The answer is depressingly simple. California's system for revoking teaching credentials is so broken, so bureaucratically sluggish, that predatory educators slip right through the cracks.

Since 2019, at least 67 cases have been identified in which California failed to revoke educators' licenses even after their own school districts determined they committed sexual harassment or misconduct. At least 14 of those individuals were rehired by other schools. Let that sink in. Fourteen teachers that districts already decided were unfit to be around children walked into new classrooms full of someone else's kids.

One Bay Area case is particularly stomach-turning. Jason Agan, a teacher at Rodriguez High in Fairfield, was fired after students repeatedly reported him for unwanted touching, including alleged shoulder massages. An independent panel deemed him unfit. His district did its job. But the state? The state let him keep his license.

This isn't a funding problem. It's not a staffing shortage issue. It's a government accountability problem — the kind where a bloated bureaucracy moves at a pace that puts children at risk while the adults in Sacramento shrug.

As one Bay Area resident put it: "How does this guy get away with so much, when other teachers get fired on the flimsiest of evidence?" It's a fair question, and it points to something even more unsettling — a system that isn't just slow, but arbitrary.

If California can process tax penalties and parking tickets with ruthless efficiency, it can figure out how to yank a teaching credential from someone who shouldn't be within 500 feet of a school. The state has a monopoly on who gets to teach our kids. The absolute bare minimum is ensuring that people already found guilty of misconduct don't get a second shot.

Every day a credential stays active after a finding like this is a day the state has chosen bureaucratic inertia over child safety. There's no libertarian or progressive spin needed here — this is just failure, plain and simple.