Public education is political

"[E]verything about public education is political," OEA president Alicia Priest pointed out last year. "The reforms, the elected school board, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, the standards, your salary and benefits, the textbooks that are approved for your use—ALL politically driven decisions."

She's right. "[E]ducation has always been political," high school teacher Zachary Wright points out today ("It's Non-Negotiable. We Have to Teach Social Justice In Our Schools.").

When a nation has within its DNA laws regulating who can learn, with whom one can learn, and where one can learn, then the idea that a school ought not engage in the political realm reeks of forced naïveté. 

As long as our school systems are funded within halls of state legislatures that maintain 21st-century houses of education for zip codes of wealth, and crumbling school houses for zip codes of poverty, then it is disingenuous at best to assert that schools exists outside the realm of political discourse.