Recent headlines highlight the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights’ new investigation of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is leading the charge, asserting that when teachers are accused of misconduct, LAUSD merely reassigns them to another school. Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey says LAUSD puts “the continued employment of sexual predators above the safety of students.”
McMahon is also attacking United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), accusing the union of working to “protect the employment of sexual predators … allowing alleged criminals to be reassigned to a different school.”
One might think that before launching this attack McMahon — a cabinet secretary and the leading education figure in the US — would look into what is meant by “reassigns.”
Yes, accused teachers are reassigned — to home.
And at home they wait — and wait and wait and wait – for their cases to be investigated and adjudicated. They are not allowed any contact with their school or any students.
Until recently, teachers on administrative leave were held in “teacher jail” — forced to report and sit all day in a windowless room in LAUSD’s downtown headquarters. They often went months without even being informed of the charges against them.
Some didn’t even know in which year they allegedly committed the offense(s), and were often surprised to find that the allegations were from several years ago.
UTLA has forced some changes. For example, accused educators now get to serve their time at home as long as they check in during the day, and must be “notified within five days of the general nature of the allegations against them.”
The accusations against these teachers have not been adjudicated. UTLA is not protecting “predators”; we are protecting teachers’ right to due process.
As a union steward at my school, I’ve often represented teachers in the early stages of this process, and for the accused, it can be an agonizing experience.
For example, in September 2024, Jason, a 2018 Los Angeles LAUSD Teacher of the Year in his third decade of teaching, was abruptly yanked out of school and kept at home for almost nine months. He was accused of impregnating a former student, now 26 years old.
Yet it was not until May — 237 days later — when LAUSD finally interviewed the alleged victim, at which point the entire accusation was immediately discredited.
According to the LAUSD Special Investigator, the alleged victim attested that Jason “had always conducted himself in an appropriate manner” and “she denied ever seeing him outside of school … she said the information her [then 15-year-old] sister told the District was just a really bad joke.”
For this, a devoted teacher’s life was upended and his career almost destroyed.
I certainly would not claim that every accused teacher is innocent, but many of them are. In fact, one of the untold outrages in modern K-12 education is how common it is for teachers — particularly younger male teachers — to have their careers marred or even destroyed by false allegations.
Over 80% of LAUSD students are low-income, and many are immigrants or the children of immigrants. They and their families have a tremendous incentive to make an accusation — even the “go-away” money from a settlement based on a spurious accusation is a small fortune to many of them.
Beyond this are all the conventional reasons for a false accusation: a student is angry over a grade or a teacher’s criticism, something a teacher said to one student is being misunderstood by another, the student is having problems in his or her personal life, and so on.
A common one is that when a student wants to change out of a difficult class and the counselor won’t let her, he or she makes a claim against the teacher so he or she can get out of the class.
Moreover, young people — like the source of the false accusation against Jason — generally have little or no idea of the serious long-term damage a false accusation can cause.
For all the Department of Education’s bombast against LAUSD, the district’s statements in response to the investigation have been measured and largely correct. The exception is their claim that “when allegations are reported, they are promptly reviewed.” In reality, resolving claims often takes years.
The extraordinary amount of time it takes to investigate and adjudicate claims against educators — not an imagined permissiveness or leniency — is the actual problem with the way LAUSD handles abuse allegations.
Glenn Sacks teaches Government and represents United Teachers Los Angeles at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
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