The Department of Education is launching civil rights investigations into 20 school districts nationwide, threatening to pull federal funding from schools that shield teachers credibly accused of sexual abuse, a crackdown that names Los Angeles as its first major target.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a "Dear Colleague" letter to school districts across the country last month warning that the federal government will no longer tolerate what her department calls a pattern of administrators looking the other way when teachers prey on students. The letter, paired with a formal announcement from the Department of Education, puts districts on notice: comply with federal law or lose your money.
The initiative centers on two federal statutes already on the books. Title IX, the 1972 law best known for campus gender equity, requires any school with knowledge of sexual harassment or assault to respond promptly and not with deliberate indifference. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the main federal K-12 funding law, bars districts that receive federal dollars from quietly shuffling accused predators to other schools, a practice investigators call "passing the trash."
McMahon's department says both laws are being broken routinely.
The department opened a Title IX investigation into the Los Angeles Unified School District in May, Breitbart News reported, zeroing in on a contract provision between LAUSD and the United Teachers of Los Angeles. That agreement, according to McMahon's letter, guarantees that teachers 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 officials investigate.
McMahon quoted the provision directly and warned that any district with a similar arrangement should expect a knock on the door next:
"To the extent that the Department is made aware of similar agreements, further investigations will follow."
California drew particular scrutiny. McMahon cited at least 67 cases this decade in which the state failed to revoke the professional licenses of educators after their own school districts determined they had sexually harassed students or committed other sexual misconduct. Fox News reported that at least 14 of those educators were later hired by other school districts, with at least 12 still working in education as of May.
That means teachers whom one district found guilty of sexual misconduct walked into classrooms in another district because California's credentialing commission never pulled their licenses.
Three California schools across two districts face losing nearly $50 million in federal Title I funding if the investigations find violations, the New York Post reported. McMahon framed the stakes plainly: schools that receive federal funding have a duty to protect students, report sexual misconduct honestly, and follow the law.
The same week the federal crackdown escalated, victims and child-safety advocates lobbied California's Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento. A state measure that would have capped the dollar amount victims could recover in lawsuits against government employees, including teachers, ultimately failed. But California lawmakers did manage to raise the standard of proof for older abuse cases, a move critics say makes it harder for victims of long-running misconduct to win in court.
The scale of the problem did not sneak up on anyone in Washington. In 2004, researcher Charol Shakeshaft published a landmark study under contract with the Department of Education. It found that nearly one in ten students would be subjected to sexual misconduct by a school employee before graduating high school.
The finding drew little sustained action. By 2006, Shakeshaft was telling National Review that the crisis dwarfed the Catholic Church abuse scandal:
"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."
Her follow-up research pushed the estimate higher. Shakeshaft's updated studies now put the figure at 17 percent of students, a seven-point increase from the original finding. A 2022 update to the ED-contracted study, covering 50 million students across nearly all of the nation's 100,000 schools, documented a nearly 100 percent increase in educator rape or attempted rape since the 2004 baseline.
Shakeshaft told Breitbart that recent media coverage tends to feature what she called "nearly 'pornographic' or salacious tabloid stories of female teachers having sex with young teen boys," while the data shows male teachers account for the lion's share of misconduct. Elizabeth L. Jeglic, a researcher at John Jay College in New York, called the problem "rampant" and said grooming behaviors by predators are often obvious inside schools, but colleagues are reluctant to report them.
The Trump administration tried once before to tighten reporting requirements near the end of its first term, in 2020. The ACLU mounted a court challenge to those rules. The outcome of that challenge is not detailed in current reporting, but the pattern is familiar: federal enforcement met institutional resistance, and the problem persisted.
The federal announcement landed during a week that illustrated exactly what McMahon's letter described. In New Jersey, a 45-year-old special education teacher, a married mother of two, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for sex with an eighth grader. In Riverside, California, a 34-year-old teacher and swim coach pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual penetration and other sex crimes against a 14-year-old. In the small town of Warden in eastern Washington, a 26-year-old teacher received 15 years for repeated sexual abuse of a 13-year-old student, including filming the encounters.
Those cases represent only the ones that reached a courtroom. The broader concern driving the federal crackdown is the number of cases that never get that far because administrators choose to transfer or quietly remove an accused teacher rather than report the conduct to law enforcement. The pattern mirrors the scandal that consumed the Catholic Church, and the people closest to both crises say so directly.
Attorney John C. Manly, whose firm has handled some of the highest-profile sexual abuse cases against both the Church and school districts, drew the comparison without hesitation. His firm won $140 million in damages against LAUSD in the case of Mark Berndt, a former Miramonte Elementary School teacher in Los Angeles who pleaded no contest in 2013 to 23 charges of lewd acts on children. Berndt received a 25-year prison sentence under the plea agreement. Scores of child victims each received $1.2 million.
The case that prompted ongoing national attention to teacher misconduct was not an isolated incident, Manly said. His firm has deposed hundreds of administrators in abuse cases and produced a documentary on the practice of passing the trash. He told Breitbart that the structural problem is straightforward:
"There is no liability unless administration knew and did nothing. With every school predator there is an enabler. And the enablers need to be held account."
Manly compared the institutional incentives to the ones that protected abusive priests for decades:
"You keep the secrets, we'll protect you. Which is precisely what the bishops used to do."
Chris Hansen, known for two decades of on-camera stings targeting child predators, appeared at the Sacramento news conference alongside victims' advocates. He told Breitbart that more than a dozen teachers have shown up at his sting operations over the years, and that one case earlier this year stood out.
Hansen described a sting in Maryland that netted a 61-year-old man who had once been named teacher of the year in the Baltimore school district. By the time he arrived at the sting house expecting to meet 15-year-old boys, he had risen to administrator and head of the advanced placement and gifted learning program for young students across the entire Baltimore district:
"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."
Hansen said the man is now charged with solicitation of minors and is sitting in a Baltimore jail awaiting trial. The case underscores a point McMahon's letter made repeatedly: the problem is not limited to classroom teachers. It reaches into administration, and the systems meant to catch it are failing.
The Trump administration's willingness to use federal funding as leverage marks a sharper posture than previous efforts. McMahon's department has framed the initiative not as a policy recommendation but as enforcement of existing law, law that districts have, in the department's telling, flouted for years while teachers' unions worked to shield accused members from discipline.
McMahon called the union agreements a failure of districts' "moral and legal responsibilities to parents and students." Her letter closed with a sentence that left little room for ambiguity:
"This epidemic of nationwide sexual abuse in our schools must end."
In a separate statement, McMahon added that the department would "fully enforce federal law and employ every resource at its disposal to protect children from sexual predators." Parents, she said, "should never have to wonder whether their kids' school employs and protects sexual predators."
Manly, the attorney who has spent years deposing the administrators who looked the other way, offered his own assessment of what it will take to change the incentive structure:
"The minute you start sending administrators to prison this will all stop."
He noted that parents have no choice in the matter the way churchgoers once did. The law does not force families to attend a church where children were molested, but it does require children to attend school. The distinction, in Manly's view, makes the government's obligation even greater.
A separate Breitbart report from February detailed the case of a teacher at a $60,000-a-year prep school in Brooklyn who had allegedly posed as a teenage boy online, obtained nude photos of girls between the ages of 3 and 15, and used them to groom students, despite having been hired with a criminal record already on file. Cases like that one, and like the broader pattern of leniency toward convicted sex offenders, illustrate the gap between what the law requires and what institutions actually do.
The 20 investigations now underway will test whether the threat of losing federal dollars changes behavior where two decades of research, lawsuits, and public outrage have not. The department has not publicly named the other 19 districts beyond LAUSD.
For millions of parents who send their children to public schools every morning trusting that the adults in charge will act like adults, the question is not whether the federal government is overreaching. It is why it took this long to reach at all.
