In the new A24 movie "Primetime," a film about the groundbreaking and important show "To Catch a Predator," Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen, a man who has spent the bulk of his career catching child predators. Here's how it worked. Someone on the show would pretend to be a young teenager online and set up a meeting at a house in the suburbs. The man who showed up expecting a child got Hansen instead, with a camera crew rolling and police waiting outside. Parents watching at home learned how predators groom kids online. As a result, plenty of them started pulling a chair up next to the family computer.
Our schools deserve the same scrutiny. A predator in a classroom has something the men on Hansen's show never had, and that's the protection of teachers' unions. The rules that make it so hard to get an abusive teacher out of a school exist because the teachers' unions fought to keep them.
The numbers are hard to ignore. Back in 2004, a report prepared for the U.S. Department of Education estimated that more than 4.5 million kids, roughly one in ten, experience sexual misconduct by a school employee at some point between kindergarten and graduation.
Take Mark Berndt. For more than 30 years, from 1979 to 2011, he taught third grade at Miramonte Elementary in Los Angeles. Lawsuits later alleged that administrators and Los Angeles Unified School District officials ignored complaints about him from parents, teachers, and students dating back to the early 1980s. When the district finally fired him in 2011, Berndt appealed. LAUSD's general counsel concluded the firing would not hold up, so the district paid Berndt $40,000 to drop his appeal and resign.
The public learned the rest later. Berndt was arrested in 2012, pleaded no contest the next year to 23 counts of lewd conduct, and received 25 years in prison.
The case led Los Angeles Democrat and state Sen. Alex Padilla to write SB 1530, a bill that would have made it easier to fire teachers accused of sex, drugs, or violence involving a student. Padilla called those narrow protections "no-brainers." The bill passed the California Senate by a lopsided 33-4 vote, then ran into the Assembly, where the unions wield enormous power. After lobbying by the California Teachers Association (CTA) and United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), it died in the Assembly Education Committee by one vote, with four members abstaining. UTLA's president said the bill "solves nothing."
Two years later, Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB 215, a compromise that created a faster firing process for teachers accused of egregious conduct, including sexual abuse. The CTA supported it. California's children waited two years while the union made sure the reform arrived on its terms.
Los Angeles is still paying for it. In May, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into LAUSD over policies that appear to automatically reassign teachers accused of sexual misconduct with students. Federal officials pointed to a 2024 settlement between the district and UTLA that resolved a union grievance. LAUSD denies the charge, saying reassignment typically means an accused employee stays home and away from students during an investigation. Meanwhile, the district has approved $750 million in bonds to pay sexual misconduct claims.
California is hardly alone. A two-year USA Today investigation found more than 100 educators who lost their licenses over misconduct with children and went on to work with kids in other jobs. It also found state education agencies ignoring a federal ban on secret agreements that hide sexual misconduct, which makes it easier for accused teachers to land jobs in other districts. The practice even has a name: passing the trash. Only 19 states and D.C. require standard screening of prospective hires and ban the confidentiality agreements that help predators move from district to district. The Department of Education is now reviewing how 20 districts in 15 states respond to these allegations.
That review should be the start of a national crackdown. Every state needs pass-the-trash legislation that penalizes superintendents and administrators who sign nondisclosure agreements with teachers accused of misconduct. Parents should be notified when an employee at their child's school is under investigation for sexual misconduct with a student. Every quiet deal that sends an accused predator to a new district puts another child in his path.
Teachers have a role to play too. Those who don't support their unions' lobbying against these reforms should consider leaving. Teacher Freedom Alliance can help any teacher do it.
"To Catch a Predator" made parents take the danger online seriously. The danger inside school buildings deserves the same attention, and the families at Miramonte learned what it costs when adults look away.
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