I sell a closed source educational software product and I've seen the insides of a lot of schools. I know that any teacher or school IT coordinator is going to hate to see their known infrastructure replaced at the whim of the state legislature by something they had no say in.

You need to be talking to the people in the schools first, not the people making the laws. Odds are you can find some problems that Open Source software can help with and a few IT coordinators who are on board with it. Then evangalize your local success, highlighting money saved and better student performance, and you'll start opening up a lot more people's minds to open source software.

But top-down through the politicians is not the way to go (case in point).

If you really want to change the landscape, though, find a way to actually fund open source educational software development. It's a shame that we don't have something like a PBS for educational software. I'd much rather write software that everyone can have for free.