ProPublica, an almost entirely pro-progressive, anti-conservative “independent public interest watchdog” organization, shockingly goes after our most progressive state (it’s a close competition), revealing that California allows teachers who have been caught sexually harassing students to keep teaching anyway.
What?? Indeed this seems to be the case. The investigative reporting website states in part, after relating the tale of a teacher named Agan who after an independent panel convened by the state to hear his case deemed him “unfit to teach” based on multiple complaints by students, hired by two other schools prompting sexual harassment accusation by students a
“A broad look at California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing by KQED and ProPublica shows a pattern of delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, that have allowed educators to continue teaching after school districts reported them to the state for sexual harassment or other misconduct of a sexual nature. Agan’s case is one of at least 67 in which the state has not revoked the professional licenses of educators after school districts determined they had sexually harassed students or committed other types of sexual misconduct, according to a review of available records from 2019 through 2025 obtained by the news outlets. At least 14 of those educators were rehired by other schools, and of those, at least 12, including Agan, still work in education, according to a review of school websites and employment records provided by schools.” Anita Fitzhugh, a spokesperson for the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, said the state automatically revokes teachers’ credentials when they are convicted of sexual criminal offenses, but not necessarily when a district determines they have committed sexual misconduct. She said the state Legislature — not the licensing agency — determines the type of misconduct that results in automatic revocation. The agency appoints a committee to assess noncriminal cases of misconduct, she said. Agan has not been accused of a crime. “The Commission’s authority balances protecting students as well as the legal rights of educators who have been accused but not convicted of specific crimes,” Fitzhugh said in a written statement.”
Yikes. What’s going on here? That key question in ethics inquiries seems to be this: California’s kinder, gentler, incompetent approach to enforcing even minimal personal responsibility appears to have resulted in a bizarre calculation that puts children at risk. See, Agan, and many other teachers, haven’t criminally assaulted students or at at least can’t be proved to have done so beyond a reasonable doubt. So as long as the unprofessional, emotionally damaging, conflict-ridden sexual harassing conduct doesn’t rise to the level of a felony, California appears to be satisfied to let bygones be bygones, and a male teacher who leers and drools over and even touches female students get second and third chances to change their ways.
I assume that the teachers unions have a great deal to do with this disconnect that and the fact that the now fairly dead-in-the-water #MeToo movement disgraced itself by turning into a willing DEI weapon. Like so much that goes on in California while alleged adults stand mute and passively by, I don’t get this at all. What does California care about, besides catering to illegal immigrants and environmental virtue-signaling? What value system does a state embrace when it shrugs off sexual misconduct by its teachers?
Ethics Alarms 
Public School Teachers 100 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO ABUSE KIDS Than Catholic Priests
PWS
Here’s how I describe California values; ignorant bikini clad valley girls with flowers in their hair driving 40+ miles per hour over the speed limit being chased by drooling boys speaking fluent dumbass peddling their asses off on their bicycles.
I stole that description from some Marines stationed at Twentynine Palms.
I assume that the teachers unions have a great deal to do with this.
As do I.
But if accusation (not conviction) is all it takes to ruin a career, and a “he said/she said” accusation needs no witnesses, how does a teacher avoid blackmail? Do we assume that students (some of whom are hardly children, in their mid-teens) can never lie?
One of my favorite authors for junk reading has a murder mystery that is solved because a teacher installs a camera pointed at his desk so that he can never be accused of fooling around with students since he will always have an impartial witness on the camera. I thought that sounded like a great idea, at least in a one-party consent state.
False accusations destroy lives all the time, and especially sexual abuse/harassment accusations. There are very few ways to combat this, as innocents are hurt either way. In truth, the distance between victim blaming and “believe all victims” is very short and nearly everyone, at least of those I’ve met, suffers from both. One false accusation moves people to victim blaming quickly, whereas one badly hurt person who was denied justice moves to “believe all victims”.
I think the middle ground involves a lot of work from both sides in this. First, if a person falsely accuses someone, they need to incur a harsh punishment. Now there needs to be an attempt made to understand a false accusation that comes from a misunderstanding rather than a malicious accusation. If a kid thinks the teacher said to “show your boobs” rather “show your food” when there is a kid with a life threatening peanut allergy in the lunch line, this is a simple misunderstanding. A kid who wants to get out of that F she’s getting for not doing her research paper, on the other hand is malicious.
Second, teachers need to be held to a high degree of behavior in and out of the classroom. Teachers should not be doing things that could get misconstrued and if they act outside a reasonably strict morality clause, this is not the profession for them.It used to be that teachers had to be immaculate. You couldn’t have a teacher who drank. You couldn’t have a teacher who was pregnant. If a teacher was found fornicating or even worse, adultery, they were removed. This kept the teachers’ noses pretty clean. While I don’t know if we need to have quite that strict of regulations, requiring good character in a teacher and making most significant ethical failures to be a firing offense would rather quickly make things better.
My hometown had a teacher who got pregnant with the principal’s kid about a decade ago. The principal’s wife, another teacher, got mad. The pregnant teacher’s husband got mad. Lots of unpleasantness and unprofessional behavior followed. The pregnant adultress moved in with her adultery partner and the cuckolded spouses were cast aside publically. This not only made major town gossip, but every kid in the school knew the basic details. Because of a lack of morality clause, nothing could be done and everyone kept their jobs. My mother told me she thought she had ended up in a soap opera, for the amount of drama this caused in that small town.
It’s easy to pick examples that show extremes, but really, working on policy that moves towards more ethically appropriate teacher behavior in and out of the class, as well as strictly punishing malicious false accusations would decrease the instances that could occur. Sexual harassment/assault by teachers continues to rise, according to some studies. It is time we consider how to stop this and, since it has become such a cancer, drastic action is needed before it kills the whole system.
“Teachers should not be doing things that could get misconstrued and if they act outside a reasonably strict morality clause, this is not the profession for them.”
I agree, 100%. There are most definitely certain roles in society that demand adherence to a higher standard than the norm, and a teacher (and more generally, anyone who works directly with other people’s children) is definitely one such role.
Unfortunately, this whole concept is completely stillborn today. The teacher’s unions are, by and large, owned and operated by people who tilt hard to the left, and such people do not and never have embraced morality as any sort of Good Thing™ going all the way back to the 1960’s.
Their idea of strict morality would mostly consist of trans ideology, socialism, and Orange Man Bad and so are the Deplorable Nazi Fascists who voted for him.
The irony is that it was the left who (IMO, correctly) first pushed for the elimination of sexual-adjacent behavior in the workplace, but we’ve seen time and again that they’ll abandon that same principle the nanosecond that one of THEM is negatively affected. (*cough* *cough* *Bill Clinton* *cough*)
I’m sure the left’s orthodoxy has no moral problem at all with the married Principal having an affair with and impregnating a married teacher so long as they both vote the correct way, because Power is all that matters to the Left.
I defy anyone to show me a moral principle that the Left espouses and consistently adheres to (and I’ll even allow for a handful of outliers). Go ahead. I’ll wait.
–Dwayne
Our host has observed that serial harrassers rarely stick to just one victim Given this Agan’s history, and the stories the others have shared on this thread, it’s almost comical how some people just can’t seem to help themselves, even when common sense would suggest they lay off for a while. With that mind, I think the cases worth investigating are the ones with multiple accusations from multiple, independent victims, and said accusations are given in a timely manner (within a week or so).
Did you read the article? The guy at the center seems pretty clearly a serial harasser.
As much as I hate to defend California, this is hardly unique. Wyoming has similar policies and we are about as red as they come. A previous principal in my town harassed/seduced teachers and students who reached the age of 18. Because all of his predations were of adults (even if only technically), he remained at his job for nearly a dozen years before enough complaints and the loss of too many teachers forced the school board to finally let him go. Just this last couple of years, a special education teacher was arrested after sexually abusing lots of kids just a few towns over from us. He had been skirting the edges of the law for years, but finally crossed enough lines that he could be arrested and fired, after abusing at least a handful of kids.
The other stories I know of are teachers who abuse students in other manners, not sexually, but I personally do not see much of a difference between a teacher who sexually harasses students and a teacher who beats students up, since children should be safe and unharmed in the school system if it were any good. Therefore, I’m picking on a favorite story of mine, my cousin, since I know many of the particulars that I might otherwise not know in detail. He worked in one town and was fired for wrestling his students and put a few too many in headlocks. After being fired for this, he was transferred to another town, where he rug-burnt a few handfuls of his students. He got fired again, and was hired as the youth pastor at the local Baptist church. He wrestled a few more kids harshly and is currently not allowed to be the only adult present when the youth group meets.
Frankly, if one looks at the data, 38% of all students in 7th-12th grade receive sexual harassment/abuse in the public school system from adults, according to some studies in 2017. I caution that these studies have broad definitions of sexual abuse/harassment, including things ranging from rape to cat-calling to inappropriate jokes and sexual comments. Of course, the more minor offenses of inappropriate comments and commentary are far more common than the more serious ones. Grooming behavior is reported separately, but is very common. The adults also range from teachers to coaches, bus drivers to lunch ladies to janitors, and everything in between. However, 63% of the behavior nationwide come from teachers.
The problem of how we handle accusations in public school can be handled very similarly to how accusations are handled in the Catholic Church. I don’t know if you are aware, but since 2010, more than 9 out of every 10 new accusations are found not to be credible. My favorite debunked accusation had the accused priest over 100 miles away on live television at the time of the alleged abuse. That’s quite the alibi. The way the Catholic Church handles accusations is that the priest is removed from active service until the accusation can be deemed credible or not. If it is not credible, the priest is still punished by being moved to another part of the diocese since people won’t believe he’s innocent, even if he was on another continent at the time. If it is deemed credible (which usually requires the priest to be in the correct locale and not easily proven to be doing something else), the priest is removed from public service entirely. If the priest can definitively prove his innocence, he MIGHT be allowed back into service, but is never allowed around kids again, no matter that he was proven innocent, because it MIGHT have happened, even if it didn’t. Catholics are still accused of being too light on the priests because there are errors in the application of these principles and people refuse to believe that priests could ever be innocent.
California is doing nothing significantly different than the rest of the nation. After learning of these facts years ago, I was further convinced that my children did not need to be in the public school system. I sometimes wonder if I am actually doing a good enough job teaching them, but frankly, if a 38% sexual harassment/abuse rate is not a reason to pull my kids from that system, what would be?
Comment of the Day, and I’ll combine it with your following one.