It's just that politics outweighs systems thinking.

Selling a narrative that money can fix, getting funds, and then allocating funds is comically easy and less risky than trying to fix something broken. You're capturing sentiment into political momentum, when you're the one who allocates money you are very, very popular and interesting and can make many things happen.

You can do all of this and move on independently of any results in the problem statements that may or may not have been written to begin with.

Contrast that with telling people hard truths like deified educators aren't effectual, or that per-capita pupil spending doesn't correlate with outcomes, or how parents and home culture are stronger effects than whether you offer rich IEPs or adopted Common Core - you can be tarred and feathered for rocking the boat before you get to make any change.

It's not that anyone thinks we should give up on the children, it's that we should probably give up on direct democracy in some areas, and at best, these spending splurges are incompetence and at worst, outright wealth transfers to the PMC and NGOs or fraud.