An Education in Democracy: Paraprofessionals in Schools, Communities, and the Labor Movement, 1965-1980

My dissertation analyzes the creation and development of programs that brought hundreds of thousands of working-class mothers into public schools as paraprofessionals in the 1960s and 1970s. The project is focused on New York City as both a case study and a hub for the promotion of paraprofessional programs nationwide. In the mid-1960s, school districts across the United States began hiring local residents - primarily the mothers of schoolchildren - to work in public schools. Community activists advocated for these positions, and federal legislation funded them. Paras provided pedagogical and emotional assistance in classrooms, worked to improve school-community relationships, and trained to become teachers. Seeking better pay, job security, and improved training opportunities, paras unionized with locals of the American Federation of Teachers, beginning in New York City in 1969. An Education in Democracy seeks to illuminate the lives and labor of these parent educators and the ways they shaped, and were shaped by, relationships between schools and school systems, community politics, and public sector unions.This qualitative history of paraprofessionals relies on archival and oral histories, and will offer fresh perspectives on three topics in the history of education social protest, teacher unionism, and the relationship between education and poverty. Paras worked to integrate the teaching corps and promote community participation in schooling, but also joined unions and fought to make their locals equally responsive to community needs. Like many War on Poverty initiatives, para programs focused on education and training, but they also created jobs and redistributed resources to communities. Preliminary research suggests that paras remade schools, communities, and unions (and the relationships between them) in ways that improved public education in this era, and might inform current debates about the role of communities and unions in schools.,