Groom and Doom

May Day promises to see the U.S. and its classrooms saturated with leftist propaganda.

Celebrated on May 1, May Day has traditionally honored workers and the history of labor organizing. The day traces its roots to the 1886 Haymarket Affair in Chicago, where laborers fighting for an eight-hour workday were met with deadly violence.

But over time, the day has become an excuse for the far left to strut its stuff, and this year’s events will be especially political. Communist Party USA, a prominent leader in the planning, states that workers, students, and families should “rally, march, and take action across the country to demand a nation that puts workers over billionaires.” As a tactic, CPUSA is calling for “No School. No Work. No Shopping.”

The commies are especially combative this year, ironically insisting that the country is descending into a dictatorial state.

“We’ve returned to the days of the Robber Barons and the Gilded Age,” ominously declares Faye Guenther of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 3000. “This will be everyday working people saying, ‘enough is enough,’ and then returning home to organize unions to implement May Day’s goals.”

It’s hardly surprising that the teachers’ unions are front and center in the hoopla planned for this year’s May Day, with loads of indoctrination ready to be foisted on children in the nation’s classrooms. The leader of the radical pack is the National Education Association, which has issued a toolkit that is essentially an updated version of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.

As reported by Defending Education, the toolkit contains typical leftist blather, including a laundry list of demands for a day of action that stresses “building the Society we ALL deserve.” The union’s agenda includes:

· Stopping the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption within the Trump administration.

· Protecting and defending Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs that working people rely on.

· Fully funding public schools, healthcare, and housing for all.

· Stopping the attacks on our communities, including policies targeting immigrants, people of color, Native people, people with disabilities, and those who identify as LGBTQ+.

· taxing the rich

· an elimination of ICE

· expanding democracy

· defending “free and fair elections, not a rigged disaster.”

Additionally, the NEA toolkit promotes “hosting a corporate action,” which the organizers say offers a “chance to stand up to the billionaires who are directly causing them harm and profiting from it.” The listed corporate targets for the action include Chevron and Citgo, which the union claims have played a “critical role in supporting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the ongoing displacement of Palestinians.”

The NEA’s tactics include “Walk-ins” at schools, where participants plan to rally in front of the building before entering to either “celebrate” and “collaborate with school officials” or “protest harmful school conditions and policies.”

It must be noted that May Day is just one example of students being used as pawns by the left. Defending Education maintains a “K-12 Student Walkout and Protest Tracker” that details K-12 student walkouts and protests from 2022 to the present, many of which were orchestrated by left-wing actors.

The group tracked 48 states and Washington, D.C., and found that 278 school districts have seen 600 school walkouts. There were 58 in 2022, 28 in 2023, 24 in 2024, and 59 in 2025, but a whopping 394 in just the first few months of this year. (A recent example of this activity was the coordinated anti-ICE walkouts by many teachers across the country. For instance, Erika Sanzi, director of communications at Defending Education, reported that teachers in Minnesota coordinated student protests via social media. Additionally, in Oregon, a video showed kindergarten students taking part in a demonstration, and numerous schools nationwide preemptively canceled classes to allow students to protest.)

At the local level, the Chicago Teachers Union stands out for its left-wing political activity. In a memo sent to teachers on April 9, CTU hysterically claims that democracy is under attack in the U.S. and that “Trump’s military is starting to automatically register young people for the draft, and his agents are tear-gassing our neighbors and students at dismissal after kidnapping their classmates’ parents as they are being dropped off at school. All of this chaos is happening as federal agencies are taking away their health care, SNAP benefits, and civil rights protections.”

Predictably, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson—a former CTU organizer—backed the CTU’s efforts to shutter schools on May 1. The union pushed to cancel classes that day so students and staff could join a national “no school, no work, no shopping” day of protests. But despite strong backing from the mayor, newly appointed Chicago Public Schools CEO Macquline King balked at the idea, saying in a note to parents that “every minute in the classroom is vital for students.”

On April 16, after much haggling, it was decided that schools would be in session that day. The school district and the union reached an agreement allowing some students and educators to attend a pro-labor, anti-Trump afternoon rally, with the district providing buses for the protest.

Shamefully, the CTU is indifferent to the fact that children in Chicago are poorly educated. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows that only 26% of 8th graders are proficient in reading, and worse, a mere 22% are proficient in math.

Also in the Windy City, chronic absenteeism—defined as missing 10% or more of school days—reached 40% districtwide in the 2024-25 school year.

As the country approaches its 250th anniversary, the upcoming school-based May Day festivities are just one example of the rampant indoctrination—often at the behest of the teachers’ unions, which are taxpayer-funded—that passes for education in our government-run schools.

More than anything, parents need to be aware of this when they send their children to school in the morning. Their children’s future, and the nation’s, are at grave risk if things continue on their current course. This blatant left-wing grooming could turn students into little more than Marxist foot soldiers and steer the U.S. in a far-left direction.

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Larry Sand is a retired 28-year classroom teacher who served as president of the nonprofit California Teachers Empowerment Network from 2006 to 2025. He now focuses on raising awareness about our failing education system.