The Boston Teachers Union proudly represents more than 10,000 teachers and other professionals including school nurses, psychologists, guidance counselors, paraprofessionals, and substitute teachers.

Together, we advocate for the interests of students, parents and education professionals throughout the Boston Public Schools and beyond. We support investment in public education to ensure a stronger future for our students and our city. As a union of educators, we are part of a movement that seeks to improve the quality of life for all working people. We are united against all forms of prejudice and bigotry that would seek to devalue the lives or liberties of our students, families or colleagues.

Union Membership

Being a member of the Boston Teachers Union affords you representation in all matters related to work, a competitive wage scale, professional development opportunities, access to a Health and Welfare Plan, and much more. Our union works with the community to ensure our schools are the best as they can be, promote the strengthening of public education, and ensure adequate funding to support improvements in public education. We are also proud to work through COPE (the Committee on Political Education) to elect pro-public education, pro-union candidates.

Officers and Staff

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BTU History

Educators in Boston have been organizing to improve their working conditions and their students’ learning conditions since the dawn of public schooling in Massachusetts. Since 1945, the Boston Teachers Union, chartered as Local 66 of the American Federation of Teachers, has led the way in these struggles – from the union’s early fights for pay equity and collective bargaining rights to today’s ongoing struggles for fully funded public schools and inclusion done right. The BTU is committed to preserving and presenting its history to celebrate the transformative power of union organizing and to learn from prior struggles and hard moments in our past as we build toward a brighter future.

Since 2018, the BTU has partnered with UMass Boston to collect and share our union’s history. These efforts have included a community archiving event, an ongoing oral history project, and the digitization of the union’s newspaper, all of which are freely available online through UMass Boston’s Open Archives.

We have collected full-length oral histories with nearly 30 BTU leaders and organizers and made available full-text searchable versions of the Boston Union Teacher going back to the 1960s. The BTU has also transferred some historical documents to the University Archives and Special Collections at UMass Boston for preservation, where they will be processed for public use.

Visit the BTU Collections online at UMass Boston

For those interested in conducting their own research in these archives, visit this Research Guide to the collection, created by UMass Boston librarians, faculty, and graduate students.

UMass Boston faculty and students have also created a companion website and digital exhibits using the BTU Collections, a site whose development is ongoing as part of graduate research in public history. In partnership with BTU members and leaders, graduate students have explored topics across the union’s history, including the origins of teacher unions, the experiences of Black educators during desegregation, BTU’s history of standing in solidarity with the wider labor movement, and the union’s response to the anti-bilingual-education Unz Initiative in 2002.

To learn more about the collections, email project co-directors Betsy Drinan(Retired BTU Secretary-Treasurer) and Nick Juravich (UMass Boston) at BTUHistory@gmail.com.