Recent weeks have seen a wave of student walkouts around the country, with school-age teens and kids leaving class to join protests against actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). From California to the Midwest, students are marching through streets, holding signs, and chanting slogans, criticizing deportation policies and recent high-profile incidents involving federal agents. This even involves kids who are far too young to read the message they are promoting, let alone understand it. The demonstrations have been part of a broader, coordinated effort tied to nationwide calls for walkouts and economic disruption aimed at pressuring the government to defund or dismantle ICE entirely.

On their face, these walkouts have been framed by the organizers as student-led protests, supposedly meant to allow them to express their own concerns about deportation tactics and the chaos surrounding ICE operations.

In northern Indianapolis, for example, high school students walked out and lined a busy street, holding signs with messages including “ICE kills” and “No one’s illegal on stolen land” — all based on the idea that they were supporting their immigrant classmates. One 18-year-old involved in organizing told reporters she wanted to show support for diversity and fairness.

There were even coordinated calls nationwide under what some activists called a “National Shutdown” — a broader strike urging people to skip work, school, and shopping to protest ICE funding and enforcement practices.

But not everyone accepts the stated claim that these walkouts are spontaneous, grassroots student movements. Documents and organizing guides from liberal activist groups have surfaced, suggesting the protests were carefully planned and coordinated — going well beyond spontaneous student expression.

A recent Washington Examiner investigation reported that liberal activist organizations — including the Sunrise Movement and UNIDOS Minnesota — circulated materials to high school students in Minneapolis on how to protest ICE, complete with suggested tactics and messaging. One training guide even encouraged tactics such as buy-and-return actions at big-box retailers like Target, a strategy designed to inconvenience shoppers and employees, disrupt sales, and deliberately harm the business.

Preparation for the walkout included slides presented to students, packed with carefully selected messaging and buzzwords intended to drive engagement and participation. “‘We are seeing this surge in ICE agents because we live in an authoritarian regime,’ [one] slideshow shown to students reads. ‘ICE is being used to terrorize and divide everyday people, while billionaires get richer.’”

Along with growing questions about who is actually behind these protests and why these age groups are being heavily influenced to join, there’s also concern about the loss of classroom time, particularly in schools where academic scores are already below average.

Columnist Geoffrey Ingersoll put the question bluntly: “Can the public school children participating in ‘ICE Out’ protests even read?” He’s sounding the alarm about the consequences of turning schools into political activism spaces rather than educational environments.

Fox News highlighted an outside student union in Rhode Island that played a major role in the walkout for students across the Providence School District, drawing criticism for engaging in political actions and detracting from classroom instruction. Another report noted backlash after Chicago teachers union members staged protests at a retail store over immigration policy rather than prioritizing educational outcomes.

So what’s really happening here?

Many students are likely acting in good faith, motivated by a genuine desire to protect classmates or community members. But evidence that organized political groups are doing much of the behind-the-scenes work — shaping messaging and steering students toward explicitly anti-ICE positions — raises several red flags. Young people’s limited life experience and incomplete understanding of complicated policy issues make them especially vulnerable to having their worldviews guided in one direction, with little exposure to opposing perspectives or meaningful debate.

The efforts by these outside groups are not illegal, but they should raise questions about who’s shaping these movements and whether students and parents fully understand that influence. Are parents even included in the decision to use class time for these activities?

For many parents, that’s the heart of the issue — especially when school environments become channels for adult political goals. Parents have a fundamental right to decide what ideas and values their children are exposed to during their formative years. When school time is spent marching through intersections with signs bearing pre-determined messaging or chanting slogans instead of learning history, math, science, or literacy, the role of moms and dads quickly erodes, and their input becomes irrelevant. In a time when many parents are already concerned about academic performance and the future prospects of young Americans, tying up instructional hours with organized political activism — whether around immigration enforcement or any other hot-button issue — is seen by many as a distraction from core educational goals, and an infringement on conversations that should be led by parents in the home.

There is also a legitimate concern about safety. While most reports describe demonstrations without incident, any time crowds of teenagers leave supervised classrooms and gather in traffic and city streets, the risk increases.

Public schools exist to educate, not to serve as training grounds for one political perspective or another. Teachers are supposed to teach English, science, math, and how to think, not what to think, acting as self-appointed political leaders.

For America to thrive, we need kids who are well-educated, curious, well-rounded, and ready for adulthood — not students whose primary after-school activity is gearing up for the next opportunity to line the streets and scream the slogan of the day at passing vehicles. If we genuinely want young people to be informed and engaged citizens, that work should start with a solid education, not spending school hours making liberal educators feel validated.