Declining Trust and Its Consequences
The story is familiar. It began with the Covid-19 pandemic. While the country has seemingly moved on from the public health crisis, parental resentment over school closures lingers. As recently as this last school year, I had exasperated parents holding me on the phone to vent their frustrations about the shutdowns. While their child got headaches from sitting at home staring at a tablet for six hours, patrons at the local bar played darts with a beer in hand. The reflexive trust that schools and policymakers would consistently do right by their child shattered.
Then came years of investigative journalists and culture war crusaders uncovering far-left antics cropping up in classrooms—gender theory in kindergarten, critical race theory in English class, sociopolitical consciousness-raising in math. While many teachers shun such political posturing in the classroom, enough of it goes on to make many conservative parents leery.
Controversy over the teaching of reading has also undercut parents’ trust in schools. Beginning in fall 2022, the podcast Sold a Story initiated a nationwide realization that public schools have almost universally been miseducating children by following pseudo-scientific theories of early language instruction. Hitting record downloads, Sold a Story broke into the public consciousness in a way that niche education stories rarely do, demonstrating that schools were failing even at their most basic duty of literacy instruction.
It is hard to measure with data how pervasive this recent mistrust actually is. A few animated parents causing a ruckus at school board meetings could very well be outliers. When I was still an administrator, my school had several classrooms per grade level, which meant that one parent complaint per class each week amounted to daily issues to tackle. This constant fire extinguishing gives the perception of widespread dissatisfaction, when in reality the majority of parents may be content.
In an attempt to gauge the extent of the problem, one intriguing study analyzed almost 100,000 videos of school board meetings—totaling 150,000 hours of deliberation and more than a billion words. The researchers’ findings mirror the preceding conjectures: Conflict at school board meetings has indeed increased, especially in urban and suburban districts with high per-pupil expenditures. Still, the large majority of school board meetings remain civil.
A survey of special education directors finds that almost all have perceived a rise in parent-school tensions. Surveys of the general public also indicate a dissolution of trust. A recent Gallup poll revealed that public opinion toward American education is at an all-time low, with 73 percent of respondents expressing dissatisfaction. When pollsters ask public school parents what they think about public education, opinions are warmer, with 46 percent would give their local schools an “A” or “B” grade. American education as an institution is easy to hate, but everyone still loves Mrs. Pennyworth in the red brick building down the street.
Even so, that generic dissatisfaction will affect the interactions between parents and their schools. I reflect on the angriest parent with whom I have ever spoken. Her son had terrible grades, and she blamed the teacher. I made what I thought was a benign observation by suggesting that the accommodations we had offered her son had proved counterproductive. Continual retakes, burdensome tutoring regimens, and the opportunity to review the teacher’s slide presentation at home removed all incentive for this young man to focus in class, and instead foisted the responsibility for his success onto his parents, his tutors, and his teachers—everyone except him. After the meeting, several of my colleagues remarked on the volume of shouts they’d heard echoing down the hall.
But who was right in this situation? Had our school failed this student, or should his mother have accepted my assessment and placed the responsibility for failure on her son? Both views probably had at least some validity, but in these moments of conflict, without trust or the assumption of competence, even otherwise happy parents will be more likely to cast blame on the teacher, administrator, or school.
Looking through an even wider lens, schools often require that the wants of the individual be subordinate to the needs of the group. It’s often as simple as asking a talkative child to keep quiet so his peers can focus. One could argue that experiencing this kind of sacrifice imparts a valuable lesson—that forgoing our own desires and sloughing off childhood solipsism for the greater good represents a virtuous shift in character. But why would a parent consider it virtuous or advisable for their child to suppress their own desire to an institution that they distrust?
Or consider the tough-as-nails teacher who hammers away at their students, maybe even unfairly at times. With strong trust between school and families, students could benefit from this experience—the teacher’s exacting standards toughening them for the hard lessons of life. Such teachers should pose challenges for students to overcome, and not be seen as untrustworthy, incompetent operators to remove, steam roll, or fire. When trust is lost, intent becomes muddled, rigor can be misinterpreted as mishandling, and parent-teacher relationships deteriorate.
Today’s digital communications have also influenced the parent-school dynamic. Before the era of email and online forms, one of the only ways to get a teacher’s time was through an in-person meeting, and for working parents, making time for that was often impractical. Now, the opportunity cost of sending off a disgruntled email is functionally zero.
Moreover, it’s a slippery slope. If a few parents manage to get a letter grade bumped up or an exception to a policy by complaining, other parents will try similar tactics. Before long, you have the makings of a social contagion, where complaining gets rewarded.
Social media also magnifies complaints and can feed hysteria. In the past, a school might have faced public scrutiny if an enterprising local journalist uncovered a genuine controversy; parents might have kvetched amongst themselves while watching the children at the public park—but they had little recourse. Now, a parent can cause a ruckus with a Facebook post to every parent in a school or district. Such transparency has some benefits, but a bad grade that would have been a minor event a decade ago can now spiral into a public campaign for a teacher or administrator’s removal.
I acknowledge my tendency toward “back-in-my-day”-ism, but the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the society-altering effects of social media, and what little public polling we do have on parent-school relationships all make me suspect that my personal experience reflects a broader shift. A significant rupture remains between parents and schools, and that has caused an outpouring of parental antagonism—both reasonable and needlessly hostile.
