Let’s check in on California, where things are going about as well as you would expect. Yesterday, the Hill reported, “McMahon: Education Department ‘cracking down’ on teachers harassing students.” Harassing students? The headline buried the disgraceful lede.

CLIP: Secretary of Education Linda McMahon calls out California (1:41).

Yesterday, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon told skeptical CNN anchor Dana Bash that, based on a department study of data provided by school districts, “statistics show one in 10 children will be sexually molested before they finish high school.” That seems like a lot.

Apparently, many or most of these teachers are not disciplined. Their records remain undisturbed. They just get reassigned to other school districts under a policy McMahon called passing the trash. “Instead of firing those teachers, those teachers just get sent to another school,” McMahon explained. “And it’s not part of their record or anything.”

🔥 That this scandal is erupting in blue states shouldn’t surprise anyone. I’m old enough to remember when Catholic churches and Baptists were accused of passing the trash with pedophile priests and youth ministers. Then, it was a progressive moral panic. Now? Crickets. Well, worse than crickets. Denial.

To its credit, CNN posted the unedited interview transcript. But what the transcript showed least was any sense of concern from interviewer Dana Bash. She repeatedly demanded proof, as if the official government findings were something McMahon had just made up for clicks and giggles.

Unsurprisingly, California is one of the worst offenders. “When we really looked at those stats coming out of California, we said, what is really going on here in these schools?” One suspects teachers’ unions might have something to do with it, given their proximity to ground zero, in the same way that Wuhan bioengineers might be related to the covid breakout. You never know.

McMahon announced a crackdown: opening formal investigations into school districts, threatening to withhold or cut federal funding under Title IX and other laws, and pressuring states and districts to actually fire molesters and child abusers and keep proper records.

That seems exactly like the kind of thing a federal Department of Education should be doing.

🔥 What was surprising, if not shocking, was Dana Bash’s resistance to the information, as if McMahon’s claims were completely unprecedented. But the problem has been long known, even if not well covered. How Dana Bash failed to do even the bare minimum of research is the ‘real’ scandal. Here’s a 20-year-old CBS headline:

Umm… yes.

In 2002, the Bush Administration’s Department of Education carried out a study of sexual abuse in the public school system. Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft conducted the study, and was shocked at how little attention the problem was getting compared to church-abuse scandals. “Think the Catholic Church has a problem?” she asked. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”

If church abuse is a national scandal, then what about 100x public-school abuse?

As recently as 2023, PubMed published a peer-reviewed study of K-12 teacher abuse.

“Overall,” the researchers concluded, “11.7% of the 6632 participants reported having experienced at least one form of educator sexual misconduct during Grades K-12, with 11% reporting sexual comments and less than 1% reporting other forms of sexual misconduct (e.g., receiving sexual photos/messages, being kissed, touched sexually, or engaging in sexual intercourse/oral sex).”

Most of those reporting misconduct were girls (72%).

🔥 It’s an epidemic. The 2023 study reported even more abuse than McMahon claimed. But CNN’s Dana Bash thought the very idea was the strangest thing she ever heard. “Where did that stat come from?”, Bash demanded, and then sneered, “Did you do a study at your department?” (McMahon said yes.)

The data is trivial to find. Even the data focusing on the Golden State. In May of this year, left wing ProPublica ran an entire series called “Unfit to Teach: How California Hides Teacher Misconduct.” Finding specific examples with named teachers was a moment’s work:

Jason Agan —found “unfit to teach”— was the mildest example they could have chosen. After a lengthy union-defended process, he was allowed to resign from his original school district, and promptly started teaching in another. As of May, Agan was still teaching. ProPublica said it reviewed five years of records from 2019-2025 and found at least 67 similar examples of other unfit teachers who were not permanently disciplined, with at least 14 rehired by other districts. Pass the trash.

There are good reasons why California ranks among the worst states in the country for teacher abuse. “The agency’s disciplinary process is unique among licensing bodies in California in how much is kept secret,” ProPublica wrote. The licensing agencies for dozens of other professions in California —like doctors, nurses, police officers and lawyers— clearly disclose the reasons for disciplinary actions right on their websites. At least 12 states, including Oregon, Washington and Florida, do the same for teachers.

But not in the nation’s bluest big state, where Democrats squat in solid control of state government.

It’s not just male teachers, not by a long shot. In Florida, where teachers are arrested and publicly prosecuted for sexual misconduct, we have noticed, with an appropriate degree of horror, that a distressing number of abusers are women. Headline from Cocoa Beach affiliate CBS-12, April, 2026:

In June, Fox News reported six alleged victims of one female special education teacher in Douglas County:

🔥 Let’s not let Florida off the hook, even though the Sunshine State aggressively prosecutes offenders. Criminal prosecution is most effective in that it cuts teachers’ unions out of the loop. And we can recognize that McMahon’s crackdown is long overdue— why didn’t the Bush Administration, for example, crack down after conducting the original study?

But the core problem is that all after-the-fact remedies, whether firings or prosecutions, require a victim first.

Don’t get me wrong. Consequences are essential. Without them, confirmed problems continue. However, they arrive too late —after the harm has already happened— and too frequently prove incomplete.

What school districts really need are proactive policies designed to root out bad actors before they enter the system. But too often, Democrats kneecap efforts to screen undesirables from public schools. California law, for example, bans the state’s educational credentialing agency from publicly releasing teacher disciplinary records.

Again— this secrecy privilege is unique to teachers. “Professional privacy” is not shared by lawyers, doctors, nurses, or police officers.

Thanks to protective laws, school districts in California have limited access to sexual misconduct history. They can only get a summary of cases, only after the state agency has formally disciplined a teacher, and not after five years. Investigations take years, and the system is designed to keep the entire process confidential until a final decision. Short of rape, even the state agency lacks the power to revoke teaching credentials, and the state process has been described as “slow and opaque.”

That’s how pass the trash works. California state law makes it nearly impossible for a new school district to properly vet applicants. Teachers’ unions, especially the California Teachers Association (CTA), are among the state’s most powerful political players. Just saying.

The most encouraging part of Linda McMahon’s announcement was the threat of defunding schools whose policies fail to protect students. Maybe that will get their attention. But it must have teeth. More, please. Faster.