Squandering Public Pressure
A ‘crisis of trust’ in education won’t change the profession if a divided public mistrusts for different reasons
Charting the Course is a series from Education Progress featuring pro-excellence education commentary, news, and policy analysis.
THE EDUCATION profession looks ripe for a crisis of public trust. Major districts are fumbling, scores are falling nationwide, and even Yale is reckoning with the mistrust in higher ed. Public opinion seems to reflect this: a record-low 35% of Americans are satisfied with K–12 education, and high-school teachers received their lowest “trust rating” yet (50% high or very high) on Gallup’s most recent “Honesty and Ethical Standards” poll.
Meanwhile, as education research writ large is under the microscope, poor research continues to move policy and good research is under attack. Unlike more scientifically rigorous fields such as medicine, education continues to entertain discredited ideas long after they’ve been debunked. No surgeon today debates virtues of handwashing; meanwhile, phonics and explicit instruction get buried, dug up, and then buried again.
When reformers ask themselves why education trails behind, a frequent point of reference is Douglas Carnine’s “Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices.” “Education experts routinely make decisions in subjective fashion, eschewing quantitative measures and ignoring research findings,” Carnine writes, and we should not expect it to become an evidence-based profession until it faces “intense and sustained outside pressure.” The medical field did not replace a reliance on the subjective judgments of individual practitioners with a demand for “judgments constrained by quantified data that can be inspected by a broad audience” all on its own; it was only after the univocal horror of the Thalidomide tragedy were drugs required to prove safe and effective before being prescribed. When reformers see signs of a crisis of trust, it can be tempting to hope that such a crisis might pressure education to trade ideology out for evidence as has happened for other professions.
Yet to think Carnine’s account warrants a simple “crisis → reform” narrative is optimistic by half. “There are signs today,” he wrote in 2000, “that this is beginning to happen in education.” In 2025, the signs weren’t much different: “We are in education’s own crisis of trust.” It tells us something that the right crisis has still not arrived. When crises of public trust have forced other professions to embrace the evidence, the problems and levers were sufficiently clear for the public to converge on solutions. Nothing is so clear in education.
It is not so clear, for one, that a sense of crisis in education is widespread. Despite that record-low public trust rating, high-school teachers still rate 5th out of 21 professions; in last year’s poll, moreover, grade-school teachers were rated 2nd (61% high or very high), even with the outrage over grade-school reading instruction.
Further complicating the crisis narrative, disaggregating responses by political leaning reveals that public trust is fractured along partisan lies. Among Democrats-leaning respondents, trust in high-school teachers jumps from 50% to 71% high or very high; among Republican learners, the figure sinks to a mere 31%. On the left, then, there is even less evidence of a crisis-of-trust mentality; on the right, meanwhile, trust is falling in precisely the kinds of scientific institutions responsible for producing the research with which our educators need to align. So the side more inclined to ‘trust the science’ is less likely to doubt that educators are informed by the evidence, and those more mistrustful that educators grasp the research are less apt to support the institutions who conduct it.
So the side more inclined to ‘trust the science’ is less likely to doubt that educators are informed by the evidence, and those more mistrustful that educators grasp the research are less apt to support the institutions who conduct it.
This is our coalitional problem for education reform. The crises of public trust by which professions mature are ones where public mistrust can converge on something productive (policy change or institutional reform). But the two halves we would need for our reform coalition — those who trust research on the one hand, and those willing to pressure the profession to use it on the other — sit on opposite sides of the aisle. And the aisle is getting wider.
Regrettably, education discourse is structurally biased toward moral drama. Rather than the avenues most likely to afford agreement and change, social dynamics incentivize us to stress the high-stakes moral issues where convincing others is hardest — disputes about which civil rights apply to which students, or controversial curricula centering certain identities and diminishing others. Raising the temperature among fellow partisans scores identity-politics points and clout; agreeing with opponents on low-hanging fruit is worse for the algorithm than dunking on rabid takes; politicians don’t lean back toward the center or signal openness to compromise until after they’ve won their primaries. The resulting irony is that most attention is spent on what is least likely to change, whereas less attention is spent on our best chances for reform.
Most who join for the culture war, stay for more culture war. The allies recruited by moral outrage about banned books or athletics policies are not so easily regrouped when the discussion moves beyond topics parents might be used to talking or hearing about, like to pedagogical disputes or the science of reading conversation. Teachers’ views on DEI are more moderate than many realize on the right, and defeating DEI in the culture war doesn't automatically produce a better education. If students enter college unable to read, a rigorous, “classical education” with a “great books” curriculum is a pipe dream; if partisan hardball reformers continue winning territory — on either side — but the only replacements are dysfunction or mediocrity, then nothing has been solved.
Prioritizing the actionable levers that sidestep moral outrage is our first step toward more productively channeling mistrust. Universal screening, expanding access to advanced coursework, grouping students by ability, and emphasizing direct instruction shouldn’t be controversial. And even the most modest bipartisan wins reinforce a mutual trust that opponents can be reasoned with.
But while tactical sidestepping is necessary, it will not be sufficient. A reform coalition that brackets petty grievances will still face two structural obstacles that keep public pressure from reaching the machinery that needs it most.
The first is a vocabulary gap. Moral judgments don’t require technical expertise; they’re accessible to everyone and easy to apply to new cases, which is precisely why they dominate public discourse. Pedagogical disputes are different: they require some grasp of what the research actually says, a sense of where the evidence is strong and where it’s contested, and enough familiarity with the field to tell the difference between an approach that merely sounds rigorous and one that actually is. Parents irate that their children can’t read often can’t pinpoint why; being able to ask whether the problem is curriculum, instructional methods, professional development, or district policy already demands finer-grained concepts than the public audience has. A key reason Sold a Story was so galvanizing is that it named specific causes, actors, and points of failure for parents and policymakers. Without that vocabulary, frustration stays diffuse; until it can converge on diagnosis, it can’t converge on a remedy.
The second is an accountability mismatch. The institutions most accessible to parents, such as school boards, PTAs, and principals’ offices, are also the ones least connected to the upstream decisions that shape what happens in classrooms. A school board can fire a superintendent but can’t fix the teacher pipeline, and a PTA can raise hell about curriculum, but can’t revise what counts as “evidence-based” at the state level. Meanwhile, the entities with the greatest structural reach — ed schools, curriculum publishers, and state boards of education — are almost entirely insulated from public pressure. Their influence is pervasive and consequential, but they’re a layer removed from parents, invisible by default, and accountable to know one who is likely to show up at a meeting. The result is an inversion: pressure is strongest on the points where reform is least durable, and weakest where the real leverage is.
Together, these obstacles help explain why Carnine’s “intense and sustained outside pressure” has proven so hard to generate even when public frustration runs high. It is natural to think that a crisis of trust will be the proximate cause of a profession’s reform; closer to the truth, however, is that “crisis of trust” is the name we give to the moment when public mistrust finally converges productively on an actionable diagnosis. We are not yet at that moment. Reformers may see that mistrust abounds, but at present it is still too diffuse; not only is it split along partisan lines, but it lacks vocabulary to name the right targets and the institutional access to reach them.
“Dogma does not destroy itself.” Just so, public mistrust does not converge productively by itself. For those who believe that high mistrust is sufficient to trigger reform, increasing it to a fever pitch may seem like a recipe for change. But raising the temperature is of little help if it distracts from the tasks of building a common vocabulary and identifying the levers of consequence. Educators want to offer effective instruction, but many are equipped with ineffective methods rubber-stamped by ed schools and professional development opportunities dripping with fads. As teachers experience crises of their own, they need the support and training that comes with the institutional guardrails of an evidence-based profession.