By Michael Tavoliero
In Alaska, public education carries extraordinary power and control. It does more than transmit mathematics, science, history, and language; it helps shape how young people understand authority, citizenship, rights, government, and their relationship to one another. Precisely because that influence is so great, public education must resist the temptation to transform instruction into political mobilization. The proper purpose of civic education is not to produce students who arrive at an institutionally preferred conclusion. It is to produce citizens capable of reaching conclusions for themselves.
History demonstrates why this distinction matters. Some of the greatest political catastrophes of the twentieth century occurred when ideology ceased to be an idea open to examination and became a doctrine enforced through institutions. The Soviet Union under Stalin, Nazi Germany under Hitler, Maoist China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and Iran under revolutionary clerical rule demonstrate the immense and tragic human cost that can follow when totalizing ideologies are fused with centralized state power, political conformity is enforced, and the rights and dignity of the individual are subordinated to the objectives of the regime.
The resulting suppression of dissent and the subordination of the individual to an ideological objective destroys human lives, potential and true societal progress. History provides abundant warning that revolutionary socialist movements have developed into communist and Islamic systems in which political conformity displaced individual liberty and independent judgment.
The lesson is not that students should be protected from any political philosophy. The opposite is true. They should study all of them seriously. Students should read Adam Smith and Karl Marx, examining how Western liberalism, socialism, and Islamic political thought have understood property, labor, government, social order, and human flourishing. Students examine labor movements and free markets and compare the promises of political systems with their historical results.
They should be taught to distinguish ambition from outcome and propaganda from evidence, and to understand why the American constitutional system, grounded in individual liberty, representative government, free enterprise, private property, and the rule of law, has produced a more durable foundation for freedom, prosperity, and human flourishing than the totalitarian alternatives history has repeatedly tested.
That educational obligation becomes compromised when taxpayer funded institutions move from teaching political participation to manufacturing it.
Consider the controversy involving Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union on May Day, May 1, 2026. The problem was not that students were exposed to protest, organized labor, or political activism. Those are legitimate subjects of civic education and should be examined seriously.
The concern arises when a taxpayer-funded educational system, working alongside a politically active public education union, crosses from teaching students how citizens participate in public life into facilitating their participation in a political event aligned with causes favored by the institution or its employees. That is precisely where the extraordinary influence of public education requires restraint. When schools cease merely explaining political movements and begin helping mobilize students on behalf of them, something fundamental is endangered: the distinction between preparing young people to exercise independent judgment and using public authority to influence the political conclusions they may ultimately reach.
A more disturbing pattern emerged in Alaska in both 2024 and 2026. On April 4, 2024, hundreds of public-school students left their classrooms during the instructional day to participate in a coordinated statewide political walkout protesting Governor Mike Dunleavy’s veto of an education-funding bill and the Legislature’s failure to override it. That action was organized through the Alaska Association of Student Governments, a statewide student-government structure supported by the Alaska School Activities Association, and it advanced a political objective that NEA-Alaska was simultaneously pursuing as a major legislative priority.
Then, in 2026, Anchorage School District itself reported another district-wide student walkout, this time in response to proposed budget cuts, with particularly strong participation at Polaris K–12.
When school-day political walkouts become recurring instruments of pressure on elected officials, and when those actions arise within an educational environment surrounded by powerful institutional actors advancing the same policy objectives, a dangerous boundary begins to disappear. The school risks ceasing to be merely the place where students learn how citizens exercise political power and becoming instead one of the places from which that political power is organized, amplified, and projected through the students themselves.
Anchorage School District stated that it did not advocate student participation and that classes continued normally, an important factual distinction from direct institutional sponsorship. Yet the District’s response also risked creating plausible deniability by distancing leadership from the walkout itself while leaving unresolved the more fundamental question of whether existing attendance, truancy, and student-conduct policies were enforced against participants in these school-day walkouts.
Yet the deeper concern remains. Once organized political action moves through structures embedded in or closely connected to the public-school system, occurs during the school day, and advances causes simultaneously championed by powerful institutional actors within public education, the distinction between teaching students how democracy works and drawing them into an organized political campaign begins to erode.
At that point, the danger is no longer merely theoretical: the public education system risks becoming not simply a place where political ideas are examined, but an environment through which political power can be cultivated, organized, and projected through the students themselves.
Students possess the same fundamental rights in civic life as other citizens. But those rights belong to the students themselves; they are not a license for public officials or taxpayer-funded institutions to steer students toward politically preferred causes. A public education worthy of a free society should give young people the history, evidence, constitutional knowledge, and intellectual tools necessary to decide what they believe; not place the authority and prestige of government behind an effort to decide it for them.
Education unions illustrate another dimension of the problem. Alaska law does not define a public employee organization ideologically. Its legal purpose concerns representation of employees regarding wages, hours, grievances, benefits, and working conditions. Yet organizations such as NEA-Alaska and the Anchorage Education Association have voluntarily moved well beyond the traditional functions of collective bargaining, wages, benefits, grievances, and working conditions.
They have embraced a much broader political and social mission to influence the direction of government and public institutions. Viewed in that broader context, the convergence with the political program advanced by organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America is not merely striking, it is deeply troubling and contrary to American values and norms.
The significance lies in the convergence of objectives and methods: organized labor as a vehicle for political power, control and broader efforts to reshape economic and governmental policy. What began as an employee organization created to represent teachers in their employment relationship has therefore become something substantially different. When a well-financed political and ideological institution operates inside, alongside, and with significant access to the very public education system whose employees it represents, the risk is that collective bargaining power becomes institutional political influence and the classroom becomes exposed to agendas far beyond wages, hours, and working conditions.
And how much of this institutional political machinery is ultimately underwritten, directly or indirectly, by taxpayers?
Public education must develop independent political judgment rather than manufacture political participation.
