The Chicago Teachers’ Union — an organization that has somehow managed to make public education even worse than you thought possible — just pulled students out of class for a “Day of Civic Action.” The timing? April 22nd. Vladimir Lenin’s birthday. You know, the father of Soviet communism. Total coincidence, we’re sure.

Because when your students are reading at levels that would embarrass a second grader in Mississippi, the obvious move is to cancel school so they can march around with signs. Brilliant strategy.

We need to talk about what’s actually happening here, because the CTU has turned this into an art form. Chicago public schools are some of the worst-performing in the entire country. We’re talking about schools where a quarter of the kids can’t read at grade level. Schools where math scores look like they were generated by a random number generator set exclusively to “failing.” Schools where parents send their children every morning and pray that today is the day someone actually teaches them something.

And the union’s response to this catastrophe? Skip class! Go do “civic action” instead!

Now, what exactly is “civic action” when the Chicago Teachers’ Union organizes it? We’ll give you one guess. It’s not volunteering at a food bank. It’s not picking up trash in the neighborhood. It’s not tutoring younger students who are behind — because that would require the teachers to actually know the material themselves.

No, “civic action” means political activism. It means dragging kids who can barely do long division to rallies and protests organized by the same union that negotiates for higher teacher pay while delivering worse results every single year.

(And they scheduled it on Lenin’s birthday. We just want to make sure that part doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.)

Here’s what drives us absolutely crazy about the CTU. This is a union that went on strike in 2012. Went on strike again in 2019. Refused to go back to work during COVID longer than almost any other teachers’ union in America. And every single time, their argument was the same: “We need more money for the children.”

They got the money. Test scores went down. Attendance went down. Graduation rates are held together with duct tape and grade inflation. But sure — the problem is definitely that kids need MORE days out of the classroom.

Pop quiz for the CTU: If a student misses one day of instruction to attend a political rally organized by their teachers’ union, and that student was already two grade levels behind in reading, how many grade levels behind is that student now?

Trick question. The CTU doesn’t believe in math. Math is racist, remember?

The real villain here isn’t even the individual teachers — some of whom are genuinely trying to help kids in an impossible system. The villain is the union leadership. The Stacy Davises and the Brandon Johnsons of the world who treat Chicago’s public schools like a farm system for progressive activism. The kids aren’t students to these people. They’re future voters. Future protesters. Future union members.

Why teach a kid to read when you can teach a kid to chant?

And let’s be honest about what “civic action” means when it falls on April 22nd. That’s not a coincidence and everyone knows it. Lenin’s birthday has been a rallying point for socialist and communist organizations for over a century. The CTU knows exactly what date they picked. They just figured nobody would notice — or that if anyone did notice, they’d be too afraid of being called a conspiracy theorist to say anything.

Well, we noticed. And we’re saying it.

This is what Democrats have done to public education in every major city they control. Chicago. Baltimore. Detroit. St. Louis. The formula is always the same: pour money into the system, let the unions run the show, watch test scores crater, blame “systemic racism” or “funding gaps,” demand more money, repeat.

At no point in this cycle does anyone suggest that maybe — just maybe — the kids should be in school learning instead of out on the streets doing the union’s political bidding.

The CTU has one skill, and they’ve perfected it: making sure Chicago’s kids learn absolutely nothing. A “Day of Civic Action” is just the cherry on top of a decades-long failure sundae.

Parents in Chicago deserve better. Their kids deserve teachers who show up, do the job, and save the communist holiday celebrations for their own time. But as long as the CTU is running the show, those kids are going to keep falling behind — one “civic action” day at a time.