Executive Director

CTA Executive Director Carolyn Doggett is a veteran classroom teacher and passionate advocate for public education, educators, and union rights. She leads CTA’s team of more than 500 employees statewide and has won numerous outstanding victories for students and educators during her long tenure.

Since becoming executive director in 1995, Doggett cites two major accomplishments that stand out among many. One is the passage of the CTA-sponsored Quality Education Investment Act (SB 1133) to help our public schools of greatest need. The law, passed by the Legislature in 2006, will provide lower-performing schools with $2.9 billion over seven years for proven reforms such as smaller class sizes, more counselors and quality training for educators. It also provides money to community colleges to enhance vocational education programs.

She is also proud of the historic CTA campaign in 2005 to defeat several initiatives that would have hurt our public schools, the education profession and the rights of union members. With unprecedented coalition building and organizing, CTA proved the importance of a united labor movement. The coalition defeated the governor’s special election attacks on working families that would have destroyed teachers’ due process rights, silenced the political voices of CTA members, and dismantled the state’s minimum school funding law.

During Doggett’s 12 years on the job, CTA has had many other legislative and political victories. California voters have approved more than $75 billion in local and state bonds and parcel taxes, defeated a well-financed school voucher initiative in 2000, secured a new state program to reduce class sizes in the kindergarten through third-grade, helped increase state education funding, and greatly improved teachers' pensions.

Today, CTA membership includes more than 340,000 public school teachers, counselors, psychologists, librarians, and education support professionals. They work in the more than 1,000 local chapters to comprise what is the largest professional public employee organization in California.

Doggett also maintains CTA's strategic alliance with the powerful National Education Association, which represents 3.2 million educators in the country. CTA is the NEA's largest affiliate.

She is a fourth-generation Californian and a fourth-generation teacher, having begun her career by teaching first grade at Brookside Elementary School in Willits, California.

She taught high school English from 1969 to 1981 in Anchorage, Alaska, was twice elected as president of the Anchorage Education Association and twice president of NEA-Alaska, the state association affiliate of the National Education Association. She lobbied the Alaska Legislature and sharpened her organizing skills in that state, going on to work on California school board and legislative campaigns.

In 1994 she was promoted to CTA deputy executive director, and took her current post a year later, bringing with her the core union values that include her belief that an injury to one is an injury to all.

Doggett holds a bachelor of arts degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She has taken advanced course work at the University of Alaska, Anchorage; at California State University campuses in Sonoma and Hayward, and at the six-week Harvard Trade Union Program for union activists, where she lectures annually.

Doggett and her husband, Roger Severin, live in Belmont.

Contacting Carolyn Doggett

California Teachers Association
P.O. Box 921
1705 Murchison Drive
Burlingame, CA 94011-0921
Phone: (650) 552-5329
Fax: (650) 552-5001
E-mail: cdoggett@cta.org