“No, you’re not crazy. This thing you’re feeling, I’m telling you, I feel it too.” – Dave Chappelle, Unstoppable 2025
In the quote above, Chappelle is referring to a feeling that many–if not all–of us have that the world has gone a little sideways in the last few years. It’s political, but not only political. It’s technical, but not only technical. It’s social and cultural and ideological in ways that concern and confuse us and make us look around and say, “What happened?”.
I believe, at the root of this feeling, is an erosion of trust. It’s across the spectrum and affects almost every aspect of our daily lives. And it has impacted the way we view and value institutions that had, for generations prior, seemed inherently good and vital.
Public Education is one such institution, and it is suffering from an erosion of trust every bit as dramatic as the melting of ice-caps, and just as empirically verifiable. Gallup polling from 2025 indicates that satisfaction with the quality of public education has plummeted to a 24-year low of 36%. As recently as 2019 the same satisfaction number was 62%. EdChoice data reveals that in January 2025, a majority of parents (51%) believed K-12 education was on the "wrong track".
And the center stage for this conflict has been the school library and the classroom bookshelf. The American Library Association (ALA) and PEN America have documented historic levels of book objections in 2024 and 2025. The Supreme Court’s Mahmoud v. Taylor effectively constitutionalized a "parental veto" over curricular content, altering the legal relationship between a parent and teacher and elevating the tension around home and school.
Where did this precipitous decline in trust come from? Agitprop like Moms For Liberty and BookLooks? People afraid of drag queens? I think it’s too simplistic to lay the erosion of trust at the foot of recent political discord: while political affiliation is a strong predictor of trust—with Republicans significantly more distrustful of higher education and K-12 curricula than Democrats in recent polling—more nuanced data as well as common sense points to deeper, apolitical “trust eroders”. These include:
the chaos and trauma arising from the pandemic with its school closures and near-instantly digitized classrooms
the fear and impotent sadness of watching school shootings and bomb threats proliferate, year over year, without systemic changes
administrative opacity that alienates parents regardless of ideology
school choice and funding policies that confound more than clarify, obscuring critical progress and reporting data at a time when parents just want to know their options
the physical decay of public school infrastructure–especially in urban and rural communities–which signals institutional neglect across the board.
And these trust eroders are not unique to American education. The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia all have parallel movements asserting "parental rights" against gender ideology, bureaucratic overreach and the decaying infrastructure of public systems. This suggests a transnational crisis of trust in educational expertise in the post-pandemic era.
Yet here’s a ray of hope and maybe the starting point for a rebuilding of the “trust engine” that drives an institution like public education: while faith in the system of public education has collapsed, trust in individual practitioners—teachers and librarians—remains high and enduring. 88% of parents report trusting teachers to make good decisions for their children (Gallup). Similarly, an EveryLibrary Institute survey found that 92% of parents trust librarians to curate appropriate materials, and 96% feel their children are safe in libraries. Maybe this data – which is in such contrast to the rapid falloff in public trust of the institution of public education – can offer us a lifeline toward a common purpose.
As I looked at these data, it made some sense: I feel it too. Our systems and our discourse around public education seem broken, fraught -- it feels exhausting to "wade in" to almost any of the public debates on education. Yet I genuinely enjoy (and trust) my local educators, and the educators in my family. I know they are struggling with the macro environment just as much as I am, and I applaud their courage and tenacity in heading into class every morning, ready to work and hopeful for the future of our kids.
I plan to keep thinking and engaging on this topic, because I don't want this public trust in education to slide any further. I believe an educated populace is a fundamentally safer and stronger populace. I believe that our educators deserve our respect, our trust, and our commitment to stay in the fight with them as long as it takes.
In follow-up posts, I will try to dig in to the roots of the problem in public education, looking for antecedents to our crisis of trust. While I strongly support our educators, the system has flaws, and it is not doing the "best for the most." My hope in looking backwards at the way public education has evolved/devolved is that we can then develop answers for restoring trust moving forward. How can we rebuild the “presumption of good faith” and establishing a transparent and realistic expectation for the future of public education.