{"id":199486,"date":"2026-08-24T01:08:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T01:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/199486\/"},"modified":"2026-08-24T01:08:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T01:08:11","slug":"dont-let-the-the-uft-fleece-taxpayers-via-teacher-aide-bonuses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/199486\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t let the the UFT fleece taxpayers via teacher-aide bonuses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the City Council are going to war<\/a> in court over payments to Department of Education paraprofessionals \u2014 even though they agreed on the issue not long ago.<\/p>\n

At a 2025 press conference where the 200,000-member\u00a0teachers\u2019 union endorsed him<\/a>, Mamdani touted his support for giving paraprofessionals $10,000 checks.<\/p>\n

Last month, the council unanimously passed<\/a> the union-driven and branded \u201cRespect for Paraprofessionals\u201d bill, at an expected cost of $325 million.<\/p>\n

Mamdani, however, didn\u2019t sign or veto it but instead let it become law automatically,\u00a0citing concerns about its legality. Hours later, his lawyers\u00a0ran to court<\/a> to block it.<\/p>\n

Whether paraprofessionals deserve more pay isn\u2019t the issue. Virtually everyone can agree that they do very difficult work, and a starting salary of about $33,000 doesn\u2019t go far in the highest cost-of-living city in the nation.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s at stake goes to the heart of how the city hires and pays its employees.<\/p>\n

Under the state Taylor Law, public employers and unions bargain collectively over wages, benefits and work rules. Collective bargaining is imperfect, but it\u2019s the lawful process.<\/p>\n

The United Federation of Teachers\u2019 members, which includes both teachers and paraprofessionals, agreed<\/a> in 2023 to a contract that did little to address paras\u2019 low pay.<\/p>\n

The 2023 contract, for example, cut the time for a teacher to earn a $100,000 salary from 15 to 8 years<\/a>. But it didn\u2019t revise the paraprofessionals\u2019 pay scale.<\/p>\n

UFT President Michael Mulgrew reasoned that<\/a>\u00a0paras could get more only if teachers took less \u2014 a tradeoff the union has declined.<\/p>\n

Instead, it\u2019s sought to strike a better deal for its large teacher membership and then separately have the council boost salaries for the paras.<\/p>\n

The trouble is, in sidestepping collective bargaining, the new law threatens to open the door to multiple ways for unions to win pay hikes.<\/p>\n

Once they finish bargaining with the mayor, they\u2019ll run to the council and negotiate additional payments.<\/p>\n

Neither side will want to appear stingier than the other, so the union is effectively trying to engineer a spending arms race \u2014 taxpayers and fiscal consequences be damned.<\/p>\n

It was obviously irresponsible for Mamdani to back the legislation on the campaign trail; funny that his doubts about its legality didn\u2019t surface then.<\/p>\n

But the council should\u2019ve known better than to upset the six decades of accepted labor practice.<\/p>\n

That every member present voted for the bill shows the extent of UFT\u2019s stranglehold over the city\u2019s education system.<\/p>\n

The council justifies the payment as helping fill 1,600 paraprofessional vacancies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Students legally entitled to one-on-one support can wait months for the city to provide it, while the city pays far higher rates when it fails to provide them.<\/p>\n

But the bonuses would hardly recruit many more aides.<\/p>\n

Almost all of it would go to the roughly 25,000 paraprofessionals already employed, while any incentive to stay would vanish once the checks stop.<\/p>\n

There are far better ways for the mayor and council to address the problem.<\/p>\n

First, education officials should determine whether requests for paraprofessionals genuinely reflect student needs; standards should be consistent across the five boroughs.<\/p>\n

In 2018, the\u00a0city\u2019s budget office reported\u00a0that officials recommend paraprofessionals for students at rates that vary widely by borough; an aide for a Staten Island student with autism, for example, was nearly twice as likely to be recommended as one for the average student citywide.<\/p>\n

Officials should also fix the broken process to hire paraprofessionals.<\/p>\n

Candidates cannot simply apply; per DOE\u2019s own careers page, applications \u201care only made available to people who have been nominated by a school principal.\u201d<\/p>\n

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That means someone interested in the job must contact individual schools and find a principal willing to nominate them based on their staffing needs.<\/p>\n

Everyone else may fill out an interest survey, but the DOE warns that \u201cdoes not guarantee a nomination.\u201d<\/p>\n

And weeks before the new school year begins, nominations are closed, per the DOE\u2019s website.<\/p>\n

That means someone looking to become a paraprofessional cannot apply right now.<\/p>\n

Nominees then go through assessments, fingerprinting, workshops and an exam before they become substitutes.<\/p>\n

And after that, they must work at least 25 days and earn the required state certificate before becoming eligible for a full-time paraprofessional appointment.<\/p>\n

The DOE should, at the least, let qualified candidates apply without first securing a principal\u2019s nomination.<\/p>\n

And when the UFT contract expires next year and Mamdani and Mulgrew resume collective bargaining, the two parties should address paraprofessionals\u2019 salary.<\/p>\n

The court will now decide whether paraprofessionals get the payout the council passed.<\/p>\n

But even if they do, it\u2019ll be just a Band-Aid that leaves the system still sorely in need of repair.<\/p>\n

Jennifer Weber and John Ketcham are fellows at the Manhattan Institute<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the City Council are going to war in court over payments to Department of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199487,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[148],"tags":[39953,2872,1296,84642,55,32747,6440,1050,29423,52163,5697,52164,553],"class_list":["post-199486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-zohran-mamdani","tag-autism","tag-city-council","tag-court","tag-mike-mulgrew","tag-opinion","tag-public-schools","tag-students","tag-taxpayers","tag-teachers","tag-teachers-union","tag-unions","tag-united-federation-of-teachers","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117147815440790847","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199486\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}