It's true systematic research on public interventions has historically been valued highly. The Campbell collaboration, Cochrane's sister project dedicated to public policy interventions, is based in Oslo.
But when some politicians wanted to praise and fund "centers of scientific excellence", it overwhelmingly went to the sort of high prestige research you'd expect, like neuroscience and AI. Politicians don't like being told what to do. Especially when the policies with scientific support from controlled studies are unpopular, as they often are (arguably, the study of public interventions against high alcohol consumption was how the Nordic's love of controlled studies in public policy came from).
Even uncontroversial things are decaying. Professor Dan Olweus, through controlled interventions, developed an intervention against bullying in schools in the late eighties. He pushed hard to get them implemented, and pushed back hard against "vibe coded" antisocial behavior prevention programs that didn't have experimental evidence. Bullying went down. But he died in 2020, and guess what, bullying is up again. Keeping government social interventions on the evidence-based path is constant, thankless work.
It is frustrating to see this happen when —while it would be more expensive— they could’ve dealt with that by just
There are demographics and individuals who work hard to bring these net negative boondoggles into reality and they ought to take blame.
But in practice, it backfired. Most families in the Sunset opted out: either by enrolling their children in private schools or moving out of city. The policy didn’t create meaningful integration; it just hollowed out neighborhood public schools and made traffic worse.
A striking example: St. Ignatius Catholic school located on Sunset Boulevard is now undergoing a $200 million campus expansion, while SFUSD is closing public schools due to declining enrollment.