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France spent the past three weeks watching its high schools burn. What originally began in late September at a suburban school outside Paris as a protest over missing teachers, overcrowded classrooms, and decaying buildings spread to hundreds of schools and quickly metastasized into riots that included Marxists, Antifa, and Islamists.
On the biggest day, the interior ministry counted more than 250,000 people in the streets. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu called the casualties the heaviest toll on the school system in decades: at least 215 teenagers and 85 staff injured, plus more than 760 police officers. Twenty-four schools have been burned or ransacked.
The original grievances were actually real. The response is the predictable product of a state monopoly on education. France already spends more per upper-secondary student than the European Union average, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), yet the buildings still fall apart.
Parents in France have almost nowhere else to go. Since 2022, the country has essentially banned homeschooling for ordinary families. Raising your own children at home now requires government permission, granted only for narrow exemptions such as a disability, intensive sports or artistic training, geographic isolation, or a family that travels constantly. The default is the state school. When that school fails, the street is the remaining outlet.
American parents should recognize the script. Our government-school cartel spends more per pupil than almost any country on earth and still leaves most children below proficiency. On the latest Nation’s Report Card, only about one in four eighth-graders is proficient in math. Union leaders respond to that failure with another political campaign.
At its Portland convention last summer, the National Education Association pledged to defend democracy against what it called President Trump’s “embrace of fascism,” and directed staff to use that label in union materials. This July in Washington, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) adopted a resolution to “mobilize for the 2026 elections,” casting the midterms as a “which side are you on” moment and committing the union to an unprecedented turnout machine.
The same convention heard Jeff Freitas, president of the California federation, tell delegates that “we need to be in the streets” to “fight back against this fascist regime.” His red shirt read “Solidarity is the Lesson Plan,” with “May Day” printed on the book in the graphic. A separate resolution turned May 1 into a day of civic action, complete with political education and with students used as political pawns in the marches and rallies.
Politics don’t stop at the ballot box. The AFT has been a major backer of the “No Kings” protests. Randi Weingarten, who is paid over half a million dollars per year to run the union, used her 2025 convention speech to call for people “in the streets” and to threaten lawmakers who refused to listen.
This week the union’s own social-media account posted her outside Delaney Hall, the immigration detention center in Newark, shouting that detainees “play by the rules” and “should not be detained or deported because we have a broken immigration system.” If Weingarten fought this hard for instruction, more than one in four American children might be able to do grade-level math.
The New York City affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers, endorsed Zohran Mamdani. Nationally, about 99 percent of the AFT’s campaign contributions in the last federal cycle went to Democrats. The same union urged members to skip Target for back-to-school shopping because the company had not denounced immigration enforcement, and Weingarten leaned on pension funds that directly hold about 6.8 million Target shares to try to force a political statement out of a retailer.
A Freedom Foundation review of the union’s own federal filings found at least $1.4 million in AFT resources tied to producing and promoting her book, “Why Fascists Fear Teachers.” Congress is now scrutinizing that spending. Members paid for the manifesto. She kept a cut of the proceeds.
Teachers who want to teach reading and algebra are financing a permanent political operation that marches their students, boycotts their stores, and labels half the country fascist. France shows where that model ends: a system that cannot staff a classroom, a law that keeps most families inside it, and children in the street when the adults fail them.
Two exits would break the pattern. Teachers who are not on board can resign from the government union and join an alternative such as the Teacher Freedom Alliance, which offers liability coverage and advocacy without the partisan machine. A real exodus would hit the bosses where the dues are and force them to represent members instead of a party.
Parents have the other lever. School choice lets a family take the education dollars assigned to a child and spend them elsewhere. The school that drills math and history gets the money. The school that treats May Day as the lesson plan loses it.
That escape valve does more than rescue one household from indoctrination. A monopoly that cannot hold its customers cannot keep marching the next generation into socialist politics. France is the control group. America still has time to save itself from teachers’ union tyranny.
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Corey DeAngelis is a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Americans for Fair Treatment.
