Paraprofessionalism in Harlem, 1960-1980

• In Event: Harlem Stories: Contesting Educational Goals and Strategies for Reform in the 20th Century

Abstract

In the mid-1960s, impoverished school districts across the United States began hiring local women to work in schools as paraprofessionals. They did so in response to grassroots activism, labor organizing, and progressive scholarship, and with funds from federal antipoverty legislation. These diverse origins were reflected in the goals of paraprofessionalism, which included enhancing pedagogy and classroom discipline, improving communication and cooperation between schools and communities, creating jobs for local residents, and training paraprofessionals to become teachers. By the mid-1970s, hundreds of thousands of “paras” worked in American public schools.

This paper examines the creation and development of paraprofessional programs in Harlem. Harlem warrants study as both a robust case – thousands of paras worked in the neighborhood's school districts – and on account of the outsize influence of neighborhood residents (including paras) in the development of paraprofessionalism nationwide. Scholar-activist Preston Wilcox helped design the first paraprofessional program in New York as Chairman of the Women's Talent Corps in 1967. Labor leaders including Bayard Rustin, Richard Parrish, and Velma Murphy Hill led the unionization of paraprofessionals with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), resulting in a contract that guaranteed a career ladder to teaching and 140% wage increases in 1970. During the 1970s, Hill and Rustin worked with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to promote paraprofessional unionism around the country, while Wilcox's Afram Associates became the coordinating institution for community-based programs that hired paraprofessionals in five states. In Harlem, paras themselves worked to articulate their own vision for community-school participation, aided by their high-profile allies and a supportive Board of Education member, Harlem's Isaiah Robinson (an architect of the City University's paraprofessional training program).

At the nexus of education, labor, and community, this project draws upon diverse literatures and methods. Paraprofessionals were among the “grassroots warriors,” women who carried the lessons and language of civil rights and Black Power into struggles for economic justice. They were part of the postwar wave of municipal organizing that reshaped the American labor movement and public education. Funded by Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, paraprofessionalism offers a window onto this legislation and the larger War on Poverty, demonstrating that community involvement could sustain and improve welfare-state programs. Finally, in Harlem and elsewhere, paraprofessionals were at the center of initiatives that sought to improve education and combat poverty in unison. Their experience suggests schools can be sources of opportunity for adults and communities as well as students. In an era characterized by unemployment, alienation, and fracture, paraprofessionalism offered a multi-level strategy for education and empowerment to the people of Harlem.

This paper utilizes the archives of the New York City Board of Education, the UFT, Preston Wilcox, Richard Parrish, and the Harlem Neighborhood Associations, among others. It also draws on interviews with paraprofessionals, teachers, and community leaders.

Author

• Nicholas A. Juravich, Columbia University