In education, ‘trust the experts’ is a scam to silence even expert dissent

What would you do if your child came home from school with library books clearly inappropriate for their age? Like any responsible parent, you would reach out to the school.

But what if, instead of an engaged, empathetic response, you were met with derision?

For years, “trust the experts” has been the parroted answer to any parent or teacher who objected to a library book. Librarians — backed by the American Library Association, which shapes library policy nationwide — insist that every book children can access at school has already been vetted through professional reviews. If you dare challenge that judgment, you are no longer considered a parent raising a concern, but rather demonized as a “book-banner.”

We are both experienced educators who found ourselves in exactly this circumstance: We voiced concerns and were vilified for it. Two recent developments, however, show that the American Library Association’s narrative is false.

First of all, the librarians themselves and their own organization have now admitted that the reviews of books don’t work. One of the association’s own divisions published a 2026 study finding that librarians increasingly distrust the very reviews they have long pointed to as their defense. “It’s almost like we can’t go on our reviews,” one librarian admitted.

Those reviews, from outlets like Kirkus or School Library Journal, focus on themes and genre and are shaped as much by the reviewer’s bias as by the book’s actual content. The American Library Association explicitly rejects content rating systems that document child-safety concerns such as sexual content, violence, and language — actual useful ratings, like the ones applied to movies and music. And so the only way to know what is in a book is to read it — exactly what parents challenging books have been doing all along, only to be publicly excoriated for it.

If “trust the experts” was sincerely about expertise, then a credentialed expert’s objection should carry more weight than your average parent’s, not less. Instead, we both found the opposite.

One of us was told her objections lacked merit because she didn’t hold a library media specialist certification. So she went and earned one — nothing changed, of course. She went further, running a professional semantic analysis of the challenged book’s text, finding that it failed on its own linguistic terms, not just on its content. That analysis was waved off by people with a fraction of her training. She was treated as a problem to be managed and watched her family’s private disagreement with a school district become a public story .

The vicious retaliation she and other parents received was disproportionate to the actual complaint she had lodged, but it was proportionate to the threat her credentialed expertise posed to local educational bureaucrats once she could no longer be waved off as “just a parent.”

Another one of us was given an optional novel for her students and did what any worthy teacher would do: She read it. There were entire sections about a character watching his sister have sex doggie-style while using a Ziploc bag as a condom. There were also passages regarding sex with a dog.

That one book sent her straight to the district’s library catalogue, where she has been finding other sexually explicit titles almost daily ever since.

Before her school board adopted a stronger policy , the backlash was tremendous — a national media campaign built on twisted quotes, more than 12,000 emails demanding she be fired, two lawsuits, and death threats. Despite her rating of “highly effective” and an internal investigation that cleared her completely, the attacks intensified once the board — acting on the books she had brought to their attention — finally began removing hundreds of inappropriate titles. Three years after her first reconsideration form had been filed, the board finally removed the novel that had started it all, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.”

None of this is surprising. It comes straight out of the American Library Association’s handbook , and it’s a one-two punch few are willing to name. First, objectors are told they lack the correct credentials. But even if they have those credentials, nothing changes. And when they bring expertise that plainly outranks anything on the other side of the table, that expertise is discarded and the person offering it is made to suffer consequences.

We read the books. We gave our expert opinion. Between us, we held every credential anyone could demand. Yet when we reached a conclusion our institutions didn’t want to hear, our credentials didn’t legitimize our concerns; they made us targets instead.

If they do that to us, what hope is there for the next parent with no credentials at all?

That is the actual farce behind the mantra “trust the experts.” It was never a commitment to expertise. It was a demand for a specific conclusion, dressed up so that objecting looked like anti-intellectualism instead of intellectual dissent.

Behind the euphemism was a simpler and uglier truth: Defer to the American Library Association, or risk consequences to reputation and career. That threat no longer holds up to scrutiny. The curtain has been pulled back, and the sleight of hand is over.

Crystal Marull holds a Ph.D. in second language acquisition, a master’s degree in education, and teaching certifications in Spanish and media specialist in four states. Vicki Baggett holds a master’s degree in English with certifications in English, ESOL and supervision and administration. She has taught high school and college English for 35 years.