Much of this stuff is not visible. Back in the No Child left behind days some people relatively high up in the administration where harassing a researcher based on her research. I found this out from one of her graduate students not the news.

I don't recall all the details, but a large part of the push was centered around a politically connected company selling some education materials. And the research suggested that approach was not useful.

Now extend that to issues people actually care about and I suspect a lot of this stays under the radar.