The Department of Education has launched probes into 20 school districts nationwide for allegedly shielding teachers credibly accused of sexual abuse, and is threatening to pull federal funding from any district that fails to comply.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon fired the opening salvo in July with a "Dear Colleague" letter to school districts across the country, warning that the department had identified "a troubling and recurring pattern" of credible abuse reports going uninvestigated and suspected predators being quietly shuffled to new schools instead of removed. The letter, first reported by Breitbart News, names the Los Angeles Unified School District as ground zero for the federal effort and puts every district in the country on notice: protect predators, lose your money.
The crackdown invokes two federal laws. Title IX, the 1972 civil rights amendment, requires any school with knowledge of sexual harassment or assault to respond promptly and without deliberate indifference. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act bars districts that receive federal dollars from helping accused perpetrators land jobs at other schools, a practice insiders call "passing the trash." McMahon's letter makes clear that districts violating either statute face termination of federal funding.
The department opened a Title IX civil rights investigation into LAUSD in May, alleging that administrators and the United Teachers of Los Angeles had been protecting sexual predators at the expense of students. McMahon's letter spelled out the charge in detail: LAUSD's agreement with the teachers' union guarantees that educators credibly accused of maintaining sexual relationships with students, creating child pornography, or failing to report suspected child abuse will be reassigned, not terminated or immediately removed from contact with children, while the district investigates.
McMahon called the arrangement a failure of "moral and legal responsibilities to parents and students" and blamed teachers' unions for committing "to shield their members from disciplinary actions." She warned that any district with a similar deal should expect the same scrutiny.
The New York Post reported that two additional California districts, Tulare City Unified and Wilsona School District, also received federal warning letters for allegedly shielding teachers accused of sexual abuse. California alone faces up to $50 million in potential federal funding cuts if violations are confirmed across the three flagged districts. McMahon put it plainly: "Our schools must protect America's children. Parents should never have to wonder whether their kids' school employs and protects sexual predators."
The scope of the problem runs far deeper than any single district. A landmark 2004 study contracted by the Department of Education, authored by researcher Charol Shakeshaft, found that nearly one in ten students would be subjected to sexual misconduct by the time they graduated high school. Shakeshaft's follow-up research for her book Organizational Betrayal, published by Harvard Education Press, put the figure at 17 percent, a seven-point jump.
A separate ED-contracted study of 50 million students across nearly all of the nation's roughly 100,000 schools, updated in 2022, showed a nearly 100 percent increase in educator rape or attempted rape since the original 2004 findings. Shakeshaft warned about the trajectory years ago. In a 2006 piece for National Review, she said:
"Think the Catholic Church has a problem? The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests."
That comparison is not rhetorical flourish. The Catholic Church abuse scandal produced congressional hearings, grand jury investigations, and billions of dollars in settlements. Educator sexual misconduct, by Shakeshaft's own data, far more widespread, has produced almost none of that institutional accountability. Attorney John C. Manly, whose California and New York firm has handled high-profile sexual abuse cases against both the Church and school districts, told Breitbart News there has never been a single legislative hearing on educator sexual misconduct at the local or federal level.
The Trump administration's broader enforcement posture extends well beyond sexual misconduct. The Education Department has also opened a joint investigation with the DOJ into Washington State for alleged Title IX violations related to transgender policies in schools, including accusations that the state coerced districts into hiding students' gender identity information from parents. McMahon has created a "Title IX Special Investigations Team" to handle these cases and warned that federal funding will be terminated for non-compliant states.
Manly's firm won $140 million in damages against LAUSD in the case of Mark Berndt, a Los Angeles teacher who pleaded no contest on November 15, 2013, to 23 charges of committing lewd acts on children. Berndt's plea agreement called for a 25-year prison sentence. He had allegedly abused and molested third through fifth graders for decades. In one incident, he allegedly fed cookies containing his semen to some of the children. Scores of victims received $1.2 million awards.
Manly, who has deposed hundreds of school administrators in abuse cases, described a system that mirrors the institutional cover-ups exposed in the Church. He told Breitbart News:
"With every school predator there is an enabler. And the enablers need to be held account."
He compared the dynamic directly to the bishops who shielded abusive priests: "You keep the secrets, we'll protect you. Which is precisely what the bishops used to do." Manly said administrators routinely ignore mandatory reporting laws that exist in all 50 states. He called their indifference "shocking" and argued that the only deterrent that will work is criminal prosecution of the officials who look the other way.
"The minute you start sending administrators to prison this will all stop," Manly said.
Parents, he argued, have no idea how widespread the problem is. Manly told Breitbart News that no law requires districts to inform parents when sexual misconduct occurs. He pointed to a grim irony: the government does not force families to send their children to church, where the abuse scandals played out, but it does compel them to send children to school.
The administration's willingness to use federal funding as leverage against school districts marks a sharp departure from previous approaches. The same funding mechanism has been deployed in the ongoing fight over biological males competing in girls' sports, where the Education Department has threatened to cut off districts that refuse to comply with Title IX as interpreted by the current administration.
Chris Hansen, known for two decades of on-camera stings that have caught hundreds of child predators, told Breitbart News this week about a case that captures the problem in a single episode. Earlier this year, Hansen's team ran a sting operation in Maryland. A 61-year-old man showed up at the sting house expecting to have sex with 15-year-old boys.
Hansen described what they found:
"We were doing a sting in Maryland, and a former teacher of the year in the Baltimore school district showed up expecting sex with 15-year-old boys. Turned out this 61-year-old man now was the administrator and head of the advanced placement and gifted learning program for young kids for the entire Baltimore school district."
The man has been charged with solicitation of minors and sits in a Baltimore jail awaiting trial. He had risen from celebrated classroom teacher to a senior administrator overseeing programs for gifted children across the entire district.
More than a dozen teachers have appeared at Hansen's sting houses over the years. Hansen appeared at a Sacramento news conference this past week alongside victims and student safety advocates who lobbied California lawmakers, an event that, per the reporting, drew no mainstream media coverage.
Researcher Elizabeth L. Jeglic of John Jay College, who has studied the issue extensively, told Breitbart News that less sensational grooming behaviors by predators, the kind that precede outright abuse, are often visible to colleagues in schools. But those colleagues remain reluctant to report what they see.
The reluctance to confront institutional failures in schools parallels resistance on other fronts. The ACLU has fought the administration on multiple education-related policies, and it previously brought a court challenge to reporting rules the Trump administration implemented near the end of its first term. The administration overcame that challenge, and the current crackdown builds on those earlier efforts.
The week the department's initiative became public, three separate teacher criminal cases made the news. A 45-year-old married mother of two who taught special education in New Jersey was sentenced to 12 years in prison for having sex with an eighth grader. A 34-year-old teacher and swim coach in Riverside, California, pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual penetration and other sex crimes against a 14-year-old. And in the small eastern Washington town of Warden, a 26-year-old teacher received a 15-year sentence for repeated sexual contact with a 13-year-old student and filming the encounters.
In February, Breitbart News reported on a teacher at a $60,000-per-year prep school in Brooklyn who had posed as a teenage boy online, obtained nude photos of girls between the ages of 3 and 15, and used those images to groom his own students. The school had hired him despite a criminal record.
McMahon's letter cited at least 67 cases in California alone where the state failed to revoke the professional licenses of educators after their own districts determined they had sexually harassed students or committed other sexual misconduct. Twelve of those teachers remain working in education today.
Meanwhile, California Democratic lawmakers attempted to pass a measure that would have capped the dollar amount victims could recover in lawsuits against government employees, including teachers. That effort failed, but the lawmakers did manage to raise the standard of proof for older abuse cases, making it harder for victims of past misconduct to win in court. The Supreme Court's reluctance to take up parental rights cases has left much of the enforcement to the executive branch and state legislatures, a vacuum the Trump administration has moved aggressively to fill.
Shakeshaft, who has studied the issue for more than two decades, told Breitbart News that recent media coverage of teacher abuse cases tends to be sensationalized and disproportionately focused on female offenders, when male teachers account for the vast majority of misconduct. The pattern she identified in 2006, institutional indifference, bureaucratic self-protection, and a refusal to treat the problem with the seriousness it demands, has not changed. It has gotten worse.
Even members of the president's own party have begun to recognize the broader pattern of institutional failure in schools. Several House Democrats recently broke ranks to support protections for students in military-run schools, a sign that the political ground may be shifting beneath the education establishment.
Mandatory reporting laws exist in all 50 states. Federal statutes already prohibit the worst abuses. The tools have been on the books for years. What has been missing is the willingness to use them, and the political courage to name the unions, administrators, and bureaucrats who decided that protecting adults mattered more than protecting children.
