A major teachers’ union in the state of Colorado recently passed a resolution declaring that the capitalist system of economics “inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources.”
According to Fox News, the final draft of the resolution passed by the Colorado Education Association (CEA) reads: “CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy, (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality.”
But a screenshot was leaked of an earlier draft, which saw an extra phrase added to the end of the paragraph. The line declared that the CEA’s goal would be “to dismantle capitalism and replace it with a new, equitable economic system.”
In the same scrapped version of the resolution, another line added that “we are constantly using band-aids and minor reforms to make things better, which is good, but the system itself is the problem, and it needs to be named.”
The screenshot of the original draft was leaked to an outlet called The Lion by a former federal official, who received the image from a CEA member who was disgusted by the resolution. When the outlet went to the CEA’s director of communications Lauren Stephenson, she acknowledged the legitimacy of the leaked image and the resolution itself, which she admitted was passed in secret due to concerns about “process” and privacy.
The resolution was introduced by history professor Bryan Lindstrom, who tweeted after the resolution’s passage that CEA members are now allowed “to publicly advocate and lobby for anti-capitalist policies at the CO Capitol.”
The CEA is a state affiliate of the broader National Education Association (NEA), which has also displayed far-left tendencies in recent years. Becky Pringle, the president of NEA, declared recently that “racial justice,” “social justice,” and “climate justice” must become “pillars” of the NEA’s mission.
“For us at the NEA, education justice must be about racial justice, it must be about social justice, it must be about climate justice. It must be about all of those things. For our students to be able to come to school ready to learn every day–We can never think of education as an isolated system because everything connects to our students’ ability to learn,” said Pringle. “So, we have to necessarily talk about housing justice, food inequality, and the reality that we all just went through a global pandemic together and of course it was the most marginalized communities that were already suffering from the inequities in every single social system in this country and every country.”