EXCLUSIVE: Trump Education Department Goes on the Warpath Against School Districts Enabling Teacher Sex Crimes

In a move to reduce the epidemic of teacher sexual misconduct, the Trump Administration has launched a nationwide crackdown on school districts that enable these disturbing offenses against children that continue to generate weekly headlines, Breitbart News has learned.

This week alone, three cases made the news:

• New Jersey special education teacher, 45, a married mother of two, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for having sex with an 8th grader.
• A 34-year-old Riverside, California teacher and swim coach pled guilty to two counts of sexual penetration and other sex crimes on a 14-year-old child.
• And, a 26-year-old teacher in the tiny eastern Washington town of Warden was sentenced to 15 years for repeated sex with a 13-year-old and filming the encounters.

The new effort appears particularly focused on what is known as “passing the trash” — the act of concealing sexual offenses and assigning the teacher to another school or recommending him or her as a good hire in another district.

The Department of Education (ED), which is leading the new probe, said in a recent statement:

The Trump Administration has observed a troubling and recurring pattern in schools across the nation of credible reports of sexual abuse and harassment by adults in positions of authority going uninvestigated or of suspected offenders being transferred to new schools or roles in the district.

However, that announcement, like many of Trump’s official actions, was ignored by major news networks and legacy print media.

While incessant Trump critics have accused the president of narrowing investigations and outright killing the federal education department, his administration in fact ramped up “educational sexual misconduct” reporting near the end of his first term.

The new policy meant to get a better handle on the problem had to overcome a court challenge to the reporting rules by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Announcement of the new 2026 crackdown comes following a blistering “Dear Colleague” letter sent out to U.S. school districts by ED Secretary Linda McMahon last month, which has been obtained by Breitbart News.

McMahon cites the epidemic being enabled by “institutional silence and complacency” by school districts and teachers’ unions being committed “to shield their members from disciplinary actions.”

McMahon called such practices a failure of their “moral and legal responsibilities to parents and students.”

Two decades-old laws are in play in the effort, an ED source who asked for anonymity told Breitbart News:

• A Title IX amendment in 1972 which requires schools with “knowledge of sexual harassment or sexual assault” to “promptly respond in a manner that is not deliberately indifferent.”
• The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) requires local districts receiving federal funds to prohibit schools from quietly removing perpetrators by helping them get jobs at other institutions — the practice known as “passing the trash,” the source said.

Secretary McMahon in her letter promised those who fail to follow federal laws will face the loss of federal funding, which virtually all school districts depend on for various local programs.

“This epidemic of nationwide sexual abuse in our schools must end,” she concluded.

In short, though schools are largely controlled by local school boards, the Trump administration and ED appear to be on the warpath.

For starters, the ED is opening investigations into 20 school districts it suspects may not be complying with federal laws.

California and Los Angeles appear to be emerging as ground zero in the effort. A civil rights investigation into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) began in May, alleging administrators and the teachers’ union were “protecting sexual predators at the expense of students.”

McMahon cited reporting that found at least 67 cases where the state of California has not revoked the professional licenses of educators after school districts determined they had sexually harassed students or committed other types of sexual misconduct this decade.

Twelve of those teachers remain working in education.

This past week, victims and student safety advocates lobbied California Democratic lawmakers who were attempting to pass a measure to limit the dollar amount victims could be compensated in lawsuits against government employees, including teachers.

Mainstream media ignored a news conference at the Sacramento capital on this issue despite the appearance of Chris Hansen, widely known for his two decades of busting hundreds child predators in on-camera stings.

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The measure to prevent lawsuits against predatory teachers and to cap financial awards ultimately failed, but lawmakers managed to increase the standard of proof for older cases.

California appears to be a leading offender in letting teachers off the hook.

Secretary McMahon wrote to educators:

For example, the Department recently opened an investigation into the Los Angeles Unified School District for an agreement with United Teachers of Los Angeles that guarantees that teachers will be reassigned — not terminated or immediately removed from student-facing roles while officials investigate when they are credibly accused of conduct including maintaining a sexual or “romantic” relationship with a student, creating child pornography, and failing to report suspected child abuse. To the extent that the Department is made aware of similar agreements, further investigations will follow.

McMahon also cited a 2004 landmark study — previously reported in an exclusive Breitbart News investigation in March — that revealed nearly one in ten students will be subjected to sexual misconduct by the time they graduate from high school.

That means millions of teens have gone on into adulthood with the demonstrated emotional and behavioral issues associated with those experiences, according to survivors, therapists, and child safety advocates.

In reality, the percentage is believed to be higher because of what experts say is a reluctance to report sex abuse by students, fellow teachers, and administrators in school systems plagued with a “culture of permissiveness,” leading experts on the epidemic told Breitbart.

Another ED-contracted study of 50 million students in nearly all of the 100,000 schools in the U.S., updated in 2022, showed a nearly 100 percent increase in educator rape or attempted rape since a landmark study published in 2004.

Charol Shakeshaft, who authored both the study for the ED and a book on this subject called Organizational Betrayal, as well as contemporary researcher Elizabeth L. Jeglic of John Jay College, have both called the problem “rampant” in U.S. schools, both large and small, urban and rural, public and private.

Shakeshaft’s follow-up studies for her book now put the percentage of students affected by sexual misconduct by the time they graduate at 17 percent, a seven-point increase.

Legacy media has largely neglected the troubling trend of the past two decades, instead focusing on scandals in the Roman Catholic Church and most recently the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Shakeshaft bemoaned the lack of concern and action in National Review in 2006 and predicted the explosion of cases, saying: “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.”

Recent coverage most often features nearly “pornographic” or salacious tabloid stories of female teachers having sex with young teen boys, Shakeshaft told Breitbart, when, in fact, their data shows male teachers account for the lion’s share of misconduct.

Offending teachers don’t limit their victims to their own students but often go hunting online for other marks and then involve their own pupils.

Breitbart News reported in February about a teacher at a $60,000-year Ivy League prep school in Brooklyn posing as a teenage boy online on, getting nude photos of girls between ages 3 and 15, and using them to groom his students. He was hired despite having a criminal record.

More than a dozen teachers have shown up at Hanson’s “sting houses” over the years.

One episode early this year involving a school administrator in a major city really stood out.

“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,” Hanson told Breitbart this week. “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.”

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He added, “Now he’s charged with solicitation of minors crimes and in the Baltimore jail awaiting trial.”

Researchers Shakeshaft and Jeglic told Breitbart News other less salacious grooming behaviors by predators are often obvious in schools, but colleagues are reluctant to report them or accuse a fellow teacher so as not to disrupt school “harmony.”

All 50 states have mandatory reporting laws, according to the ED. However, the effectiveness of peer reporting is questionable.

California and New York attorney John C. Manly, founder of one of the most successful law firms in the country for high profile sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church and in school districts, told Breitbart News when it comes to administrators following the law “they just ignore it.”

His firm won $140 million in damages against LAUSD for the notorious Mark Berndt case where the teacher allegedly abused and molested third through fifth grade students for decades and in an infamous incident, fed cookies containing his semen to some children.

Scores of kids received $1.2 million awards, Manly said.

Former Los Angeles teacher Mark Berndt, 62, is seen during his change-of-plea hearing in Los Angeles Friday, Nov. 15, 2013. Berndt, a once-respected former teacher accused of committing lewd acts on children in what he called “tasting games” pleaded no contest Friday to all the charges against him. He entered the legal equivalent of guilty pleas to 23 charges at a hearing Friday. The plea agreement calls for the former Miramonte Elementary School teacher to be sentenced to 25 years in prison. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

“There is no liability unless administration knew and did nothing,” Manly said. “With every school predator there is an enabler. And the enablers need to be held account.”

Instead, his firm has had cases in Los Angeles where administrators who failed to report got probation and were later promoted by their districts.

“You keep the secrets — we’ll protect you,” Manly said. “Which is precisely what the bishops used to do.”

His firm has deposed “hundreds” of administrator in cases.

“The shocking thing is the absolute indifference of administrators and superintendents to the problem,” he said. “The minute you start sending administrators to prison this will all stop.”

Manly’s firm also shot a documentary on the practice of “passing the trash.”

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There is no law requiring parents to be informed of sexual misconduct, the attorney also said, while schools require parents to be informed of other health matters such as lice infestations.

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Manly said there’s never been a legislative hearing on the local or federal level on the educator sexual misconduct epidemic, while far lesser issues are scrutinized by lawmakers. Politics and anti-Trump sentiment have entered into the legislative picture on a completely “nonpolitical” problem, Manly said.

“If parents understood the absolute scope of this, we’d have pitchforks and torches in the street, the tremendous number of children affected,” Manly said.

He continued, “The thing that’s maddening is the law doesn’t make your kids go to church where kids were molested, but the law mandates your kids go to school. We’re sending kids into a buzz saw.”

He added, “When this happens to a kid, it’s essentially murder. Their lives are destroyed. They’re never the same.”

Lowell Cauffiel has been covering in depth the ongoing teacher sexual abuse epidemic since 2025 for Breitbart News. He is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets , which documents one of the worst cases of child sex abuse in U.S. history, and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.