Exploring the Boston Teachers Union Collection

Hello, I am a graduate student in the Public History Track of the History graduate program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The topic chosen for a digital exhibit was the Unified Facilities Plan, an idea introduced during the then ongoing desegregation of Boston Public Schools. This topic touches on numerous aspects of the history of the Boston Teachers Union, including the unions response to desegregation, teacher seniority, affirmative action, racism within the union, the relationship between the city and the union, the relationships between teachers and students, and other aspects of the relationship between the union, the city of Boston, and the courts. The exhibit seeks to display the process of the BTU in disputing the necessity of school closures with the city, and the relationship between the union and the city. Other aspects of the exhibit touched upon are the effects of desegregation on the teachers in the BTU and students in the Boston Public School system.

Researching this topic largely involved reading relevant articles from the Boston Union Teacher newspaper, with the earliest relevant article coming from the December, 1979 issue of the paper. Available papers were then examined chronologically for relevant articles or cartoons pertaining to the UFP, which were readily found throughout issues of the Boston Union Teacher. Selecting the issue at which to stop and end the exhibit. The Unified Facilities Plan, school closures, desegregation, and teacher layoffs would continue throughout the 1980s, but as another exhibit was examining teacher layoffs and the impact of desegregation and racism on the inability of the union to protest this, the natural end of the Unified Facilities Plan exhibit was when the question of teacher layoffs became unavoidable as an aspect of the exhibit.

When developing the exhibit, the biggest issue centered around the expansive nature of the Unified Facilities Plan, which was related to numerous other exhibits. Focusing too much on one area would have made the exhibit too repetitive and similar to others. Therefore, I decided to focus on the teachers’ reactions to the plan as show in the Boston Union Teacher, whereas other exhibits delved more deeply into other issues such as layoffs, budget reductions, and desegregation. The Unified Facilities Plan exhibit would focus on these areas, but only as they were perceived and reacted to by the union, rather than an all-encompassing view. This would make the exhibit both unique and focused when dealing with such a variable topic.

Certain challenges were presented in this attempt, as much of the teachers’ professional grievances were surrounded news of legal actions and city plans that frequently interrupted union news in single articles. Although this legal news was necessary for understanding the nature of professional grievances, it would have necessitated quotes of extreme length or rendered succinct quotes uncontextualized. I attempted to include physical images of the articles that would enable a viewer to understand the whys and wherefores of the complaints, but the physical display made this method unusable. Fortunately, some articles contained wonderful photographs which I could utilize, although they still needed explanations. Context must be provided outside of the direct quotes in a succinct manner while article images are removed and replaced with the most relevant quotes to illustrate the grievances of the union.

Along with the redesign of the articles and quotes for the exhibit, a deeper look into the Unified Facilities Plan, its purpose, intent, and how it was to be carried out is a clear necessity of the exhibit. A deeper look into accusations of the Boston Teachers Union of corruption regarding real estate taxes and investments would also be an area to further explore, as it connects to other budgetary concerns related to Proposition 2.5.

Any further ideas that could be explored in this exhibit have largely been explored in other exhibits, specifically those exhibits dealing with desegregation, the 1981 teacher layoffs, and disputes between the BTU and City of Boston regarding the budget and affirmative action. Although these are important topics to understand, both on their own and as context for the Unified Facilities Plan, they are best left as their own exhibits that are already linked to the UFP exhibit. However, if the time period was to be extended, 21^st Century issues within the Boston Public School system could be related or directly connected to the UFP or precedents set by it. Unfortunately, this seems a massive deviation from the rest of the exhibit and connected exhibits which focus primarily on the 1970s and 1980s.

These connections to other exhibits are both expanding and limiting. As seen, they force the UFP exhibit to exist in a narrow area and to avoid delving deeply into some issues lest it become a repetition of already existing works. Instead, direct links to those other exhibits are provided in order to give the viewer a deeper understanding of the issues at play. This narrow area of focus does, however, enable a deeper look into the perspective of the Boston Teachers Union when compared to other exhibits, which took broader approaches. This exhibit is essentially a trade-off of broader understanding of an entire topic for deeper understanding of a small portion of a single topic. The topic of this exhibit, the Unified Facilities Plan, although ended, still has relevance to schools throughout the country today. The intended goal of the UFP when it was conceived was to reduce the expenses of the city by reducing the number of schools and therefore associated staff such as teachers, janitors, nurses, and others. Education is often on the chopping block whenever fiscal needs are considered, and the Unified Facilities Plan, by another name, returns to menace schools again. The response of the BTU, and its minor successes in delaying the plan but ultimate failure to stop it through a lack of solidarity due to the ongoing desegregation and the effect on racial attitudes in the BTU also provide meaning for the BTU today. By failing to come together due to racial prejudice, the BTU and Boston Public Schools endured more at the hands of the UFP than was likely necessary.

It was the third week of our Digital Public History class, and we were finally going into the archives. We had already dipped our toes into a wealth of information about the current best practices in Digital Humanities exhibits and archives, and we had also spent time learning about this semester’s project: a deep dive into the newly-digitized archives of the newspapers of the Boston Teacher’s Union. We had read versions of the Boston Union Teacher newspaper online, but today we were going to be able to open the boxes, to hold and touch and read through the original documents.

After an introduction by one of the UMass Boston librarians, we were set free, in small groups, to look through the boxes of documents. I remember the stress of carefully lifting the fragile pages, how carefully we moved them, making sure to put things back in the same order they had come from in the dozens of manila folders. I remember, also, the excitement of seeing the names and photos of people who were already becoming familiar to us from our research into the history of the Boston Teacher’s Union.

Turning the pages, we all saw lots of interesting ideas for topics!
Some initial ideas included:

• Advertising – I was curious about which businesses chose to advertise in the Boston Union Teacher, and why, and what their relationship was to the union and union membership.

• Creative writing & teachers’ poetry – Many poems have been included in the paper over the years, and they provide an interesting pathway for reflecting on the experience of being an educator.
• Discussions of teacher’s practice – Teachers talking about teaching, and examples of teachers sharing best practices in their classroom over time.
• Ethnic Studies Program – Stories in the newspaper could help trace the evolution and earlier iterations of the push for a more inclusive curriculum.

• Leisure – There were ads for Candlepin Bowling outings, Barbeques, and other social get-togethers for teachers. How important were these, who participated, and do events like this still happen?

• Women’s Rights – There were several articles in 1974-5 about a “Women’s Conference” and women’s rights in general. It could be interesting to think about how the Women’s Liberation movement affected Boston’s teachers.
• Proposition 2 ½ – It could be important to explore the impact of this pivotal property tax bill on the public schools in Massachusetts, and the union’s response.

• Evolution of Technology – There was an article in the November 1998 issue by Nancy Jones called “Digital vs. Digitized Video,” which included this excellent topic sentence: “There are numerous moving picture formats in existence today that are called ‘digital video.’” It really made me think about all the different technologies educators have had to adapt to over the years, and how each new leap forward means yet another learning curve to conquer in the classroom.

• Northern Ireland – I found a fascinating editorial in the September 1969 issue comparing “the civil rights movement of the Catholic minority” in Northern Ireland to the Civil Rights movement in the Southern US.
• Vacations – There were numerous ads for “Teacher’s get-aways” and discount tickets for cruises to Cancun and other places. How many teachers went on these types of vacations? Again, what was the relationship between the advertisers and the union?

Many students were drawn to some of the more contentious times in the union’s history, including the response to Judge Garrity’s desegregation orders in the 1970s, and the union’s response to the teacher layoffs in 1981. I ended up doing my deeper dive exhibit on this latter topic, with help from BTU organizer Ari Branz, building on research they had done in the Fall of 2021. It was particularly powerful to get to work with the oral histories collected from BTU members, and to hear the emotion in their voices as they talked about events that had happened over 40 years ago. It was a vivid reminder of the ways in which what has happened to us becomes a part of who we are, and we each use the stories of the past to make sense of the present.

I wished I had time to pursue all of these different threads, and dig deeper into each of the topics. Over the course of the class, however, almost all of these topics got picked up and investigated by at least one of the other students. So, even though I didn’t have time as an individual to research all of those topics, as a class, we did a pretty good job of covering as much as we could. The BTU archives are such an incredible source of information, particularly around Boston history, labor history, the history of the Boston public schools, and of the union itself. I know there is much, much more to explore.

Movies and television can have a profound effect on our emotions and ways of thinking. In Professor Juravich’s Digital Public History course, which I took as a final semester student finishing up my two-year Public History MA, the documentary Eyes on the Prize captured my attention completely.

Eyes on the Prize, specifically an hour long section titled “Keys to the Kingdom,” focuses on the fight over the desegregation of Boston Public Schools in 1974-1980. Desegregation had been a long time coming in Boston, but even still, its implementation sparked anger and violence primarily on the part of white Bostonians. Even today the geographic segregation of the city into areas primarily occupied by white populations versus people of color is very stark. Boston still struggles very much with its discriminatory legacy.

I was blown away by the primary source footage of desegregation efforts in 1974 Boston shown in Eyes on the Prize. More importantly, I was astounded by the way the filmmakers allowed the footage to speak for itself. There were no talking heads, no academics – just the voices of people who lived through Boston’s desegregation of its public schools. This documentary, and the emotions it inspired in me as a student of history and a human being, was the ultimate reason I chose to focus my digital exhibit for the Boston Teachers Union collection on desegregation in 1974.

This period of history was completely out of my traditional wheelhouse. I usually study English colonial history in the eighteenth century, which meant the sources available to me for this project were much more multisensory, utilizing audio, video, and oral history interviews, than the traditional letters and diaries to which I was used to using. It was a unique challenge to learn how to incorporate and work with these new (to me, at least) sources.

Usually in my previous work, and even in an exhibit I was building at the same time as this class, I had to struggle with not having nearly enough sources. In this project, I had far too many! It was difficult to choose between oral history interviews of BTU teachers from the time, the BTU digitization day images, and the Judge W. Arthur Garrity collections at Healey Library. Despite honing in on one specific year in BTU and desegregation history, I still found a plethora of first-person stories in UMB’s collections.

Moving forward, I plan to continue working on the project as I am able. It is important that as many voices of Black educators, parents, and students are showcased as possible – to that end, I would like to continue adding oral history interviews throughout the exhibit. The connections between “Snapshot: Desegregation 1974” and other students’ exhibits are also an area for further exploration.

Meghan Arends’ “Women & the BTU” would be an interesting place to investigate the role women played in desegregation. There are a few women in particular who became strong voices both for and against the work of desegregation efforts. Additionally, Eleanor Katari’s “Black Choices, Black Voices: Navigating the Layoffs of 1981,” as well as Matty Patten’s “The Unified Facilities Plan” both address the fallout of desegregation several years afterward.

While I am pleased with my ability to highlight one specific year in BTU history, following those narrative threads further ahead in time would help us to connect 1974 to today, and desegregation’s effects to Boston’s current conversations surrounding racism and discrimination. After all, isn’t the point of examining the past to live in a present that is better for everyone?

Written by Grace Wargovich

I am a student at UMass Boston in the Accelerated History Master’s Program.  I am finishing my final year as a senior majoring in history and minoring in secondary education.  Over the past semester, I have taught social studies at Randolph High as a student teacher.  I was initially interested in creating a project on the issues that teachers have faced over the past decades.  As I leafed through the pages of the Boston Teacher’s Union (BTU) newspaper, I considered writing about topics such as the size of classrooms or the amount of times teachers were observed by administration.  As a future educator, I had seen first-hand how difficult these problems could be for teachers. 

To learn more about these issues, explore the exhibit “Women’s Voices” by Meghan Arends.

To learn more about gains teachers made, explore the BTU Contract Timeline built by Jordan Cooper.

However, the more I researched the archives, the more interested I became in the teachers’ responses to these issues.  The teachers’ contributions to the newspaper were rich in opinions, advice, and solidarity.

Focusing on Teachers’ Voices

            Since I wanted to focus on teachers’ voices, I mostly used the Boston Teacher’s Union newspaper for my sources.  My primary goal was to broadcast the articles and pieces from teachers that might otherwise be overlooked.  After all, it was the teachers who made up the BTU, teachers who were facing the issues of the education system, and teachers who had ideas for solutions.  Initially, I planned on centering the project on letters to the editor from teachers, which was the topic I chose for my first blog post.  However, as I delved further into the BTU newspaper, there were so many pieces from teachers, such as poems and articles on teaching pedagogies, that it was necessary to broaden the scope.

Format

For the format, I wanted the reader’s attention to be on the teachers’ voices.  The text is mostly there to summarize or draw the reader’s attention to a certain quote.  Since teachers often feel that their voices are not heard, I wanted their words to be the main focus.  For example, at the beginning of the digital exhibit, I used a picture of a teacher, Carolyn Johnson, as the primary photo for the exhibit.  The format of the exhibit would be one of my favorite parts, although it was also the most difficult aspect to achieve.  Since I was working with a variety of sources on different topics (poetry, letters to the editor, advice on stress, articles on pedagogies), I wanted to organize them in a way that would not overwhelm the reader.  This is why this project is split into four different pages that all link to each other.  Not only is this setup clearer and more organized, but it also helps to convey how teachers used their voices to address many different subjects.

Going Forward

            Teachers’ comprehensive contributions to the BTU newspaper are still relevant today.  It is surprising how applicable the teachers’ solutions and advice are to the current issues in education.  As a student teacher, I found that many of the articles even personally resonated with the work that I do (especially the articles on stress!).  It is fascinating to see how far back some of these issues go and to see how teachers responded to them at the time.  Even today, teachers are continuing to share their voices and create a sense of solidarity among teachers in the BTU.  For example, the podcast created by Paul Tritter, Teachers on Teaching Podcast, allows teachers to talk about their personal pedagogies and helps teachers to learn from one another.  I hope that in the future, this digital exhibit can grow with the addition of more sources from the BTU newspaper and with teachers’ voices from today.

1980.

Boston is still seeing the effects of Judge Garrity’s court-ordered busing and desegregation. Recent decisions on Affirmative Action demand that changes be made to the hiring practices in Boston Public Schools, directly conflicting with Union fights to save tenured teachers’ jobs and honor the protections that come with seniority encoded in the Union contracts. The Boston School Department has gained a reputation for being ineffective, subjecting it to heavy criticism from both City Hall and the BTU.