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High school students rally at an ICE protest in Washington, DC, on February 27, 2026. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Steve Cortes is president of the League of American Workers and advisor to CatholicVote. He directs political campaigns on media, polling, and Hispanic outreach, including Trump 2016/2020 and Vance 2022 U.S. Senate. He is a former broadcaster for Fox News and CNN.

ICE protests grow as student achievement plunges…

Just last week, hundreds of students at Lincoln Park Public High School in Chicago staged a mass anti-ICE “walk out,” leaving classes without permission to protest federal immigration enforcement policies.

Of course, similar scenes have unfolded across the country in recent months, often either tacitly or overtly encouraged by public school teachers and teachers’ union officials. In Chicago, teachers’ union members recently filmed themselves entering a Target store where they harassed employees on the job, bizarrely demanding that they somehow shield workers from ICE enforcement.

Such deliberate ideological activism—encouraged by leftist organizers and echoed by much of the media, effectively grooming students for lawlessness—might be slightly less offensive if actual student performance in the classrooms of Chicago weren’t so dreadful. Even at the protest high school, Lincoln Park, only about half the students are academically proficient, in one of the wealthiest city neighborhoods in America. That’s right—only 51% proficient in math, 53% in reading, and 42% in science.

So, in a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar brownstones and tony boutiques, the best the politicized teachers’ union can achieve is half the kids doing, well, just OK. In fact, Chicago Public Schools actually boasts about Lincoln Park High, branding it as Chicago’s “top neighborhood school.” But admittedly, the school’s performance is better than the citywide marks of academic misery. Among high school juniors across the Windy City, just 19% are math proficient and only 22% read at grade level.

This systemic level of failure does not come cheaply, either. In a city struggling with an unsustainable fiscal crisis, Chicago Public Schools costs taxpayers a whopping $10 billion annually, only half of which reaches student instruction. So the per-pupil cost tops $30,000.

Perhaps if the teachers’ union focused on student achievement instead of constant activism, results could improve? Is the goal to create mature and capable young adults who can thrive in a new digital economy? Is it vital that America raise up a new generation of patriots who love our country and embrace the responsibilities of citizenship?

Instead, it seems that school system chiefs in Chicago—and across America—prefer to indoctrinate students as politically fixated young agitators who can act out with impunity. As long as leftist narratives dominate, those vulnerable children are simply passed along, advancing grades without mastering the basic skills of a fully formed thinker.

These are our children sitting in those classrooms, and these are our tax dollars funding them. Yet far too often those taxpayer dollars are used to promote progressive activism, political indoctrination, and even the grooming of students into ideological movements.

Deliberately using our children and our tax dollars to push ideological activism instead of academic learning is simply wrong. Schools exist to educate, not to indoctrinate. Using taxpayer-funded schools to groom children for activism and defiance of the law is not education—it’s a betrayal of the public trust.

Our schools should never be putting activism before academics—especially when it’s our children in those classrooms and our tax dollars paying the bills.

Public education belongs to the American people. Our children should never be used as political instruments—especially not with our own tax dollars funding it.

Additionally, don’t think these failures apply only to deeply blue cities like Chicago. In fact, nationwide numbers show systemic underperformance as well.

The widely followed national testing standard NAEP—the National Assessment of Educational Progress—shows that a stunning 40% of fourth graders in America are not even at the level of “basic” reading skills. That failure rate is up 29% since pre-COVID levels. Similarly, 39% of eighth graders in America are not proficient in math, and that level of failure has risen an astounding 50% in the last decade.

So instead of ICE protests and chaotic “walk out” culture, it is imperative that we reclaim education and create the conditions for children to thrive. Rather than politics and radicalism, schools must foster the hard skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. In addition, curricula should cultivate a love of Western civilization and the American way of life. That way of life includes the rule of law and the expectation that immigration to the United States flows through the legal processes designed by the people of the republic.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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