Across the country, students are leaving school grounds in the middle of the day to stage anti-ICE walkouts. So far, at least one student has been struck by a car. Others have been left stranded.
Caught off-guard, parents and policymakers may wonder why teachers' unions seem broadly supportive of students staging these walkouts. But for anyone paying attention, the unions' responses are not surprising. The largest teacher union in the country, the National Education Association, passed a new business item in 2025 pledging to support "students' rights to organize against ICE raids" -- in other words, teachers' right to disrupt their learning in order to promote a revolutionary agenda.
Teachers' unions are increasingly political organizations first and education advocates second. That shift is not accidental, organic, or confined to one city -- it is the product of a coordinated, national strategy to turn K-12 education into a space for ideological mobilization.
Jan. 23 offered a telling snapshot. While Chicago schools were shut due to a winter storm, the Chicago Teachers Union's president and vice president traveled to Minnesota -- not to advocate for students or teachers, but to protest against immigration enforcement.
That same week, the National Education Association Educators for Palestine hosted a webinar, attended by the Fairfax Education Association president, that advised on how to activate unengaged members of their teachers' associations by showing the "connections" between Israel and ICE.
Under the banner of "social justice unionism," teachers' unions are increasingly treating classrooms, teachers, and even students as instruments in a wider ideological project -- one organized, replicated, and funded across the nation.
This shift helps explain why contemporary political controversies are now being filtered into elementary, middle and high schools. As one activist leader put it during the NEA Educators for Palestine webinar, the anti-ICE movement is "the spark that could ignite the fire under Labor." As the saying goes, "The issue is never the issue -- the issue is the revolution."
No union better illustrates this transformation than the highly radicalized Chicago Teachers Union. A kingmaker in city politics, the union is now better known for its political activism than it is for representing teachers. More importantly, it has served as a national template for how unions can be converted into engines of progressive political organizing.
This transformation has been driven by its progressive Caucus of Rank and File Educators, which is openly affiliated with radical groups such as the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and the National Association Against Racism and Political Repression. This arrangement demonstrates how a teachers union can be repurposed as a political force extending far beyond the classroom.
Across the country, progressive caucuses have replicated the model. In Massachusetts, the far-left Educators for a Democratic Union has produced the last three presidents of the Massachusetts Teachers Association -- one of whom went on to found Educators for Palestine NEA and the Massachusetts Teachers' Association Educators for Palestine. In New York City, the Movement of Rank and File Educators mounted a serious challenge to the long-dominant and supposedly "moderate" leadership of the United Federation of Teachers. And in Los Angeles, the Educator Power 2026 candidate slate, which won impressive gains in the recent elections, is seeking to turn the already-activist United Teachers of Los Angeles into an even greater force for progressive politics.
Far from organic, these caucuses within teachers' unions share training, strategy, and, in some cases, sources of funding. The Caucus of Working Educators in the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, for example, was explicitly formed to continue the "revolutionary struggle." Kelly Collins, one of its founders, related how Chicago's caucus had brought together other similar caucuses from across the country to teach them how to sow "the seeds of revolution within the rank and file of the teachers unions across the country," including in Philadelphia going back to 2014.
To formalize this coordination, according to Collins, the Chicago Teachers Union established the United Caucuses of Rank and File Educators, a national hub supported by significant outside funding from the radical Social Justice and Solidarity Fund. Its annual conferences, regional trainings, and monthly meetings are sponsored by Labor Notes, a publisher and training organization tied to the Democratic Socialists of America.
This may all just seem like a confusing alphabet soup of extremist organizations, but the important thing is that they have probably infiltrated the union of your children's teachers. Many of these groups explicitly advocate embedding political organizers within teaching and other industries for the sake of developing a socialist consciousness.
These networks reveal a coordinated national effort to transform teachers' unions from professional associations into political machines. As the Chicago model spreads, teachers unions are increasingly discarding even the pretense that their primary responsibility is to students or educators.
For parents, policymakers, and school districts, this matters. Institutions charged with educating children are instead prioritizing ideological mobilization and revolution. The students become collateral damage.
When it comes to the activism being encouraged throughout K-12, parents and policymakers should keep in mind that the issue, in the end, is never immigration policy, or foreign affairs, or Palestine, or labor rhetoric. The issue is the revolution.
Mika Hackner is director of research for the North American Values Institute.