INGERSOLL: Can The Public School Children Participating In ‘ICE Out’ Protests Even Read?

Greetings, Dear Reader,

Welcome back to State of the Day, where I strip the euphemism and misdirection off the day’s news to give it to you straight; no ice, no mixer.

Guess what?

THEY CAME FOR THE KIDS … AGAIN

Mom had no idea.

As she walked up to her daughter’s public school, throngs of unruly students heckled her. There must have been hundreds of them milling about in front of the school and, dangerously, by the road nearby.

“I’m here to pull my child from the school right now,” she said as she entered the front office.

I can tell she never expected tens of millions of people to watch her video, because she says her daughter’s full name in the posted video. (I won’t be publishing her full name, but I do want to say “Remington” as a girl’s first name is pretty awesome.)

Her voice quavered as she questioned administrators about why the unruly mob of students was allowed to leave (in order to “protest” ICE and Trump).

“I thought my daughter was safe here. I guess not.”

What started in Minnesota has spilled into multiple other states. This mother was reportedly in Auburn, Washington. Student- and teacher-led walkouts have occurred all over the country since.

The St. Paul Federation of Educators promoted a protest and soon schools started allowing for “remote learning” due to “weather.” Conservatives immediately called the move out as allowing students and teachers to organize anti-ICE protests.

Soon the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the country, took the idea national, calling for nationwide “ICE out” protests.

According to the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment exams of 2025, fewer than half the state’s students are proficient in math and reading.

But they can chant left-wing slogans, play in traffic and get tear-gassed on a school day.

Protests so far have broken out in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Rhode Island, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, New Mexico, Utah and Oregon as of this writing. There’s been significant support from teachers and unions in Minnesota, Arizona, Colorado and Ohio.

Do we even need to check the test scores against the districts where the protests are actually happening, or is it safe to assume the students involved are mostly illiterate?

The protests mark the second major trend in a decade in which left-wing radicals have used children to do their dirty work in public. The last one, the transgender co-opting of childhood in grotesque ways, did not pan out very well for the left.

I don’t think this one will either.

School choice has surged to an all-time high in the last decade, with 7/10 independents and Democrats supporting it and 8/10 Republicans.

You can look at the results and see why. Public education has never been more expensive and the results have never been worse.

In the meantime, it seems like not a day goes by without Libs of TikTok posting some teacher doing or saying something wildly inappropriate. Do kids really need to know you were born a woman but identify as a unicorn? Should people with such self-evident mental illness even be around kids?

I might be able to understand taking a civics class of seniors to a public gathering of some sort, maybe even a protest, but the bedlam we’re seeing in these school walkout videos is in no way tied to education.

I remember the good old days, when a majority of kids graduating high school could at least read at an eighth-grade level and you knew almost nothing personal about your teachers. At best, maybe you knew they were married and had kids. At worst, you didn’t know your math teacher and defensive football coach had a landscaping company in the summer until you saw him mowing the grass in front of the local Wawa one muggy June afternoon.

What happened to us?

Well, I think it’s obvious that conservatives ceded public education to liberals and liberals went fully haywire in the decades since.

But parents like the one in Washington are beginning to wake up.

I for one can tell you that my kids will never set foot in public school.