EDITORIAL: Tilting at capitalism as Colorado's kids fall behind
May 24—K-12 standardized test scores tanked across Colorado amid the pandemic's lengthy school shutdown and have yet to climb back to even pre-COVID levels. And those levels were abysmal to begin with. Indeed, testing back in 2019 revealed at most a third of students performed at or above grade level in math and English.
It's no wonder a survey this past spring by education reform advocacy group Ready Colorado revealed only 31% of respondents said they feel Colorado public education is headed in the right direction.
In such a climate of near-free fall for academic performance, you'd think the state's largest teachers union, which represents 39,000 educators, might want to propose a solution. Or, at least, a response.
Instead, the Colorado Education Association passed a resolution — blaming much of the world's ills on capitalism.
"The CEA believes that capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources," the resolution read. "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."
That's right, capitalism — the economic system responsible for the Industrial Revolution, the Model T Ford and the iPhone. It's also the economic system that funds the construction of our public schools and, in a roundabout way, the hefty salaries of the CEA's union bosses.
The resolution was adopted discreetly last month at the union's state assembly but confirmed publicly for The Gazette only last week. It reads almost like a parody — an attempt to satirize Marx and Engels' 1848 "Communist Manifesto" to reflect today's woke sensibilities.
But it's also alarming. Not so much because this salad of stray thoughts has much chance of influencing students or anyone else. Nor because of how it reflects an elementary ignorance of modern history, to say nothing of Economics 101.
And not even because it exposes the ever-more-leftward, ever-more-out-of-touch tilt of the state's, and nation's, largest teachers union. That's old news for a labor union that was boycotting Florida orange juice back in the 1990s to punish its advertisers for sponsoring talk radio's Rush Limbaugh broadcasts.
Rather, it's alarming because of what the resolution and the union itself fail to address: Colorado's dismal student achievement.
Ready Colorado's President Brenda Dickhoner got it right in The Gazette's report: "With a majority of our students not reading, writing or doing math at grade level, we would urge the CEA to focus on improving student outcomes instead of dismantling an economic system that promotes human prosperity and innovation."
At best, the resolution is tilting at windmills. At worst, it's fiddling while Rome burns.
Perhaps we shouldn't expect any better from an organization that bears some of the responsibility for the latest drop in test scores. It was the Colorado Education Association and its local affiliates that had lobbied to keep schools closed much longer than necessary during the pandemic. In the face of abundant data that COVID in fact posed a very low risk of serious effects for school-age kids, the unions continued to advocate keeping everyone home.
Meaning, all but the most online-learning-inclined children idled adrift in cyberspace, often unsupervised, barely tethered to whatever it was they were supposed to be learning on their screens. Many languished as their learning eroded.
All of which only serves further to disqualify the union as a serious voice on education policy. While the union is preoccupied with its support for a discredited revolution of the 19th century — Colorado's kids are ill prepared to excel in the 21st.
