Pundits have had a hard time grasping what is fueling the explosive walkouts in red states. Their confusion is understandable because the transformation of teaching since Democrats and Republicans collaborated in passing reforms that were purportedly aimed at “leaving no child behind” has been ignored. Teaching has become work that offers few opportunities to satisfy the desires motivating most people to choose it as a career: a love of working with children and deep pleasure engaging with the subject matter. The deteriorated conditions of teaching — and learning — result from a global assault on teaching, teachers, and teachers’ unions few in education and even fewer not involved in resistance to it understand.

Since their beginnings, teachers’ walkouts in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky (and the fast-emerging movement in Arizona) have repeatedly been cast as primarily struggles over economic concerns. For conservative media, the walkouts are the work of greedy public employees who want better pay and benefits than other workers get from their employers. As the wave of actions grows across the country, the media has finally started to move beyond the idea the strikes are just about pensions and salaries. Some recognize it’s about respect as well as lack of funding, but mistakenly insist that teachers are angry because they are not paid enough given their credentials.

Teachers are angry, but their anger is about far more than how much they paid for their master’s degrees. They are angry because the work they do — and the way we define the nature and purpose of schooling — have been greatly changed by neoliberal reforms which took hold twenty years ago in this country, with bipartisan consensus. Standardized testing and mandates for “data-driven instruction” have made teachers’ work less rewarding and more stressful, reducing professional autonomy and curtailing opportunities for teachers and students to have meaningful personal interactions with students and colleagues. At the same time, as West Virginia strikers have pointed out, states have refused to fund teachers’ salaries, health care, and pensions adequately. These matter to teachers because they need the money, and also because wages reflect the value society puts on our labor.