When Chicago Public Schools announced that May 1 would be treated as a “Day of Civic Action,” it was designed to sound like a harmless attempt at engagement or civics instruction. In reality, it marks something far more troubling: the alignment of a taxpayer-funded school system with an explicitly political agenda tied to May Day protests.
Under guidance shaped by the Chicago Teachers Union, students were not simply encouraged to learn about civic life — they were steered toward activism, with schools functioning as staging grounds.
For decades, the social contract between parents and the public school system was simple: schools teach the fundamentals — reading, writing, and arithmetic — and parents would handle the moral and political upbringing of their children. But in Chicago, that contract hasn’t just been breached; it has been shredded and set on fire.
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A recent agreement between CPS and the CTU about the terms of the day of protest makes clear that the intention is to stage a state-sponsored protest. It is a coercive mechanism that allows tax-funded facilities and captive audiences of children to be used as tools for a partisan political agenda.
Under the guise of “civic engagement curriculum,” the CTU has successfully institutionalized its radical ideology, ensuring that the next generation of Chicagoans is trained not to be citizens, but to be on the picket line.
Recent revelations from my organization have exposed the dark reality of union-promoted professional development. In these workshops, teachers are taught that traditional social studies education — the very history that built this nation — serves only to uphold a “genocidal domestic and global status quo.” This isn’t education, it’s the degradation of American civic values. It is a concerted effort to teach children to hate their own country before they even understand how its government works.
Perhaps most disturbing is the overt targeting of the Jewish community within these state-sanctioned sessions. At a time when antisemitism is surging across the globe, the CTU is promoting workshops that encourage teachers to strip Jewish students of their institutional support and safety nets by delegitimizing Jewish organizations working to combat antisemitism in the public school system, all while wrapping it in the language of “social justice.”
The radicalization starts earlier than most parents believe. The debate isn’t over high schoolers debating current events; we are talking about a pre-school curriculum that covers LGBT theory, immigration politics, and highly politicized definitions of racism. When schools are teaching 3-year-olds about the nuances of gender theory and systemic oppression before they can tie their own shoes, we aren’t “educating” them — they are conditioning them for a lifetime of grievance politics.
By the time students reach high school, the indoctrination is complete. Training sessions led by the National Education Association have been documented, leading students to the pre-ordained conclusion that the United States is currently a functional authoritarian state. This rhetoric is dangerous. It frames the American experiment not as a flawed but noble pursuit of liberty, but as an illegitimate regime that must be dismantled.
Worst of all is the culture of deceit being fostered among the faculty. CTU-linked workshops have explicitly instructed teachers on how to “sneak” social justice pedagogy past administrators and parents. They know that if the average Chicago parent saw the materials being used in their child’s classroom, there would be an uproar. They teach educators to be subversives, treating the parents — the very people whose taxes pay their salaries — as the enemy to be outmaneuvered.
The CTU justifies this radical shift by claiming that political activism is necessary in the classroom because of the actions of the current administration and the state of the world. This is a chilling admission; it suggests that the classroom is there to advance the union’s political agenda, not to serve the public. It suggests that if the union disagrees with the person in the White House or the governor’s mansion, they have a “right” to use our children as political cudgels.
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As protests with teachers and students march through the city of Chicago, May Day is our wakeup call. Chicago is a blueprint for the rest of the country, and if we allow our schools to become factories for partisan activists, we will lose the future of the republic. It is time to demand a return to objective standards, to protect students from institutionalized bias, and to give parents the educational freedom to take their tax dollars elsewhere if the public system refuses to stop the indoctrination.
The classroom should be a place where students learn how to think, not what to think. Chicago’s experiment suggests a different trajectory — one in which education and activism are no longer distinct. The question now is whether parents, policymakers, and the public are willing to accept that shift or insist on restoring the boundary that once defined the American classroom.