COMMENTARY: Not merry about education in the month of May

This month, the streets of Chicago were overrun with young people protesting in honor of May Day. The streets were packed because the Chicago Public Schools handed the teachers union something political organizers dream of: warm bodies.

The Chicago Teachers Union had pushed the district to turn a school day into a system-wide political “Day of Action,” civics redefined as political activism. When the bell rang, the school buses took students to their teachers’ protest. Thousands of students showed up, and taxpayers provided the rides.

This issue extends far beyond the borders of Illinois, where these May Day protests served as a trial balloon for a broader national movement. Both the National Education Association and the CTU are clear that May Day was a “dress rehearsal” for larger protests — shutting down schools and the economy — that are set to come nationwide in 2028. They are training teachers to bring children to protests and make them less “scary” for kids as young as 3.

A week after the protests, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates hosted a post-May Day organizing call that union leaders and other groups attended. The North American Values Institute captured the conversation, wherein Gates described May Day 2026 as a “structure test” for future political mobilization ahead of the November midterm elections.

In a video clip from Chicago, an interviewer stopped two ninth grade girls who were carrying a banner. He asks: What are you protesting? They answer: “For immigrants.” He follows up: Why are you against ICE? “Because they’re bad people.” When he pressed further, they didn’t have more. What they said instead was “f--- Trump,” repeatedly. With a smile.

I have taught hundreds of girls like this. They are regular kids — socially attuned, eager to be liked, excited to be part of something. They live online. They know how to present themselves to a camera. They can hold a sign and deliver a slogan or an expletive.

But they have not been taught to think.

They gave the kind of answer teenagers give when they have absorbed an idea but haven’t really considered it. For them, this is a social day. An outing with teachers and peers they like. A fun moment to be transgressive.

That is why this is so troubling. These students are not leading with their signs. They are being led by adults they trust and their natural tribal desire to belong.

This dynamic has played out nationwide and, indeed, the world. It’s a violation of the implicit trust that children place in the adults around them.

I taught ninth grade. I recognize those students — the ones grinning on camera, enjoying their day out of school. They often arrive in the classroom with predetermined ideas — formed online, shaped by peers and tightly held. My job was to delve deeper, to get them thinking about what they believed, and why.

The goal of any educator should be to develop students’ thinking. To ask questions. To introduce competing ideas. To help students strengthen their reasoning and show them that things are always more complicated than they first appear.

That is education.

What happened on May Day is the opposite. Classrooms that prioritize activism produce students who cannot read critically or tolerate complexity. They wear ideological blinders and become easy prey for ideologues.

The numbers bear this out. Only about a fourth of our nation’s students are proficient in reading or math. Most are civically illiterate. They can hold up a sign with their friends. And for the teachers, that is enough.

Make no mistake, this is a systemic problem. Across K–12 education — from unions to teacher preparation to state licensure rules — the idea that teachers should act as agents of social change has taken hold. A day of student protest is the predictable result of a system that rewards activism and politicized classrooms.

The shift toward activist education is so normalized that most teachers do not even recognize it as political. Ask a fish about water, and it does not know what you mean. What politicization? This is just teaching. The system is a closed loop — an echo chamber with a captive audience of children.

The students in the streets of Chicago are not revolutionaries. They are children who trust the adults around them, who assume their teachers are telling them the truth. These are children being taught that chanting slogans is the same as thinking.

And while Chicago’s students fall further behind in reading, math and civics, the adults running their schools seem perfectly satisfied — so long as the kids can march on command. This is the playbook that activists want to nationalize, and America’s children will pay the price.

That is not education. It is political grooming funded by taxpayers.

Dana Stangel-Plowe is the chief program officer at North American Values Institute. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.