So it turns out that the Des Moines superintendent Ian Andre Roberts had an even longer rap sheet than previously known. According to the most recent release of records from DHS, Roberts had been violating immigration and firearm laws for close to three decades.

Understandably, most people will wonder how such a fraud can find himself at the head of a large urban school district in a state as ruby-red as Iowa. As executive editor Joy Pullman has explained, this is simply the result of a leftist regime systematically taking over the American public education system: “[Roberts is] the inevitable product of a system the Left has built for rewarding people for pushing hateful, un-American ideology at public expense and punishing excellence.” Sure enough, it was a school board headed by Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff Jackie Norris in a closed-door meeting that hired Roberts.

There is every reason to believe these people knew that Roberts was a fraud, as Norris’s pathetic plea for “radical empathy” suggests, but hired him anyway. He was just too good to not be true: a smooth-talking black man with a Caribbean accent who boasted an extensive academic and leadership background and had even represented Guyana in the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics.

And, if Vice President Kamala Harris (a DEI-hire herself) had won the presidential election last year instead of Donald Trump, it is almost certain no one would have bothered investigating Roberts now. After all, he became superintendent in spring 2023 during the Biden administration, and he led the district for two whole school years before anything happened to him. Does it really matter that he wasn’t qualified?

Well yes, it does matter, and that’s the real scandal here. Being a superintendent is not some harmless sinecure, but a powerful leadership position. While one might assume that Roberts just smiled for photos, cut ribbons for new playgrounds, and sat in meetings discussing plans to help at-risk kids like he once was, his job allowed him to do far more than this.

As a superintendent, Roberts had the final say in district and campus leadership and how the district’s money would be spent. He decided who became principal, curriculum director, athletic coordinator, chief financial officer, and a slew of other important positions. He also weighed in on vendors for things like school lunches, busing, educational software, school textbooks, and more.

Obviously, this all has a direct impact on district policy. Starting with Roberts himself, all leadership would now be hired based on skin-color, sexual orientation, and most of all politics. Over time, this produced an anti-meritocratic system where academic rigor, student accountability, a talented teaching staff, and fiscal responsibility were jettisoned in favor of the opposite.

Like a majority of school superintendents, Roberts led a system that graduated kids who couldn’t read or do math, enabled dangerous and disruptive students to terrorize classrooms and hallways, hired unqualified activists and yes-men to be teachers and administrators, and wasted taxpayer money on useless products and programs. His very presence enabled a system that punished good students, good teachers, and honest accountants trying to save money. He embodied all the reasons that a growing number of parents are pulling their children out of public schools.

All that said, besides prompting investigations of Roberts and the Des Moines School Board, this story should encourage Americans everywhere to reconsider the arrangement that has a school board being in charge of a public school district in the first place.

In all my years of teaching, I could never understand why school boards existed. These boards usually consist of non-educators who won a local election with vanishingly low turnout. Occasionally, I have shaken the hand of a school board trustee at various events, but most teachers have little contact with them. Despite being as far removed from the classroom as anyone could be, everything they decide on immediately affects me and my students. Does any other profession take its cue from a small group of laymen like this?

In theory, the school board is supposed to represent the needs and priorities of local constituents as they deliberate on educational policy, but in practice, they are incentivized to make decisions based on politics or personal interest rather than a sincere desire to help a city’s teachers and students.

Thus, when presented with an obvious fraud who nonetheless checks all their political boxes alongside a seasoned professional who wants to raise scores and make schools safer but is a white conservative male, the school board will side with the former. And when standards decline and conditions worsen afterward, it is the teachers and principals who will bear the brunt of public complaints while the trustees and superintendents are largely insulated from this pushback.

This explains how so many conservative communities can have radically leftist school districts. Because of the way the authority is foolishly delegated to elected officials who are either clueless and/or corrupt, professionalism and objective accountability are often co-opted by politics and gimmicks. This is also why the classroom has increasingly become a cultural and political battleground rather than an actual space for learning.

Perhaps we can change this by removing school boards altogether and treating local public schools like any other public service, imposing strict professional requirements for all positions, particularly in leadership, and implementing meritocracy at all levels. If this leads to insufficiently diverse faculties or more conservative administrators, so be it. If they are good at their jobs and have experience, they should be rewarded. If they are bad at their jobs or have little experience, they should either be fired or forced to improve. This would only be fair since this is how it works with their students.

Or if such a move is too drastic, cities can limit the powers of school boards so that they have less say over leadership appointment, student assessments, pedagogical standards, and large expenditures in order to discourage shills and ideologues from trying to join the board. They can also schedule elections for school board trustees in the Fall, along with other elections, instead of a random day in the Spring, which would increase turnout and help prevent compromised candidates from sneaking into office without residents being aware of it.

We can be sure that leftists will fight any kind of reform, calling it undemocratic, but that is because it will remove their hold on public school districts. Infiltrating the school boards and hiring progressive DEI puppets is their way of taking control of the country’s most powerful cultural and political institutions. For the sake of the children (and the teachers who work with them), this way should be eliminated so that public schools can finally escape the dirty business of politics and return to the original mission of educating the populace.