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BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGMay 13, 2026

He Was Fired for Sexually Harassing Students. California Allowed Him to Keep Teaching Anyway.

A joint investigative report by ProPublica and KQED reveals that California's Commission on Teacher Credentialing allowed at least 67 educators to keep their teaching licenses after school districts reported them for sexual harassment or sexual misconduct, including math teacher Jason Agan, who was fired in 2019 for sexually harassing students but was subsequently hired by two more schools. California law prevented the credentialing agency from disclosing details about misconduct cases, meaning any school searching a flagged teacher's name would see a valid, clean-looking credential. Agan ultimately faced a second accusation of unwanted touching at his second school, and despite a state-issued one-week license suspension, continued working in education.

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⚡The liberal argument represents the dominant position. A significant liberal faction disagrees — see The Divide below.

California law requires schools to report sexual harassment to the state — but doesn't require the state to revoke a teacher's license. So a man fired for harassing students kept his credentials and could teach again elsewhere. Should misconduct findings automatically end a teaching career, or does that bypass due process protections teachers need?

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One-week suspension defies explanation
Conservative
An independent state panel declared Jason Agan 'unfit to teach' for sexually harassing children, and California's official response was a one-week suspension. Not a close call, not an ambiguous finding — an independent body's determination that this man should not be in a classroom, answered with seven days off. If that outcome emerged from a system designed to protect children, the system is catastrophically broken. If it emerged from a system designed to protect educators, it worked exactly as intended.
Liberal
The seven-day suspension is indefensible, and I won't defend it. But you're treating it as proof of a design when it's actually proof of a collapse — the Commission had authority to act more aggressively and didn't. Nothing in California's confidentiality statutes required them to hand down seven days; that was a choice made by an underfunded, politically timid agency sitting on a four-year backlog. The law didn't mandate that outcome. The Commission chose it.
Conservative
You're drawing a distinction between the law and the agency, but after four years and seven days, that distinction has no practical content. A system that consistently produces this outcome across 67 documented cases isn't malfunctioning — it's performing.
Liberal
Sixty-seven cases is a real indictment of the Commission, not of the statutory framework — medical licensing boards operate under similar confidentiality rules and manage provisional suspensions within weeks. The problem is enforcement capacity and political will, which are fixable without dismantling the due-process architecture.
Confidentiality law shields predators from scrutiny
Conservative
California's law made sure that every school that hired Agan after his firing saw a credential that looked clean. Parents had no idea. Hiring principals had no usable information. The confidentiality provisions that were supposed to protect workers from false accusations functioned, in practice, as a privacy shield for a man an independent panel had already found unfit. At some point the protection being delivered has to match the protection being claimed.
Liberal
Those provisions weren't written to shield predators — they were written because history is full of workers, disproportionately women and people of color, who lost careers over disputed or retaliatory complaints before any neutral body weighed in. You're proposing to judge the law by its worst-case application rather than its purpose, which is the same logic used to gut every worker protection that's ever been inconvenient.
Conservative
The purpose of a lock matters less than whether the locksmith can pick it. Agan's case isn't the worst-case application of these provisions — it's the documented, repeated, normal application. Pointing to the law's intent doesn't explain the three schools, the second harassment complaint, or the four-year queue.
Liberal
Fair — but the answer to a lock that can be picked isn't to remove the lock, it's to build a better one. Provisional suspension of hiring eligibility, already standard in medical and nursing licensure, protects students at the hiring stage without triggering public disclosure before adjudication.
Institutional capture mirrors church and sports scandals
Conservative
The pattern here is identical to what was documented in Catholic dioceses and USA Gymnastics: an institution protects the credentialed insider, manages information, and minimizes disruption — at the direct expense of the most vulnerable people in its care. The institution is different. The mechanism is identical. California has built an educator-protection system with a child-safety veneer, and a generic red flag icon with no searchable detail is the state's idea of meaningful disclosure.
Liberal
The dioceses and USA Gymnastics actively concealed findings they already had — moved abusers, destroyed records, paid silence. California's Commission published a red flag, logged the district report, opened an investigation. The concealment was structural and passive, not coordinated and active. That distinction matters because it changes the fix: you don't need a criminal conspiracy prosecution, you need a bureaucratic overhaul.
Conservative
A red flag icon with no legal content behind it, visible only to credentialed searchers, in a state where disclosure to parents is prohibited — that's not transparency, that's the appearance of transparency. Passive concealment and active concealment produce the same student sitting in front of Jason Agan.
Liberal
Agreed on the outcome, and that's exactly why the fix is mandatory disclosure of misconduct category and investigation status to hiring institutions — not a public registry that treats an unfinalised finding the same as a conviction. Same protection, lower collateral damage.
Teacher shortage incentivizes ignoring warning signs
Conservative
The Megan's Law debates settled that the public's right to protect children from documented predators outweighs the predator's interest in occupational anonymity. There is no principled reason that logic stops at the classroom door. When California makes the information legally inaccessible, it doesn't eliminate the risk — it transfers it, offloading harm from one district's students onto the next district's students, who bear the cost of a decision they had no information to refuse.
Liberal
The COVID-era math teacher shortage created exactly the conditions where a Sacramento school would look at a vague red flag on a credential and make the pragmatic hire rather than leave a classroom unstaffed. You can't fix disclosure without fixing the workforce conditions that make schools desperate enough to look past warning signs they can barely read — otherwise better labeling just produces better-informed gambles.
Conservative
Teacher shortages are real, but they're not an argument against disclosure — they're an argument that disclosure alone is insufficient. A school desperate enough to hire past a clearly labeled sexual misconduct flag is a different and more tractable policy failure than a school that couldn't read the flag at all.
Liberal
Right, and that means the legislative package has to move together: mandatory timelines, readable flags, and workforce investment. Any one of those alone leaves a gap that the next Jason Agan walks through.
Retaliation risk in pre-adjudication suspension
Conservative
The reforms required here are not complicated: mandatory disclosure of substantiated findings, automatic suspension of hiring eligibility upon a district termination for sexual misconduct, and hard statutory deadlines on credentialing investigations. These cost the state nothing. If Sacramento can't pass them, ask who is in the room when those bills stall and what organizations they take money from.
Liberal
The hardest thing to dismiss is this: if the legislature mandates provisional suspension of hiring eligibility upon a district's misconduct report before adjudication, you've handed administrators a new tool to retaliate against teachers who filed grievances or organized. The history of how districts treat whistleblowers is not hypothetical. A reform designed to stop predators must be designed carefully enough that it doesn't also accelerate the firing of inconvenient employees.
Conservative
That's a real design problem, but notice it's an argument about how to build the reform, not whether to build it. The current system's answer to retaliation risk is to let 67 documented cases of substantiated misconduct sail through the credentialing process — that's not a tradeoff, that's an abdication.
Liberal
Agreed that abdication isn't the alternative — the design work is to tie provisional suspension to independent panel findings or formal credentialing-body review, not raw district reports, which is exactly the threshold that would have stopped Agan while protecting teachers fired for organizing.
Conservative's hardest question
The strongest challenge to this argument is the due-process objection applied specifically to the moment before final adjudication: if public disclosure is triggered at the district-termination stage rather than after credentialing review, wrongfully terminated teachers — including those fired for discriminatory or retaliatory reasons — face irreversible reputational destruction before any neutral body has made a finding. California's history includes documented cases of teachers fired improperly, and that risk is not imaginary. The honest answer is that this concern is real but does not justify the current system, which protects even substantiated, independently reviewed findings from disclosure — but the design of any reform must grapple seriously with where on the adjudication timeline disclosure should be triggered.
Liberal's hardest question
The hardest thing to dismiss is the labor-left counterargument: if the legislature mandates immediate provisional suspension of hiring eligibility upon a district's misconduct report — before adjudication — it creates a mechanism that can be abused by districts against teachers who filed grievances or organized. The history of how districts have treated whistleblowers and union activists means this isn't a hypothetical. A reform that protects students from predators must be designed carefully enough that it doesn't also hand administrators a new tool to retaliate against inconvenient employees, and that design problem is genuinely hard.
The Divide
*Progressives split on whether to dismantle teacher confidentiality laws to catch predators faster, or preserve due-process protections while fixing bureaucratic failures.*
REFORM-PROGRESSIVE
Supports immediate legislative action to mandate disclosure and faster revocations, even if it requires modifying confidentiality protections.
LABOR-LEFT
Prefers strengthening investigation processes and due-process protections rather than automatic public disclosure before adjudication.
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides agree that a one-week suspension for conduct an independent panel deemed 'unfit to teach' is categorically inadequate and represents a failure of the credentialing system to match consequence to severity.
The real conflict
FACT vs. INTERPRETATION: Conservatives attribute the system's failure primarily to institutional capture by teacher unions and a deliberate design to protect educators over children; liberals attribute it primarily to bureaucratic resource constraints and lack of political will, with union influence as a contributing factor rather than a root cause. These lead to different reform priorities: conservatives push for mandatory public disclosure; liberals prioritize provisional suspension during investigation.
What nobody has answered
If the Commission on Teacher Credentialing had the authority to impose provisional suspension of Agan's hiring eligibility immediately upon the independent panel's 'unfit to teach' finding in 2019 — without waiting for four years or relying on public disclosure — why did it not do so, and what in California law or agency practice actually prevented that action, or merely failed to require it?
Sources

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