It is with grave concern that people in Summit County have learned that the Colorado Education Association passed the following resolution in April:

“The CEA believes that capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and 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.”

We urge the Summit County Education Association to repudiate the resolution. It is Marxist dogma, wrong-headed, bad for students, and offensive to Summit County parents, taxpayers and voters.

Capitalism is not the cause of the problems cited by the resolution.  Before Capitalism:

• Child labor was universal and a necessity for family survival
• There was little or no public education, and most adults were illiterate
• Racism, patriarchy and “gender and LGBTQ disparities” were the social norms

The initial draft of the resolution called for capitalism to be dismantled and replaced with a “new, equitable economic system.” Presumably, that would be a Marxist socialist system. That system caused 100 million deaths, war, poverty and misery — in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, in Germany under Hitler’s National Socialism, in Communist China from Mao Zedong until today, and the socialist regimes of Cuba and North Korea.

It is nice that the state union wants “a safer and more equitable world,” but there are serious differences in how to create that world. We pay Summit County teachers to teach, not preach. It would be acceptable for a high school course to teach the relative merits of Marxist and capitalist systems. A teacher who accepts the anti-free market resolution could not be expected to do that fairly and honestly. 

We ask Summit County educators to repudiate the resolution and get back to work teaching. The people want to know where the local union stands.