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I disagree. The OP's list of institutions and reforms are highly associated with a set of people who really don't believe in or acknowledge tradeoffs (as a group). Largely those sorts of reforms are caused by an overactive sense of fairness and a Utopian vision. Maybe FDB thinks in the terms of "skin in the game" but mostly public school advocates think in terms of it being unfair if kids dont get the same education, and that if only we could get everyone into "good schools" most of societies ills would be solved. And, in addition, that if we didn't have public schools, all the poor kids would languish in illiteracy.
I don’t think we disagree.
Placing that much value on “fairness” is saying that it would be a huge benefit. Thinking public school ought to be good enough for the elite is assuming away the costs. For someone who thinks access to opportunity really is the only thing holding a kid back, providing that access is really supposed to fix the problem!
I think that’s a reasonable way to interpret progressive policy around education. My problem with the OP is modeling increasing access as a progressive psyop. It’s not—that Utopianism and fairness is enough.
OP is modelling the progressives as percieving and understanding the problem and its solutions the same way as he does, so is confused and left scrambling to find an explanation as to why they chose bad solutions, coming to the conclusion that bad solutions must be a deliberate part of a plan to force people to find good solutions. Progressives do the same thing when they claim that their ideological opponents must be evil or selfish for refusing to fix whatever social ill is their current project.
As you point out, most progressives likely see the issue differently, and their solutions don't seem bad to them.
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