Teachers are expected to do their jobs for the love of it.

For years now, that has meant getting by with tattered, aged textbooks, in buildings that are falling apart, and spending their own money on toilet paper, food, hygiene items, and socks for students, even as their own wages fall and their health insurance premiums spike and pensions are carved away.

It has meant, too, that any action by teachers to improve their working conditions—which, they have stressed since the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike, are their students’ learning conditions—is immediately depicted as selfish, uncaring, improper. There is no amount of money that bankers must be happy with, but our culture tells us that workers whose job is not the production of widgets (or toxic financial products) but the care and education of others must accept any sort of misery out of their devotion to their work.

The teacher revolts rippling across the country in the past couple months have seemed out of the blue to many, yet they are only the latest and perhaps unruliest actions taken by educators in the past eight years. What those of us who follow labor closely have been tracking is an ongoing reorientation of teacher unions, away from a myth of professionalism that no longer works when roaches are running over their feet, their students’ bellies are empty, and politicians from both parties are blaming teachers for not being able to be “Superman,” and toward a renewed militancy from the rank-and-file. In doing so, they are turning the myth of the labor of love on its head.

Around the country, reformers have run for office in their unions—most famously in Chicago, with the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) taking power and precipitating the 2012 strike, but also in Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, St. Paul, New York, Massachusetts, Puerto Rico, and North Carolina, among others. Teachers have refused to administer standardized tests, built coalitions for street protests and to defeat legislation, held sick-outs, and both threatened to and actually gone on strike. They have pushed back on testing, school closings, charter schools, merit pay, insurance and pension cuts, and won reforms including social services, restorative justice initiatives, and increased funding.