Sometime in the summer of 2020, a small, vocal set of parents and advocates decided that teachers should get back to work.

They overshadowed the public praise for teachers and schools in favor of opening up schools all willy-nilly. Of course, studies and polls kept disrupting that narrative, but the narrative persisted. Parents of school-aged children support their local teachers and schools, and much of the narrative came from adults without children. Studies showed that learning loss proponents overstated their claims given that the United States fared better than most industrialized countries. They’d say teachers are overpaid, but compared to other professions with comparable licensure, teachers don’t come close, even worse without collective bargaining.

But narratives persist, chipping away at the notion of having a democratic institution dedicated to educating youth, however imperfectly. So, after reading this great article by Deborah Ball, this begs the question: what does it mean to be professional? Here, I attempt an answer.

For the average person, “professional” refers to many things: expertise, experience, comportment, dress, manner of speaking, technique, and so on. We have a concept of what it means to be a professional athlete. We expect a level of professionalism from doctors, lawyers, police officers, and other salaried representatives of institutions. People have expectations about how they behave and look, how they go about procedures, and whether they’re doing their work to fidelity according to some training site somewhere with a fancy title.

For sociologists studying this issue, including me, we generally study these elements under the “sociology of professions.” Power, expertise, and autonomy allow society to confer a status onto individuals even when we’re skeptical of individual actors within those professions. We also observe how professional trust has gone down since the 1980’s as people have learned to trust institutions less.

But for teachers, it means multiple things depending on who says it and why. Society has gotten into the habit of treating teaching as a semi-profession by saying things like “They’re in it for the outcome, not the income.” Or, significantly worse, “If you can’t, teach.” Whatever that means. We’ve seen the proliferation of the bad teacher stereotype in movies like Bad Teacher and vertical clips of students fighting teachers.

Then, there are the daily interactions where an administrator calls a teacher unprofessional for reasons that align with the administrator’s tastes. Some administrators mean that the teacher fell out of compliance with expectations that only they came up with. They focus too much on teachers’ wardrobes, the timeliness of attendance sheets, or the type of music the teacher listens to during their off-duty time. Other administrators focus more on shared, reasonable expectations and student aspirations. They set the vision for the year and work with staff and students to make the appropriate adjustments.

The best administrators also have the right to call in/out teachers who don’t reflect those expectations and aspirations well. Teachers I speak to agree that when colleagues aren’t doing their jobs, administrators should do their due diligence. This is especially true in cases of racism, homophobia, or not attending to student learning. But at the heart of the confusion is less about having great administrators, teachers, schools, or even a great country.

The problem with the word “professional” in a work setting is that it pretends to be about merit, but it has lots of power depending on who wields it and why.

For many women I’ve spoken to, the word implies negative perceptions about their bodies and clothing. For Black and Latinx teachers I speak to, the word implies demerits based on how they speak or move. In education, the “most professional” people are principals, superintendents, and scholars in higher ed, which are predominantly white and male-presenting.

It seems petty, but that’s the point. Whoever has power within a professional setting often gets to set the terms of what it means to be professional. The term “professional” is as much about identity as it is about some merit bestowed upon a job.

But I believe that if teachers didn’t have a sense of professionalism for themselves, our school systems would barely run. As the world faced a global pandemic with millions of deaths, economic stratification and corporate greed, the neverending specter of wars domestic and abroad, attacks on institutions through anti-truth laws and book bans, and a lack of coherent policy for how to navigate these dynamics, educators of all types still showed up and committed to doing the work, not simply to work.

When society understands this and reflects this in teacher pay and dignity, society may get a clearer definition of “professional.” Or at least get closer to something more meaningful.