A California bill that would have let school districts check whether a teaching applicant had been reported to the state for misconduct has collapsed in the Legislature — the second failed attempt in a year — even as the state builds an identical warning system for bus drivers and janitors, according to reporting by KQED and ProPublica.

California is standing up a statewide misconduct database for school support staff — bus drivers, custodians, teaching assistants — by next summer, but a parallel effort to let districts screen classroom teachers for the same red flags just died in committee under pressure from teachers unions and the state's own licensing agency. The collapse of Assembly Bill 1381 leaves intact a patchwork reporting system that a KQED-ProPublica investigation showed lets educators pushed out over misconduct claims quietly land jobs at other districts.

Assembly Bill 1381, authored by Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, would have allowed districts hiring for public school positions to see whether an applicant had been reported to the state after being fired or resigning over misconduct claims — closing a loophole that lets educators pushed out of one district quietly land jobs at another. Muratsuchi, a Democrat, took up the cause after a May KQED-ProPublica investigation documented how delays, secrecy and inaction at the state's teacher licensing agency allowed educators reported for sexual harassment and other misconduct to keep working. It collapsed following opposition from teachers unions and the state's own licensing agency, who argued a searchable database would violate teacher privacy and subject educators to unfair treatment.

The bill's own legislative record traces how it died. AB 1381 cleared the Assembly on a 79-0 vote in June 2025, then sat in the Senate. It was rewritten twice this summer — amended on June 11 and again on July 2, 2026 — to become the teacher-database proposal. On June 26, its first hearing before the Senate Committee on Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protection was canceled at the author's own request, and the bill was sent back to that committee. That is where it now sits, effectively dead for the session.

Opposition came from two directions that rarely align against a child-safety measure: organized labor and the licensing regulator itself. The California Federation of Teachers warned that educators could be flagged before any district had actually substantiated wrongdoing.

"We would support legislation that targets substantiated reports of egregious misconduct," Tristan Brown, a CFT lobbyist, told KQED. "We live in a state with Silicon Valley. The state should be able to support a system that is up to date and tracking substantiated reports of misconduct."

Muratsuchi said his office was "confronted with a lot of resistance" over whether the database would lead to unfair treatment of the accused. He is not the first to hit that wall. An earlier attempt by Republicans failed the same way.

"When the safety of a child does not meet a legislative priority, that's a head-scratcher for me," said Republican Assemblymember Tom Lackey, who co-authored the first version of a teacher database bill, in comments to KQED. "I think being sympathetic to the offender is on the wrong side of this issue."

The failure is thrown into relief by what California did pass. A 2025 law requires the state to build, by next summer, a searchable database of school support staff — bus drivers, custodians, teaching assistants — who are under investigation or have substantiated complaints of egregious misconduct. That law survived union opposition. It also explicitly excludes classroom teachers.

For now, the system covering teachers remains a patchwork. Districts must report educators who are fired or resign over misconduct, but the credentialing commission is legally limited in what it can disclose during an investigation — a process that typically runs a year, long enough for a teacher to be hired elsewhere in the meantime. The state's public credential lookup shows a red-flag icon for disciplined teachers but no explanation of why. Absent a real database, California districts are left doing what the last few years have shown does not reliably work: trusting applicants and their former employers to disclose the truth.