What The Hell America!

During the first week of April, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), New York City’s K-12 educators’ union, ran an advertisement on cable and YouTube. The thirty-second spot highlighted a shortage of paraprofessional educators caused by poor pay, which hinders recruitment and retention and leads to “devastating consequences” for students with disabilities in New York City. The ad ended with a bold-type message: “It’s time to fix the injustice. Pass the paraprofessional bill now.”

The “paraprofessional bill” has not figured in the city’s mayoral primary or the educational chaos spewing from Washington. In early April, it had not even been introduced in the New York City Council (though it has since). But the ad points to an ongoing struggle of real significance for educators, their unions, and the defense of public education.

Over eight hundred thousand paraprofessional educators, also known as teacher aides and education support professionals, work in US public schools alongside 3.2 million teachers. They provide everything from reading interventions to bilingual services to one-on-one support for students with disabilities; about half of all paras work in “special education” in some capacity. Overwhelmingly female and, in cities, working-class women of color, “paras” are far more likely than teachers to live in the districts and school zones where they work.

As Nora De La Cour wrote for Jacobin in 2022, these educators serve as important conduits to families and communities in addition to their classroom roles. Despite the essential nature of their work, particularly in delivering education for students marginalized by disability, immigration status, language, and food or housing insecurity, paras are often paid poverty wages. Roughly 24,000 paras work in New York City, the nation’s largest district, where salaries start under $32,000 per year.

Since the 1970s, these educators have been part of teachers’ unions, and, in recent years, renewed militancy has extended to paraprofessional campaigns. Paraprofessional educators have gone on strike and won raises of thousands of dollars, far above the typical single-digit percentage increases, in large urban districts like Minneapolis, Minnesota, and suburban towns like Andover, Massachusetts. These victories have not only delivered life-changing gains to working-class educators but have served to mobilize the families and communities paras serve in their support.

In this context, a debate has emerged within the UFT over the past year, with implications for the union’s elections taking place this month. Last June, an insurgent slate called “Fix Para Pay” won seats in the leadership of the union’s paraprofessional chapter by calling for significant raises in the next UFT contract. UFT president Michael Mulgrew has responded with the aforementioned “paraprofessional bill,” which would fund these raises outside the contract. Mulgrew has cited the city’s insistence on public sector “pattern bargaining,” in which raises for all workers in a particular department are calculated at a standard percentage. Critics have argued that a legislative stipend will be neither permanent nor pensionable.

But this is not necessarily an either/or choice. Unions in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and elsewhere are pushing for statewide bills of rights with living-wage guarantees for paras in addition to fighting for contract gains. But on the question of whether to wage a contract campaign, the UFT’s own history is instructive.

New York’s paras won their first contract in 1970 despite deep divisions between their union and the communities they served in the wake of the UFT’s 1968 strikes, which effectively dismantled an experiment in “community control” of public schools in black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. The city’s Board of Education believed these divisions would keep paras powerless at the bargaining table, but paras responded with a campaign that focused on the impact they made in classrooms and communities and the ways their work addressed fundamental questions of racial and economic justice. The contract they won became a model for paras nationwide and still serves as a reminder of the power such campaigns hold for educators, unions, and schools today.

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In January 1970, the New York City Board of Education sat down at the bargaining table with the newly unionized paraprofessional educators of the UFT. Paras sought significant raises, job security, grievance procedures, access to health care, and paths for advancement and teacher training. The board didn’t want to pay for any of it. Thinking paras didn’t have the power to make them, the board rejected nearly all of the union’s proposals.

Despite the UFT’s track record of winning raises and benefits for teachers, which the union had used to court paras in a very close union representation election with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) District Council 37 in 1969 — the board believed the union would be hamstrung by the legacy of its bitter 1968 strike, which had broken the city’s experiment in community-controlled education for black and Puerto Rican parents in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side, and created long-lasting divisions between the teachers union and parents. New York’s first paras started work in 1967, following a decade of organizing by parent activists, antipoverty organizations, and radical educators. Their jobs were funded by the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and paras were hired from the neighborhoods in which they worked with support from community organizations, including the leadership of the three community-controlled districts. The goals of para programs were threefold: to improve instruction, connect schools and communities, and create a pipeline toward becoming teachers (thus diversifying the educational workforce).

Whether or not they crossed UFT picket lines in 1968 — and many did, often at the urging of parents and community leaders — these working-class women (half of whom were black and another 40 percent of whom were “Spanish-surnamed,” according to a 1970 survey) were avatars of community control in the minds of many teachers. This was particularly true among those teachers who did not work closely with paras, as para jobs were clustered in the most underresourced schools. The board didn’t think that UFT teachers would honor a para picket line systematically, nor did they believe paras’ communities would tolerate a paraprofessional strike.

In response, paras and their union waged a two-front contract campaign in spring 1970. Histories have often focused on the role of UFT president Albert Shanker, who supported the effort and penned a letter from jail threatening to resign if teachers did not back paras (Shanker was serving time under New York’s Taylor Law for leading the UFT out on strike in 1968). Shanker undoubtedly convinced some teachers, but the focus on him has obscured both the classroom-level solidarity upon which the campaign was founded and the creative ways that the organizing committee and rank-and-file paras and teachers built upon this foundation in the spring of 1970.

Despite the Board of Education’s assumption that teachers and paras stood on opposite sides of the post-1968 chasm, those teachers who worked closely with paras felt differently. In the spring of 1968, before the cataclysmic strikes that fall, an internal UFT survey of 200 teachers and 230 paras revealed tremendous mutual regard between these educators. Teachers used words like “essential” and “successful” to describe the work of paras in their classrooms, emphasized the way paras had helped teachers connect to parents, and, crucially, voiced their support for welcoming paras into the union.

When the para chapter voted to authorize a strike in April 1970, future UFT president Sandra Feldman, then a field organizer, leaned on these teachers to spread their gospel. Teachers who worked with paras penned articles for the union newspaper and hit the road to visit others around the city, armed with personal testimonials, surveys, and, in one instance, a one-act play composed by a Brooklyn teacher and chapter chair to capture the impact paras made. A UFT report later described the effort as “one of the most intensive internal education campaigns in our history.”

At the same time, paraprofessional educators mobilized their deep ties with communities to advocate for themselves and their new union chapter. These conversations were not easy, especially after the para chapter’s strike vote, which left many community organizations furious at the disruptive potential of another strike and at paras for joining the UFT, an organization many of them hated in the wake of the bitterly divisive 1968 strike. Marian Thom, a Chinese American para working on the Lower East Side, recalled wondering “if you’d come out alive” from meetings she attended that spring.

The paras’ campaign was coordinated by Velma Murphy Hill, a veteran of civil rights struggles with the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and a close associate of Bayard Rustin (one of the only black leaders to support the UFT in 1968). Hill encouraged paras to speak out about their work and its impact on the students they served in every conceivable context, from formal community and church gatherings to conversations over coffee and at playgrounds. In Harlem, a center of community-control activism, paras told their stories to the New York Amsterdam News, the city’s largest black-owned paper, which had editorialized strongly against the UFT in 1968. Puerto Rican paras shared their experiences in El Tiempo and El Diario, Spanish-language newspapers that had likewise supported the community-control movement just over a year prior. The Board of Education had underestimated paras’ power.

By May, the campaign was spilling over into the mainstream press and wider consciousness of the city. Long articles in the New York Times and the New York Post introduced New Yorkers to the impact paras had in classrooms and communities, from translating at parent-teacher conferences to working one-on-one with “troubled” students to creating examples of what we know today as culturally relevant pedagogy. Congressman James Scheuer, who had authored a 1966 bill to support training for paras, voiced his support to the Amsterdam News, and other local politicians began to follow suit.

And while Sandra Feldman and Velma Murphy Hill were both very much part of Albert Shanker’s UFT leadership team, the fight for a para contract drew support from educators who had opposed the 1968 strikes and Shanker’s leadership, as well. Richard Parrish, a socialist and elected leader who had led the UFT’s Black Caucus, critiqued the union and lauded paraprofessional educators in an influential article late in 1969. A flyer from a group of teachers who had supported the community-control fight and crossed UFT picket lines in 1968 described paras as “a potentially progressive force in fighting for real change in the schools” after the paras’ strike vote.

Even some key players in the community-control struggle voiced their support for paras, if not the larger UFT. Evelina López Antonetty, whose United Bronx Parents had worked tirelessly both for community control of schools and to demand the hiring of Spanish-speaking paras in the South Bronx, agreed with the paras’ contract demands. As her daughter, Lorraine Montenegro, explained in a 2014 interview, Antonetty’s experience in District 65 (a left-led union) convinced her both of the power of union contracts and, simultaneously, of the need for diverse, progressive voices in unions.

On June 3, 1970, ten thousand teachers gathered in Madison Square Garden and voted to honor a para picket line by a three-to-one margin. In August, the Board of Education agreed to a contract that offered a 140 percent increase in wages and fringe benefits, health care, a grievance procedure, and paid training at the City University of New York. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), of which the UFT was, and is, the largest and most influential local, used the contract and its campaign as a template for a national organizing drive to organize nearly 100,000 paras into the AFT over the next two decades.

The gains paraprofessional educators made in their first decades of organizing slowed precipitously with the urban fiscal crises and the federal retreat from social welfare spending in the mid-to-late 1970s. The rise of neoliberal education reform in the decades that followed, particularly reformers’ focus on recruiting “elite” educators and cleaving schooling from communities through reckless closure and expanding charter schools, further marginalized paras. The layers of connection to students, parents, and communities that paras maintain, and the impact they make, are not captured in the results of cost-benefit analyses or high-stakes test scores.

Over the past decade, however, paraprofessional educators have joined the reinvigorated teacher union movement. Locals in my union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, have nearly doubled paras’ pay by centering their contributions in classrooms and highlighting poverty pay as part of successful strikes. In Boston, where I teach, educators ratified a contract on April 9 that will deliver raises for paras between 23 and 32 percent over the life of the contract, bringing their starting salaries from $30,000 to $40,000. (The Boston Teachers Union, like the UFT, is a local of the AFT.)

Putting paraprofessional educators at the center of contract campaigns brings “bargaining for the common good” home to unions by fighting for living wages and respect for educators who serve, and who are part of, working-class communities of color that have been denied rights and resources for too long. Fighting for paras affirms the rights of students with disabilities, which these educators guarantee daily through their labor. It builds a bulwark for immigrant communities; when ICE’s cruelty is visited upon students and their families, it is often paras who speak the languages and know the community members who must be notified to respond.

Fighting for these educators is about doing what’s right. It is also strategic. Just as the UFT’s 1970 contract campaign educated a wide swath of New Yorkers on impact paras’ impact, contract campaigns today can do the same. They can build support for public educators, and for public schools as public goods, at a time when the entire idea of public education is under sustained attack.

Last June, two UFT elections yielded surprising results. The union has been led by the Unity Caucus, founded by Albert Shanker, for nearly sixty years. But in addition to the wins of the aforementioned “Fix Para Pay” slate, the union’s retiree chapter elected leaders from the Retiree Advocate caucus. Their vote was widely understood as a rejection of the union leadership’s support for the city’s plan to save on health care costs by shifting retirees from Medicare to a privately managed Medicare Advantage plan (the union has since withdrawn its support).

As a result, this May’s UFT leadership elections are wide open for the first time in decades. The Retiree Advocate caucus is running as part of the Alliance of Retired and In-Service Educators (ARISE), while the Fix Para Pay slate has joined a larger slate titled ABC for “A Better Contract.”

Whoever leads the UFT going forward can and should look to the legacy of the union’s 1970 paraprofessional contract campaign in charting the path ahead. UFT paras today deserve the same raises, rights, and recognition as their predecessors, and as their peers across the nation. The union, the public schools, and the city stand to benefit from a contract campaign that puts these workers and the expansive, equitable vision of public education that they represent front and center.