If your child attends a public school in the United States, they have most likely been taught, tutored, supervised, or cared for by a paraprofessional. As of May 2023, there were 1.3 million paraprofessionals (or teachers’ assistants) working in schools in the United States, earning a median salary of $35,550. That wage means that many paraprofessionals, who are overwhelmingly women and mothers, need to work additional jobs to make ends meet. Unlike most teachers, paraprofessionals—or paras—tend to live near the school where they work and send their children there as well, providing a crucial bridge between the school and the surrounding community. In Para Power, Nick Juravich examines the emergence of para labor in the 1960s, organizing by and around paras in the 1970s, and the eventual collapse of coalitions supporting paras toward the end of that decade, leading to the low wages and contingent employment that often structure para jobs today. Para Power is a critical contribution to civil rights scholarship and offers novel insights into New York City education history by moving beyond teachers to highlight the contributions and experiences of lower-paid and often overlooked school employees.
This book will be important for scholars in the areas of K-12 education, labor history, and African American history. Juravich’s main argument is that paras and their allies combined public-sector and anti-poverty organizing to create a vision and practice of community education that was “equitable, transformative, and rooted in the knowledge and ability of local communities” (p. 241). Juravich uses New York City, which was a hub of para organizing, as a case study, which allows him to explore how various stakeholders—Black and Puerto Rican activists, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), War on Poverty advocates—sought both to support paras and to mobilize them on behalf of sometimes divergent agendas. Throughout the book, Juravich centers paras’ experiences through the use of archival documents that highlight their voices as well as seventeen original oral histories, all of which allow paras themselves to express the complex choices they faced in and outside the classroom.
The first three chapters outline the rise of paraprofessional employment amid the turbulent education landscape of 1960s New York City. The first paras were hired in 1957 to respond to a perceived “crisis of care” (p. 24) in schools, due in large part to ballooning student enrollment from the baby boom. Teachers’ unions advocated for the hiring of paras to free teachers from the “burdensome chores which interfere with teaching” (p. 29). At the same time, Black and Puerto Rican activists sought to hire parent aides to address racism in the overwhelmingly white teaching corps and advocate for community needs within schools. Those interests aligned in recruiting paras to classrooms and promoting career ladder programs to pull women of color out of poverty. Paras quickly became indispensable in managing large class sizes, improving family-school relationships, and providing individualized and small group instruction.
However, United Federation of Teachers (UFT) strikes in 1967 and 1968 revealed deep fissures between the union and the community’s understanding of paras’ role. In 1967, the UFT went on strike to demand that teachers have the right to remove disruptive children from their classrooms, a demand which many parents found racially discriminatory. Paras, who often enforced discipline, struggled to balance their allegiance to teachers with their connections to families and children. This tension undergirded a larger discrepancy in how stakeholder groups saw paras’ future in the schools. While the UFT imagined a program to assist teachers and gradually diversify the teaching corps, some community activists hoped the introduction of paras could result in a total reimagining of the educational space toward a system that was run by and for community members themselves and eschewed hierarchies of degrees and credentialing. In this latter framework, “paraprofessional work was not a minor policy intervention in education… . It was part of a movement for social and economic justice in urban neighborhoods” (p. 76).
When the UFT struck against community-controlled districts in 1968, paras found themselves in the crosshairs of these conflicting agendas. Juravich’s discussion of paras’ attempts to navigate this conflict offers much needed nuance to dominant narratives of the strike, which tend to draw stark lines between the two sides. As intermediaries, paras found creative solutions to maintain multiple allegiances. Some crossed picket lines, especially in the community-controlled districts. But others held classes for students at outside locations or walked the picket lines with teachers. Paras thought their future was with the UFT, and Al Shanker, then president of that local, was careful not to alienate paras despite their mixed loyalty during the strike. In 1969, just six months after the divisive strike ended, thousands of paras voted to join the UFT. They signed their first contract in 1970.
In chapters 5 and 6, Juravich steps back from following the paras’ trajectory in New York City and looks deeper into some of the ideas that emerged from those initial struggles. Chapter 5 examines how AFT locals across the country used some of the strategies from the campaign in New York City to incorporate paras into their ranks. The AFT certainly provided opportunities for paras—in 1976, unionized paras made 67 percent more money than their nonunionized counterparts—but it also sought to maintain a clear hierarchy in its locals, in which teachers were on top. In chapter 6, Juravich compares two paraprofessional recruitment and training programs, the Career Opportunities Program and Afram Associates, a nonprofit created to advance struggles for Black self-determination. Juravich explores the ways in which their beliefs intersected, such as in advocacy for full employment and their attempts to reimagine public schooling, and the strengths of their different pathways. These debates ended abruptly in the mid to late 1970s when national funding was withdrawn.
The final chapter returns to Mayor Ed Koch’s New York City. Facing a fiscal crisis, Koch slashed city budgets, laid off paras and teachers, and told paras to collect unemployment in the summers instead of offering them annual salaries. Nationally, attacks on public education grew more prevalent and Koch framed paraprofessionals as “welfare mothers” who had won their jobs as “patronage” (p. 241). The social movement supporting paras was essentially destroyed.
Para Power is strongest when Juravich explores the tensions inherent in the rise and consolidation of paraprofessional labor—between schools and communities, parents and teachers, Black Power activists and career ladder educators, community-control leaders and teachers’ unions. The ideas, people, and events discussed are rooted in New York City and speak compellingly to the local experience of paraprofessionals there. More scholarship is needed to understand the experiences of paras outside of New York City, particularly in rural areas or in cities with different racial demographics. Nonetheless, Juravich offers a shrewd analysis of the ideologies that supported paraprofessionals and how paras drew on those ideologies to make themselves a permanent fixture in New York City’s schools. As one of the UFT’s para organizers reflected, “This is really the civil rights movement as far as I’m concerned” (p. 2). Sixty years later, the idea of hiring poor and working-class women to work in schools, for career advancement or to reimagine the power structure of public education, still feels subversive.
