The Performance of Conscience
In Fairfax County, Virginia, several hundred high school students walked out of class last week in protest of ICE enforcement activities. Similar scenes played out in Austin and Miami. The footage was compelling: teenagers in clusters, signs held aloft, the aesthetic of protest captured for social media dissemination before the students presumably returned to their Advanced Placement coursework.
Nobody is asking the obvious questions. Who organized this? How did hundreds of students at different schools in different states coordinate within days? What did the students who walked out actually know about the immigration enforcement operations they were protesting? And — perhaps most pressingly — why did school administrators in multiple jurisdictions permit the walkouts with apparently no meaningful pushback?
I teach undergraduates. I have a faculty colleague who spent twenty years in high school education before moving to the university level. She told me something I've been thinking about ever since: "High schoolers are capable of genuine political thought, but mass coordinated action that produces cable news footage within forty-eight hours is never spontaneous."
She's right. The walkouts against ICE did not arise organically from student conversations during lunch. They were organized — by advocacy groups, by community organizations, by adults with specific policy objectives who understand that minors protesting generates a category of coverage that adult activists cannot replicate. The students are not being empowered. They're being deployed.
What the School Systems Owe Their Students
There is a defensible argument for student political expression on school campuses. The Supreme Court settled in Tinker v. Des Moines in 1969 that students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate, and that principle is correct. Students can hold political opinions. They can organize clubs. They can debate in the cafeteria. All of that is legitimate.
But schools that permit coordinated walkouts — that effectively sanction mass class-skipping as a form of political expression — are making a content-based distinction. Would those same Fairfax County administrators permit a walkout in support of stricter immigration enforcement? A walkout opposing abortion? A walkout calling for the preservation of school choice? The answer in every case is obviously no, and the administrators know it. The walkout is permitted because it aligns with the politics of the institution's leadership, not because the institution has any principled commitment to student political expression across the spectrum.
That's using the school as an ideological apparatus. It's a misuse of an institution that parents are legally required to trust with their children for seven hours a day.
The families of students who stayed in class deserve an explanation. Their children received less instruction that day. The students who walked out received, instead, an exercise in political performance organized by adults whose agenda they almost certainly don't fully understand. That's not education. That's recruitment.
The Immigration Question They're Protesting
Here's the substance that gets lost in the footage: ICE enforcement operations target individuals who have violated federal law. This is not a contested point. The debate is over whether those laws should be enforced, how they should be enforced, and what humanitarian considerations should apply. Those are legitimate debates. They happen in Congress, in courts, and in public discourse.
They are not debates that high school students walking out of Algebra II are equipped to meaningfully influence. The enforcement operations in Virginia, Texas, and Florida that triggered these walkouts were directed at individuals with criminal records beyond their immigration status — a detail that didn't make the signs.
The adults who organized these protests know that. They chose not to lead with it because the full picture complicates the narrative. Instead, they gave teenagers a simple story and sent them out to perform it. The cameras followed. The coverage ran. The political objective — creating pressure against immigration enforcement — was partially achieved.
And the students went back to class having learned one thing: that their convictions, packaged correctly and aimed at the right target, are a useful tool for grown-ups who want something from the political system. That is a lesson worth protesting.
