The Issue: Educator Rights

Respecting our educators as professional experts in our field means more than just paying a living wage. It means centering our voices and expertise in legislation that affects our work. We stand up for educators having a voice in decisions that affect them and will fight to protect and expand labor and workers rights in Colorado. We call on elected officials to commit to building an accountability system that is designed by educators, free from bias, and utilizes existing, nationally-validated assessments that have more immediate, actionable data to inform student learning.

What We’re Doing About Educator Rights

Here are a few things that we are standing up for around the rights of educators:

• We believe in strengthening the ability of education employees to bargain collectively, including a statewide collective bargaining law for all public school employees.
• Educators have the right to have adequate time, professional autonomy, resources, and training for all educators to meet the needs of their students and focus on classroom instruction and pedagogy.
• We believe in reducing class sizes in all grades as well as reducing the ratios of students assigned to the following school employees: counselors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, special education providers, and other public school employees who are assigned a specific case load of students.
• We believe in ensuring educators have a voice in policy decisions that affect them.

During the 2023 legislative session, we are prioritizing advocating for the following policies:

• Starting a process to reimagine a holistic accountability system, with educators and experts in the field leading the effort to design a system that serves the students and educators of Colorado.
• Passing the Interstate Teacher Mobility Compact, allowing teachers to use an eligible license held in another state to get an equivalent license in Colorado, lowering the barriers and getting teachers back into the classroom more seamlessly.
• Protecting public sector workers when they speak up about working conditions.

Learn more on our legislative advocacy webpage.

The Issue: LGBTQ+ Inclusion

Proactive inclusion of all genders, ethnicities, sexualities and lifestyles is critical to the mental health and happiness of our students and educators. In 2022, CEA surveyed Colorado educators to get a better grasp on the education landscape for LGBTQ+ educators and students. They survey led to the creation of a report called “LGBTQ+ in Education:
Building An Inclusive Public Education through our Unions”. The report found that the majority of LGBTQ+ educators work in school environments where they feel neither safe nor supported.

• 85% of LGBTQ+ respondents are not openly “out” to their school communities.
• 80% of our LGBTQ+ educators reported working in a school without gender-inclusive restrooms for students.
• 40% of respondents had witnessed or heard about students being discriminated against due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.
• 45% of respondents who are in a school that engages in equity work reported that LGBTQ+ voices and issues are either not included in that equity work or are only included to a small extent.

In order for our students and educators to thrive, it’s critical that proactive inclusion policies are enacted.

What We’re Doing About Inclusion for LGBTQ+ Educators and Students

As an immediate next step to addressing issues of inequity in public education, changes are needed on multiple levels, including at the state level through K-12 policy and the Colorado Department of Education, at the district level through bargaining and adoption of board policy, and within our union.

We can best ensure that these rights are upheld if they are codified in a collective bargaining
agreement. However, if a local does not bargain, the included model contract provisions can be easily modified into board policies, which a local can push to have adopted by their school board.

We have focused our next steps on school district level changes, but have included changes that could be enacted within the union or at the state level, as well. In identifying the main issues, we found they fit broadly into the following categories:

1. Non-Discrimination and “Right to be Out”
2. Inclusive and Accessible Facilities
3. Inclusive Employment Benefits
4. Intentional Hiring Practices and Representation
   in the Workplace
5. High Quality Professional Development around LGBTQ+ Identities
6. Intentionally Building Inclusive School Culture

Read more about our plans for supporting LGBTQ+ inclusion in the full LGBTQ+ in Education report.

The Issue: School Safety

Our schools – their successes and their challenges – are often a reflection of the issues our communities are wrestling with. This is especially obvious with our schools’ ongoing struggle to ensure safety of all those who work and learn within them each day.

Safety in schools is a top priority for our organization. However, 67% of educators are “very” or “somewhat worried” about a mass shooting at their school. We believe that schools should be spaces where all members of the school community feel safe and welcome.

We need to work on creating an authentic engagement between community members and policymakers, so that decisions made by policymakers are not only focused on just the physical security of our buildings. We also need to focus on improvements in social-emotional support for students by increasing the number of counselors, social workers and mental health professionals at our schools. And these mental health supports are not just needed by students, but for education professionals as well.

What We’re Doing About School Safety

We know that educators, administrators and policymakers can work together to decrease incidents of school-based violence. Our organization is focusing on three components that we believe most readily affect the safety and well-being of our students and education professionals: increasing mental health support for students and educators, boosting LGBTQ+ acceptance and inclusion, and focusing gun safety regulations so that our schools remain safe places for learning.

The Issue: Testing and Accountability

We believe that our current model of school and teacher assessment relies far too heavily on results from student testing. Contrary to our current model, an effective accountability system would serve to provide a full picture of how our schools are serving students (based on a broad spectrum of indicators) so that timely support for students’ and educators’ needs can be provided.

We also believe that education professionals must be included in decisions that affect accountability and assessment, so that these systems become tools for not just penalizing and pointing out deficits without providing support and resources, but for championing and repeating schools’ successes.

Our goal is to build an accountability system that includes multiple indicators of school quality and student success. Some indicators may include:

• Graduation rates.
• Students’ access to resources and supports, including advanced coursework and fully qualified teachers.
• Number of specialized instructional personnel.
• Access to libraries.
• Modern instructional materials and facilities.
• Health and wellness programs.
• High-quality early education programs.
• Arts and athletic programs.

What We’re Doing About Testing and Accountability

Our goal is to advance policies that reduce the influence of high-stakes testing in defining teacher assessment and student success. In support of this goal, we will:

• Build and strengthen relationships with partners and parent groups to lead a joint
  fight on testing.
• Elevate educator voices and increase engagement at the State Board of
• Education and within the Colorado Department of Education.
• Educate parents, educators, policy makers and the public about the racist and discriminatory history of standardized testing.
• Develop and implement tactics to dismantle the current standardized testing system; build a movement to resist testing abuse and overuse, and to promote authentic assessment.

Learn more about how we plan on bargaining and organizing to reach our goals around testing and accountability.