If you think you can avoid politics when discussing anything important, you are delusional.
Everything important has political relevance.
It's a well-known fact that Reagan first shit up education in California and then went on to do it nationally. It's a less well-known fact, but still a fact, that it was done for the purpose of getting rapeublicans (which hilariously autocorrected to "trollbags") elected by avoiding an "educated proletariat" (those are the search terms that will get you more citations than you can eat.)
You can't avoid politics when talking about how shit education is in America because it is for fundamentally political reasons.