The night before Mayor Michelle Wu’s State of the City address, the Boston Teachers Union and Boston Public Schools reached a tentative agreement on a new contract after more than a year of negotiations. This eleventh-hour deal averted a planned protest on the evening of the mayor’s annual speech. Such brinkmanship may be good politics, but it is a poor way to run a district. Students and educators should not be reduced to pawns on a chessboard.
The tentative agreement gives historic and long overdue raises to some of the district’s lowest paid workers: paraprofessionals. Some places call them teachers’ aides, we in Boston call them paras (from the ancient Greek meaning alongside). Paraprofessionals work in the schools, often in the classrooms, alongside teachers ensuring that students get the services they need. Para pay will increase from a starting pay in the range of $30k and move to about $40k by the end of the newly proposed agreement.
Classroom teachers are scheduled to receive modest raises of 2.5% for the current school year (with retroactive pay to September, 2024), 2% in school year ’25-’26, and another 2% in ’26-’27. There are some other monies added to the proposed contract, which according to the statements of the BTU will give educators a three-year increase of 9%-11%. The higher amount goes to the newer teachers, and the lower amount goes to veterans.
Some veteran teachers, who are quite close to retirement, have expressed displeasure that their pay will not receive a boost high enough to catch up with the rate of post-pandemic inflation. Unlike many professions where experience is both respected and sought, veteran teachers in this contract are receiving comparatively lower raises. Once teachers retire, their income is essentially fixed; so a small increase now will mean a lower pension (which teachers self-fund) for the rest of their lives.
The 2021-2024 contract contained aspirational but ultimately unenforceable language, most notably around special education. When negotiations started for this contract, the BPS stated that it would not even discuss changes. After a year of walk-ins, rallies, and even thousands of postcards to the mayor, the BPS finally opened discussions with the BTU.
Three years ago I argued from the floor against accepting the ’21-’24 contract based both on pay raises which were substantially lower than the cost of living and the unenforceable language around special education. While I lost that vote, I am comforted that my objections became the major foci of the ’24-’27 contract negotiations.
Better pay for paraprofessionals is one of the BTU’s Twin Pillars of Hercules. The other is ending the practice of having a classroom teacher be both the provider of the general education curriculum and either special education services and/or English language instruction. No other district in the Commonwealth operates in such a way.
The newly proposed agreement does address this problem with certain, targeted and enforceable remedies; but it does not end the practice. At least when Hercules performed his labors, he did not have to do two or three of them simultaneously.
A third critical operational crisis is the lack of substitutes. On Dec. 12, 2022 the Boston Herald ran a story whose headline called the substitute situation “A Breaking Point.” The situation has not improved. For those who say that we should “run schools like a business,” I say then raise the pay of substitutes, especially those filling in for long term positions. Frankly, we should reach out to the various schools of education around Boston and work out a deal whereby their graduate students start working now in the schools as substitute teachers.
The proposed contract does give substitute teachers a few extra dollars a day. However, I am not convinced that $5 or $7 per day (depending upon the category) is enough to end our drought. Every day teachers all across the district must give up their scarce planning time to cover classrooms due to the shortage of substitutes.
Why must the BTU beg and plead for things the BPS can and should do on its own? Why put the students and families through such turmoil? Lawyers may like to “win” at negotiations; meanwhile we in the classroom suffer for the sake of that zero-sum mentality. Let’s remember that there are real people – students and teachers – on the other side of those losses.
We should not have to wait every three years for teachers, nurses and paraprofessionals to hold rallies and host midnight negotiation sessions in order to improve the quality of education. As a city, let us sail beyond the Pillars and into the unknown: let’s work together for the sake of the students, let us fully fund the schools, and let us pay the teachers for all the hours they work.
I would like to thank the negotiating team for all their hard work. In one of my last votes on the BTU Executive Board, I voted to send the tentative agreement – imperfect as it is – to the general membership for ratification. Perfect need not be the enemy of good. We shall continue the important work of uplifting our students, our district, and our city.
Michael Maguire teaches Latin and Ancient Greek at Boston Latin Academy, and is a candidate for the presidency of the Boston Teachers Union. The ideas expressed here are his own.)
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