I woke up on May 1st to a story about the Chicago Teachers’ Union failing to shut down the City’s public school system so students could attend socialist May Day rallies. However, busing many students to the rally will occur after school. As someone born and raised in the Windy City and who lived there for over 30 years, I can’t help but wonder what’s happening there.

What is going on with the schools? Even though the City spends over $30,000 on each public school student, the results are abysmal. Most of the City’s public school students perform below grade level. What’s taught?. Obviously, not the three Rs. In a world that is increasingly demanding greater skills, especially critical thinking, why is the Chicago School system emphasizing a failed form of government, socialism?

To make students believe that socialism’s top-down organization can deliver better results, one must ignore or distort history. Marxism has failed everywhere in every instance, but millions have died in its implementation. Do the kids know the facts, or receiving an alternative, unfounded story? If the schools are discarding historical facts, what other information never reaches the students? Can it even be called education if you’re discarding factual information, or is it indoctrination?

Chicago taxes are among the highest in the nation. Yet students in low-tax Mississippi outperform yours. Surely Chicagoans aren’t happy with schools failing their kids, yet they keep voting for it.

Of course, there are other ways of voting besides the ballot box. The City is only three-quarters of what it was when I left. When one in four leaves, they no longer pay your taxes or invest in your City. How do you justify spending more money on education as enrollment declines? Yet the teacher’s union demands and gets more.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued a stern warning against allowing public-sector unions. President John F. Kennedy disagreed and allowed them, but Roosevelt’s reasoning proved correct. In many cities, the unions are in control, and, like all unions, they exist only to grab more for themselves. Electing those who write your check really works for the unions.

If uncorrected, Chicago and many other cities under the grip of their public-sector unions will enter a death spiral. Paying out ever-increasing amounts from a shrinking tax base. That situation can’t go on forever, and it won’t.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wonderful speech at the University of Texas at Austin. He made clear how incompatible our founding ideals are with progressive socialism. One has to wonder how much these rally-attending Chicago students even know about the radical change our Revolution wrought, lifting us and much of the world, compared with their knowledge of Marxist dogma?

Organized around its ideals, the U.S. is unlike most other nations. Rather than culture, race, ethnicity, or faith groups, we value individual rights, regardless of your background. Life, liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is about your yearnings, not some groupthink.

Public-sector unions form a major part of the Democratic Party base, so the party reflects the positions of its foremost members, especially those of teachers’ unions. How else do you explain the polling showing two out of three democrats think socialism is superior to capitalism?

Reflecting this state of mind is the ever-increasing number of avowed socialist Democratic candidates, and more are winning office. The support for Marxism is stronger among the young. College graduates are increasingly prevalent in the party. Could their more recent education play a part in their orientation?

If our educational system promotes Marxism, we have to ask how this is possible. We expect critical thinking to develop in our educational system. Using the best available information and methods was a prime tenet of the Age of Reason that underlay our Revolution and the explosion of human progress since.

There is a mountain of information comparing the top-down government that pervaded the world before our Revolution with our progress since, and debating which economic system works best. Yet, we see thousands of stuntents cheering on failed schemes at rallies across the nation.

Teachers and professors are authority figures. We entrust our children to schools and universities to become educated, not only to gain knowledge, but also to think critically and apply what we know to solving problems. If institutions employing these “educators” fail to provide these tools we’re paying for, we must have other choices.

Once you dismiss reason in favor of dogma, things like reading and math don’t seem as important. Maybe that explains why the schools dominated by the progressive-marxist teachers’ unions are so bad at developing these skills in their students.

The school choice movement is growing rapidly because the prevalent system isn’t delivering what we’re paying for. It’s no wonder that where teachers’ unions dominate local and state governments, we find the greatest opposition to taxpayers sending their dollars to where they think their kids will receive the best real education. Competition highlights their failure.

On our 250th birthday, what can we do to restore the values and ideals of our founding? First, acknowledge that we have a big problem. One of our two parties favors a progressivism incompatible with our founding principles, as Justice Thomas pointed out.

Next, renew our knowledge of what underlay the most Radical and successful Revolution in history. Understand how we broke from thousands of years of top-down governance that benefited the few in control to a system that uplifts the many. Arm yourself with the facts.

Then, confront the top-down progressives in both parties with real data and facts. Don’t be surprised by the lack of substantive answers. Progressives live in a cocoon of misinformation. Press the Mamdanis and A.O.C.s of the world for examples of where the policies they’re pushing have ever worked—the same with those teachers and professors encouraging their students to attend socialist rallies.

You may find you have an ally at our fingertips. AI can dispel any claims of Marxist success. Ask about the human advancement since the inception of capitalism. Most people are unaware of how far we’ve come because they don’t know what the human condition was before.

Some would take us backward. Don’t let the top-down progressives win.