I hear you, waterbear. Early GenX here. I worked in public school policy in the late '80s and early '90s. Quant and qual (methods, design, analysis)...and left at the point where they put me in charge of a mandated statewide initiative for "school performance assessment" that was actually "ERMAGERD how can we collect data and present it so everybody thinks everything is OK and we can keep demanding higher and higher taxes/budgets every biennium?"

I wasn't unaccustomed to being courted for jobs where "research" and "data" actually meant PR...but jeez....

FWIW, I went to that agency to work in innovatiive programs for what used to be called "vocational education." My (quiet personal) mission was to find some way to advocate for The Underserved Population That Dare Not Speak Its Name--white boys who didn't want to sit down, shut up, and perform for Teacher/osculate her glutes. White boys--and a few girls, and some of varied melanin quotient--who needed to be DOING, not sitting, and RISKING, not bubblewrapped.

The tax system might have worked...better...at a time when the population served by K-16 was structured as it was in the 1960s-1970s. But with the deliberate disruption of that population structure (demographics), the schools can hardly be other than de facto public orphanages. I think they're way out of the closet with that one in recent years, with the drive in some states (including mine) to strip parents of their rights to even know what their kids are learning in class--parallel to Pharma's move to put secrecy between children and their parents and call it beneficence and justice.

Substacker Richard Cheverton (Portland Dissent) aptly called it the "Genteel socialism that has monetized 'the poor.'" Those socialists lose any pretense of gentility when you dissent from, challenge, or even ask the most basic questions about their models.