Gimmickry?

Tacoma schools are going green(er)...and making it educational, too!

6 years ago, my school was the big news on this same front.  We even won awards.

Within a couple of years, the garden that was going to be so educational was simply a bed of weeds.  The scintillatingly interesting monitors with all kinds of "cool" information about the school's functioning are now just displaying photographs of events in our district.  And the stripes constituting a floor "model" of the planets in the solar system mostly elicit a vexed and dismissive "What are those stripes supposed to be?"  And, I haven't anyone speak of any of this stuff in years.

So, this all sounds interesting and educationally useful, but is it really?  I'm skeptical.  Oh, and how do we measure student growth in these areas?