated curriculum, abide by grade level or school district units of study, and follow predetermined lesson plans. In addition, test-based accountability has colonized teaching techniques and objectives, teacher performance evaluations are yoked to student test scores, and teacher training programs are de-emphasized. Teachers also have little influence over professional development content, school-wide organization, or school budget decisions.

Under these command and control conditions, teaching looks more like automation then imagination. As University of British Columbia professor Wendy Poole noted, “teachers’ work, once conceived as requiring high discretion and autonomy, is increasingly reduced to technical-rational conceptions of teaching and teachers are increasingly viewed as technicians.” Creativity is squeezed out for conformity and teacher autonomy suppressed; room for going “rogue” is the exception. Unless everyone reads Shakespeare, no one does. I suspect that overhauling the work of teachers and undermining their professional status has also been aided by society’s tendency to undervalue “women’s work” (more than 75% of teachers in the U.S. are women).

This all occurs in an environment where teachers need higher skills — many are required to have advanced degrees and numerous certifications — and are asked to do more with less. In addition to being under pressure to meet or exceed standardized performance indicators, teachers suffer from an intensification of work. They work 60-plus hour work weeks, are in near-constant communication with parents, and must collect copious amounts of student data, among many other administrative and technological tasks. Stagnant job growth in the industry has also led to increased class sizes. In other words, teachers are asked to work harder and longer with a growing number of students while also being told to adhere to an education plan they have little control over.

The impact has been punishing. In one study, 93% of teachers reported high stress levels, while only 7% self identified as “well-adjusted.” A survey by the American Federation of Teachers and the Badass Teachers Association reported that educators find work to be stressful 61% of the time and nearly a quarter of respondents said work was “always” stressful. The survey notes for comparison purposes, “workers in the general population report that work is stressful 30% of the time.”

And yet, for decades, teachers have endured. Why? In our book on the 2012 Chicago teacher strike, my colleague and I note, “Teacher unions have largely made compromises with the prevailing wisdom. They haven’t done so without expressed reservation or opposition, but in the face of an irrational and bipartisan demonization of schoolteachers and their unions, some believed tactical retreat seemed prudent.” And surveys of teachers suggest that many are interested in new school concepts that invite entrepreneurial thinking and experimentation.

For most teachers, small acts of resistance while accommodating new bureaucratic boundaries has been possible, but only when a sense of professional control and a measure of satisfaction could still be derived from the work. In 2013, even as 82% of teachers found the ever-shifting nature of education reform to be the most significant challenge they face, many still maintained a love of the work and the profession. They still do — but their control has been eroded to almost nothing. That’s why they’re striking.

Another theory of professionalism

Yes, teachers need to be paid more and have better health benefits. But policymakers need to understand the kind of professionalism teachers are demanding, too.

The professionalism practiced by teachers recognizes and prioritizes contextuality. This echoes a theory by LSU School of Library & Information Science professor Suzanne Stauffer who puts forth that there is nothing “discrete, universal, or enduring” about professions because they’re constantly changing in relationship to the market and the state. Because of this, professionalism is not merely a collection of traits or an individual competency that can be mastered — it can’t be, because these traits and expertise are constantly changing depending on context. In other words, teachers recognize that the school environment and children’s needs dictate what professionalism requires at a given moment in time.

This means that a teacher’s classroom experiences, and the teacher-student relationship, is what ultimately creates the boundaries for what it means to be a professional. This does not rely on consultant-developed tests to measure student competency, but instead uses teacher-constructed assessments oriented to the subject matters they teach. Instead of standardized curriculum and lesson plans, teachers have the freedom to determine the best course to help each child acquire the necessary learning standards. The time needed to cover subject content corresponds to each learner’s capacity and not an arbitrary schedule demanding that every kid masters everything at the same moment. A contextualized professionalism would have teachers teach children, not a curriculum.

What’s at stake

The aspirations of today’s educators are not new. In 1987, the President of the National Educators Association Mary Hatwood Futrell hopefully wrote that, “We may at last be on the brink of realizing the centuries-old dream of American teachers: professional status, professional compensation… professional autonomy.”

We’re clearly not there yet. But with today’s protests, public school teachers are pushing back harder than ever against rigid definitions of professionalism. Instead, they are offering their own student-centered approach, combining training, context, flexibility, and a lifelong commitment to children and society. But the failure of elected officials and school boards to recognize a teacher-constructed professionalism is an invitation to endless conflict. This battle has implications for who sets educational policy and gets to decide the future of public education. The outcome of that struggle will assuredly determine the quality of the nation’s schools and, subsequently, the strength of our country’s democracy.

In the meantime, if the education profession continues to degrade, teachers will do what they know best and what their professional responsibility demands. Whether they’re in the classroom or picketing, they will protect their children. So while teachers have been forced to listen to the corporate-styled version of professionalism for decades, they’re making their voices heard on the streets. Why? Because the non-educators outside of the school have stopped (or never really started) listening to the version cherished by teachers.