A few weeks ago, after skimming through the formatting of my dissertation one last time, I said a little prayer. The last call was, “God, I leave it in your hands now.”

Before I said those words, I had done everything possible to ensure my success. I selected committee members who would push me to think deeply about my work without the dismissal of my personhood. I wrote, rewrote, and accepted/rejected changes from my advisor. I talked to multiple data analysts. I did 27 interviews, including four in a day and another six over a week. I collected over 100 survey responses from across the city. I got through the Institutional Review Board process, luckily without many hiccups. I defended my dissertation proposal, different than the actual dissertation defense. I wrote that proposal over six weeks. I completed my coursework in two and a half years. I accepted the challenge of taking on sociology and education.

I left teaching to become a full-time student again. And kept all the other titles, too.

At the heart of the study were the lived experiences and embodied histories of New York City public school teachers. On a few occasions, I’ve hinted at the core of my study (and have even before I started this doctoral work), but let me be clear: many of the ways people think about “professionalism” are inadequate and elitist. Attending to the fidelity and integrity of one’s work often gets conflated with subjective, narrow forms of how teachers work. This seems especially true for teachers in schools that are underresourced and over-scrutinized since the No Child Left Behind Act.

But to get that understanding, you would have had to deeply and intentionally listen to teachers. More power to you if you’ve taught in the same era alongside them.

Really, my doctoral study started after my fourth year of teaching, around when I thought I might make a career out of this work. With all the precarity I felt about my situation, that makes sense. The school constantly felt like it was on the verge of shutting down. The school went through five principal changes in five years at that point. I had my worst teaching year and best teaching year in consecutive years. The nature of teaching was rapidly changing from “testing is one tool for assessing student knowledge” to “standardized testing is teaching, full stop”

The conversations I was having with teachers across the city and the country told me I was onto something.

Around year six, I began inquiring about doctoral studies because I didn’t know enough about how New York got here. People whose work I admired over the years seemed to have clearer answers and sharper responses from multiple angles about the work we needed to do. I spent my tiny windows of free time reading voraciously and writing in hopes I’d get some answers. (I probably annoyed a few initially until they saw my work, but it’s all love).

So, it took me four years to finish my doctoral studies. But really, it’s been more than a decade working intently on these issues.

I didn’t think it was just me. As I read the extant body of research on professionalism, the voices I heard from outside of the research community kept saying something different. Those voices weren’t making it into publication, either. How can society re-envision this idea of professionalism to think more broadly about the work teachers do? The things I heard over the last year alone would make anyone reconsider whether teaching is viable labor for anyone.

But society has a hard time holding two important ideas. First, teachers can be critiqued and held to a high standard. Second, teachers hold a higher standard for themselves than society does for supporting them.

While this feels true for the teaching profession overall, this mattered even more for racially marginalized teachers. People can’t account for the generative ways that curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment get interpolated, sometimes in an instant, in service of students. They can’t imagine how teachers of color find themselves at the brunt end of adverse interpersonal relationships among peers, administrators, and school policies. Even among people who should know better. Race and culture matter not as a checkbox, but as a way of organizing their work for students.

I, as the researcher, had to sit there, listen without interruption, and process and analyze this deluge of stories into a clarion call for transformational change. That is different.

As New York City teachers get back to work for the 2024-25 school year again tomorrow (yes, we’re usually the last ones), it’s important to keep a few things in mind. Some pundits have made “solutions” to teaching that were never really solutions at all. Splitting off a teacher’s job into separate parts doesn’t help teachers see the continuum of their work. Using AI to write lessons and tests doesn’t account for the hours before and after the school day preparing ways to help children think for themselves. Lowering class sizes by one or two students without giving teachers more than one preparation period (prep) and lunch (if that!) is a tiny bandage from a thousand papercuts. Pay raises below the rate of inflation are no pay raises at all. Hiring administrators who don’t have a clear, humane vision for their schools exacerbates the problems, too.

But I had to step away from teaching work to learn that. I hope my hands can help craft a profession deserving of the people working it. Our students deserve no less.

part II, coming soon