The media and observers over the ideological spectrum were surprised and, sometimes, disconcerted in July 2014 when at the annual American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention in Are generally, the union’s leadership team announced it really is Innovation Fund grants of $20,000 to $30,000 were going to come in on the market to state and local affiliates to critique the regular Core State Standards (CCSS), the massive multistate effort to boost student achievement.

“It’s a signal that teachers are frustrated and fed up-and they’re making their anger heard, loud and clear,” opined a July Politico story for the new initiative.

“This is an important step simply because this time last year, these folks were gung-ho for Common Core,” said Fordham University’s Mark Naison, a critic of your standards, also in Politico.

David Menefee-Libey, a political scientist at Pomona College, went even more: “It’s all bolstering.”

The AFT’s announcement, in addition to the much-publicized rise of Chicago’s Karen Lewis as well as the election of Barbara Madeloni as president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, plus the emergence from the Badass Teachers Alliance and various social-justice factions within the unions, have combined with the impression that union opposition to your standards is large-and growing. And even, there’s little argument which the unions’ rhetoric and tone have changed.

But enjoy the AFT as well as its larger counterpart, the nation’s Education Association (NEA), really turned their backs within the Common Core in concrete, substantive ways-and if that’s the case, the amount would it matter?

?Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, addresses the viewers in the union’s annual convention, July 2014

A Mixed Message

The unions don’t have any direct authority in the Common Core implementation or even the assessments. They’re not directly responsible for preparing teachers to utilize the brand new standards and administering the revolutionary tests. No one else formal governance role in the way.

Union pronouncements concerning the failure or success of your process, however, and unions’ help states and districts and out of doors partners on the standards, do influence the resources and supports which might be being made available to teachers, plus help shape media and public perceptions with the initiative, also in theory could shape lawmakers’ positions on whether they should call continue, pause, or reengineer the effort.

Concern that the AFT, in order to a point the NEA, was flip-flopping around the Common Core, that could encourage classroom teachers’ effectiveness against the alterations and endanger the effort’s ultimate success, has become a common one of standards supporters and union critics.

“It seemed like they signed through to do that [Common Core development] three years ago, banging it down saying they desired to engage in it, and little by little they’ve peeled off,” says Democrats for Education Reform’s Charlie Barone.

According to that brand of reasoning, the unions expressed their support for the standards noisy . stages, when they were developed then adopted by states during competition for Race to the very top funds. It turned out only once enhancing assessments began, additionally, the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED’s) No Child That is left behind waiver process included clear requirements for evaluating teachers based partly on student test scores, the unions begun balk.

Not everyone goes that far. “They’re trying to walk a great line during which they still offer the standards such as the similar to the way and may implemented,” says Bob Rothman, a typical Core supporter along at the Alliance for nice Education. “But they haven’t reversed themselves” (see “The Common Core Makes its presence felt,” features, Summer 2014).

To claim that the unions had flip-flopped on the Common Core “would be a complete mischaracterization,” insists Sandra Alberti, field director for any nonprofit Student Achievement Partners (SAP), that has been making use of union leadership on implementation.

“The local affiliates achieving this work and teachers have remained really committed, and both unions were dedicated to providing resources to members despite many of the political controversy,” attests Gates Foundation staffer Lynn Olson, who works in concert with the unions in their Common Core endeavors.

Common Core critics from the AFT aren’t getting the notion the fact that AFT has reversed itself, either. The AFT-passed Common Core resolution “tries to obtain it either way,” good Chicago Teachers Union’s (CTU) Jennifer Johnson. She says the latest AFT grant program accepts on its face that the standards were a positive step and merely encourages minor changes.

“That’s not the right focus in the least,” based on Johnson, who believes that Chicago teachers would find their wedding ceremony better invested in accommodating stop the standards rather than tweaking the standards already available.

As the controversy grows, it might be much less clear what union leadership ought to do. You can find dangers for both sides: rebellion on the rank and file on a single, and political marginalization on the other guitar.

“If the standards head on down the tubes on account of fear-mongering and misinformation, the NEA might look really bad,” one union official told Education Week. “Why would anyone take us seriously if we experienced a seat at the table, and we turned our backs for the standards?”

There can also be the very real danger of confusing teachers. “Most people do not live and breathe the nuances of Common Core, so I don’t know where they are really with regards to knowing AFT position,” admits Marla Ucelli-Kashyap, director of AFT’s Educational Issues Department. “But our support remains within the books. It’s “not a yes/no style of issue.”

The Backstory

The Common Core State Standards were officially launched in June 2009. Drafts were released in March 2010 and finalized in June the exact same year. By August 2010, 33 states and Washington, D.C., had adopted them. 2 years later, 12 additional states became members of. Teams of teachers from each NEA and AFT reviewed the standards at main points and signed letters of support along the route. Union involvement inside the Common Core process continued in the following months and years, largely through partnerships with outside funders and nonprofits.

The standards developers at SAP have met with union representatives much like the NEA’s director of education policy and practice Donna Harris-Aikens and AFT’s Ucelli-Kashyap every few months, in accordance with Alberti, to share activities, get feedback, and examine what must be done next.

The Gates Foundation grant to your NEA’s Master Teacher project, containing to this point supported 95 teachers developing Common Core lessons, included the roll-out of 24,000 resources or 3,500 lessons, delivered through Better Lesson, in line with the foundation. AFT locals, including those who are in Albuquerque, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and Jefferson County (Alabama), received Gates-funded grants to produce Common Core lessons, several of which can be bought through Share My Lesson.

The unions been employed closely with SAP, which received an $18 million grant from the GE Foundation to build “immersion institutes” to familiarize teachers using the standards and then to build a storehouse of materials to allow them to use within their instruction. The 2 main national unions and SAP were section of a set that received an $11 million three-year grant on the Helmsley Charitable Rely upon 2012, which closes outside in 2016. Helmsley also provided both unions additionally, the two assessment consortia, Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for faculty and Careers (PARCC) plus the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), a $1.6 million grant in 2013, specifically aimed at engaging teachers within the development and implementation of end-of-year assessments.

Nor has got the unions’ engagement with the Common Core been limited to initiatives with outside funding. Noting the AFT’s pinpoint the standards rolling around in its education journal American Educator as well as the NEA’s $60 million purchase of teacher training projects, a February 2014 Education Week article described the two national unions as “among the initiative’s biggest boosters.” Dubbed the truly amazing Public Schools initiative, the NEA projects were funded mostly with union dues rather then outside grants, and focused mainly on helping teachers you’ll find the most popular Core.

To be sure, the unions as well as others expressed concerns about the Common Core on the way. The AFT produced a report last year that outlined a plan of action and issued tips for the union as well as others had to do. The report expressed the AFT’s apprehensions regarding the design, content, and possibility of punitive make use of assessments and vowed to make sure that educators continue to have a “significant voice” in implementation in the standards.

Such concerns spread as states began to implement the standards with varying success. In some places-states that won Race to # 1 funding in particular-there was efforts and there initially were resources to familiarize educators when using the new standards and make preparations materials to search as well as them. In others, things were hurried and incomplete. There wasn’t a whole new curriculum to go combined with new standards, or it had not been good, or there was not time for it to familiarize yourself with it and approaches to teach for it. From time to time, the revolutionary standards were in position, however with the earlier curricula and tests. In others-New York, especially-the new tests appeared to be used could the new curricula were fully set up.

The Pushback

In April 2013, AFT president Randi Weingarten floated the concept of a moratorium on high-stakes uses of the effects with the new assessments, as well as idea quickly gained steam. Eventually, people that supported some form of a slowdown included the accountability hawks with the Education Trust as well as the Gates Foundation. The U.S. Department of Education began providing waivers to states permitting them to test the limits high-stakes elements of the latest system, plus a amount of other states took steps independently to delay full implementation (see Figure 1).

In July 2013, the NEA affirmed its support for the Common Core standards using a voice vote but it really would not endorse the tests.

Then NEA state leaders met in Washington in January 2014 to contemplate just how to proceed. In February, the NEA issued its first formal statement expressing worry about the implementation process.

Serious queries about the unions’ support for any CCSS became more public in March 2014 at the Council of Chief State School Officers’ annual legislative conference, where AFT and NEA leaders “squabbled” with state education chiefs over public perception and implementation issues, in accordance with an Education Week story. With the event, Weingarten after which you can NEA president Dennis Van Roekel critiqued various elements of the implementation process, which led Massachusetts K