NC teacher walkout is sacrificing students for left-wing politics | Opinion

There are plenty of legitimate arguments to have about public school funding in North Carolina. How much should teachers be paid? What new resources would help school districts? Are students getting what they need in the classroom?

There are no definitively right answers to those questions, but there is at least one blatantly wrong one.

The N.C. Association of Educators has scheduled a mass walkout for May 1, urging teachers to leave school and rally in downtown Raleigh. School districts are already beginning to close in response, keeping children out of the classroom at a critical point before the end of the school year.

Durham Public Schools shifted May 1 to a teacher workday after more than 600 teachers, about a quarter of its educators, requested leave. Asheville City Schools said it could not provide “adequate supervision of students” because so many staff planned to be out. Guilford, Chatham and Chapel Hill-Carrboro have made similar moves.

For NCAE, that is not an unfortunate side effect. It is the goal. And if school closures are the point, then this is not really about education, but power.

The same playbook

To be clear, North Carolina has a lot more to do to strengthen public education. The school choice movement is a real accomplishment, but that focus has also meant Republicans who run the General Assembly have too often fallen short on the needs of traditional public schools. But whatever the legislature’s failures, helping shut down schools is not a serious response.

This is the first NCAE walkout of this kind since 2019, but it is not a fresh eruption of moral urgency. It is a rerun of the same playbook.

Students lose class time. Parents scramble for child care. Administrators reshuffle calendars. And NCAE gets exactly what it wanted: disruption big enough to command attention. That’s key for an organization that needs to continually recruit new dues-paying members to survive.

Any group that measures success by how many classrooms it can empty in the middle of a school week is not putting students first. It is using them as leverage. An education organization should want children in classrooms. NCAE keeps finding reasons to want them out.

That is the deeper problem with the organization. It presents itself as a teachers group, but behaves like a partisan activist shop that happens to recruit educators. The common thread in its agenda is not student achievement, classroom order or practical support for teachers. It is left-wing political mobilization, with schools used as the moral cover.

A serious teachers group would judge proposals on the merits and keep its focus on classrooms, students and the practical needs of educators. NCAE does the opposite. It treats conservative reforms as a moral outrage while embracing causes that drift well beyond reading, math, discipline and student achievement. It has attached itself to everything from abortion access to Moral Monday protests to voting rights and “democracy” campaigns, even as it claims to be speaking simply for teachers and students.

Most teachers are not ideologues. They are doing difficult work under real pressure, and many have legitimate complaints about pay, staffing, discipline and support. That is exactly why NCAE’s behavior is so frustrating. It takes those real frustrations and channels them into the same stale partisan ritual over and over again.

May Day symbolism

The date itself tells you something.

May 1 is May Day, the old international labor holiday long wrapped in the imagery of socialist agitation, class conflict and political street theater. This was not a random day chosen for convenience. It was chosen for symbolism.

Parents can see that. They watched schools stay closed too long during the pandemic, and they learned to be skeptical when adults in education claim to be acting for children while keeping children out of classrooms.

So when they hear that schools are closing because teachers are marching on May Day, they are not likely to view it as a noble act of sacrifice. They are likely to conclude, correctly, that politics is once again taking precedence over students.

More than a century ago, future president Calvin Coolidge faced the 1919 Boston police strike while serving as governor of Massachusetts. Officers walked off the job, disorder followed, and Coolidge answered with the line that made him famous: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”

He was right then. North Carolina should update the principle for our own moment.

There is no right to strike against public education, either.

Contributing columnist Andrew Dunn is the publisher of the Longleaf Politics newsletter, which offers thoughtful analysis of North Carolina politics and policy from a conservative perspective. He can be reached at andrew@longleafpol.com.

This story was originally published April 23, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "NC teacher walkout is sacrificing students for left-wing politics | Opinion."