Dean Vogel, outgoing president of the California Teachers Association

Dean Vogel, approachable president of the California Teachers Association

EdSource is conducting a serial of interviews featuring educators' experiences with the Common Cadre State Standards. For more information near the Mutual Core, check out our guide.

Dean Vogel is the outgoing president of the 325,000-fellow member California Teachers Association, the country's largest labor marriage. Earlier condign CTA president in 2011, Vogel served as the organization'due south vice president and secretary-treasurer, following more than three decades every bit a teacher and counselor in  the Vacaville Unified School District in Solano County. He will step downward in June, when current CTA Vice President Eric C. Heins will take over.

The following questions and answers take been edited for length and clarity.

Does the CTA support the Common Core State Standards?

Absolutely! Nosotros are 100 percentage behind the Common Core.

But it's important for you lot to sympathise that that is really a significantly different statement than "Nosotros are 100 percent behind the Mutual Core as it is being presented in many of the districts around the state of California."

Additionally, there is, more often than not, a substantive deviation between what the Common Core is and what information technology'southward being portrayed equally. …and that is why you lot will observe so many teachers around the state proverb things similar, "I hate the Common Core." And, at the aforementioned fourth dimension, you'll find teachers saying, "Oh, my gosh! The Common Core is such a relief."

The CTA conducted a survey last year that showed that half of the state'due south teachers gave failing grades to the Common Core. To what extent are the state's teachers really on board?

The State Board of Pedagogy adopted the Common Core in 2010, and very shortly thereafter, in some districts, the superintendent and the chapter president got together really early and said, "We've got to figure out a fashion to help our faculties bargain with this result. Let'due south first planning how we're going to become about doing that."

So there was a joint labor-management collaborative effort, where, at the building level, at the elementary schools, at the middle and high schools, the faculties were working collaboratively. Nosotros were given time during the duty day to do this work, or paid for extra fourth dimension outside of the duty day to actually await at the Common Cadre, look at existing curricula, make determinations about what's going to work, and make recommendations about potential programs that either could be bought or give them the fourth dimension to develop curricula.

When I get into those districts and talk nigh the Common Core, teachers say things like, "I'm just so grateful that I'thousand finally getting the hazard to be the pedagogical decision-maker in my own classroom, and that I've had the opportunity from the ground floor to build this curriculum."

So compare that with what (other) teachers are being given. They're beingness handed curriculum that they've never seen before, that they've had no hand in putting together. They're giving benchmarked tests, being used not for them to differentiate education, but for them to identify who are the kids that are below the proficiency line… and groom them and then they'll be better examination-takers. And they're saying, "Well, the Common Core is no different than all the nonsense that I've had shoved down my throat."

…It's not surprising that half of the teachers would say they hate the Common Core. In the concluding fifteen years… teachers have increasingly been told not only what they have to teach, but how to teach information technology.

We're all victims of the civilization that we've been complicit in developing, that basically says, "Somebody high above is going to judge us based on the way our kids perform on a standardized exam."

Do you lot have whatsoever idea what percent of districts have been and so thoughtful and proactive, as you depict?

Very, very few. Out of the thousand or so districts in California, this might have happened in just 25 or xxx of them. So what happened, what we did organizationally, about four years ago, by using some of our ain resources and getting a grant from the National Didactics Clan, nosotros put together a Common Core preparation at our summertime institute.

It basically says to the professional, "Nosotros trust you lot to exist the pedagogical decision-maker in the classroom. This is where nosotros call back kids should become. Yous determine how to go there."

And so we started doing trainings like that and… nosotros'd get 300 or 400 teachers at a time. But when you effigy we've got 300,000 of them or more than in California, that'south not very many.

It seems that many critics of the Common Core are really more opposed to the testing culture you cite.

You know, I sat with the secretary of education, Arne Duncan. As the new president of CTA, the word effectually the identify was I was this new thinker, and Secretary Duncan was courting me, and nosotros had a lot of opportunities to talk one-to-one. I told him, in the very early days, "You lot take got to figure out how to separate testing from the Common Core. Didactics is not a race, you know. Kids don't learn at the same stride, for crying out loud. Everyone who'south ever had more than one kid understands that they grow at dissimilar rates, and they have different interests, and their curiosities spark over unlike things."

He finally stopped talking to me, because I finally had to say, "Look. You just need to understand what you're doing in the department is at all-time counterproductive. At worst, it's destructive." And we've been watching it unfold around the country since so.

And, to our good fortune, the divergence in California is that the policy people are pretty much all lining up. The governor and the governor'south staff, the State Board of Education, the state superintendent of public instruction, the legislative leadership, the teachers unions… all of these different groups are pretty much all on the aforementioned folio, that we've got to become slowly. We've got to first separate the evolution of curriculum based on standards from the development of the assessment, and we've got to bring information technology all together in a very thoughtful style.

Are teachers lament of fatigue when it comes to learning the new standards? Practise y'all hear any complaints specifically that there are simply too many standards?

"Besides many standards" was really consistent with the old California standards that were a mile wide and an inch thick. At that place was just not enough time. I heard a lot more complaining nigh the former standards than I have about the new.

On the other hand, teachers are talking about being fatigued and overworked. They're continually being asked to practise more and more with less and less. We're the eighth-largest economy in the world. We're 47th in the country in funding. We're last in counselors. Last in librarians. Final in grade size. I hateful information technology'southward difficult to find a instructor who's not drawn and feeling overworked and disrespected, or at to the lowest degree under-respected.

I don't call back it's every bit related to the new standards equally it is only to the conditions of teaching and learning, due to the fact that we're then severely underfunded.

The California Legislature authorized $ane.five billion terminal year to implement the Mutual Core. Will that be plenty?

Hither's the predicament: Districts were given the discretion to use that money notwithstanding they wanted. And allow's say a district knows they're going to be using estimator-adaptive assessments – and the most recent computers they take are erstwhile Apple IIe's that are all stacked in a closet in the library. And they have no wi-fi connexion. What are those districts going to use that coin for? They're going to exist using it to buy hardware and bandwidth. And so that'southward what happened with a lot of that money.

So the professional learning opportunities for teachers, which were admittedly essential if you actually want to move thoughtfully and deliberately in implementing this, didn't happen nearly to the degree that they should take happened. So, admittedly, we believe we demand more money. But we likewise understand the reality of the situation we're in, and that ways that near districts are still needing infrastructure. Then the best that I can say is that nosotros've got to remember this isn't a race.

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