dug up the story to read myself, nothing like labeling something "taboo" to make it more compelling.

The story itself is, meh. It's a pretty straightforward Day-in-the-life-of jaunt involving a rather dysfunctional teacher. Doesn't really start anywhere go anywhere or end anywhere. The narrator is pretty candid about that dysfunction and does reference sex and drugs but honestly it's pretty tame I think with a couple small edits it would be solidly PG-13.

Overall I wouldn't ever recommend this story to anyone I know. But I can absolutely see why it was used in the class. It's rife with conversation starters, and often feels purpose built for the type of pick-it-apart analysis that you would find in school. It has just enough shock value to wake up sleepy students, features both bad teachers and institutions as well as bad students which humanizes the meta-context in the real classroom.

I wouldn't recommend it in middle school, High school would be a big maybe for later years. As college curriculum, being taught to literal legal adults, that it was controversial at all seems bonkers, honestly it's categorization as "difficult material" by the author I find rather sad. In the end I'm not even sure what's "political" about it.

Seems the most telling real reason was from the president “I don’t ever want to see this story again, I wouldn’t want my daughter reading this,”. He's apparently too busy raising a snowflake to handle a story that simply states that "things exist" that he may find unsavory.

Forgive me for whining, but this is exactly the sort of situation that makes me lament that "I hate this timeline we're living in."