State officials revoked the license of the superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district Monday after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Ian Roberts Friday on a deportation order and weapons charges. On Saturday, the Des Moines school board placed Roberts on paid administrative leave while protesters demand his release.

ICE says Roberts is not only an illegal alien from Guyana who was working illegally, but also that he fled arrest in a school district-owned car and was in illegal possession of a loaded gun and hunting knife when agents finally nabbed him. The school board voted in secret to select Roberts as the “first person of color” to assume the Des Moines superintendency in 2023. The noncitizen also holds a Maryland Democrat voting registration.

In 2022, Roberts explained away previous illegal weapon possession charges by alleging the charges were racially motivated: “I may not appear to be the ‘type of man’ who would enjoy deer season in Pennsylvania, in fact, I am and have been hunting for more than 20 years,” he wrote of the incident, according to CNN.

That’s also essentially how he obtained a “doctorate in education leadership,” with a “dissertation” that involved interviewing 15 non-white people about “culturally responsive inclusion” through an online questionnaire.

If the feds’ facts are accurate, Roberts is a highly successful career con man. Public documents show he made many outrageous and contradictory claims about his history that should have prompted due diligence from numerous U.S. education employers, including that he worked on a security detail for Queen Elizabeth.

In just the last five years, Roberts bilked American taxpayers out of more than $1 million in superintendents’ salaries plus $400,000 to settle three lawsuits accusing him of hiring women over men while leading a Pennsylvania school system. That district could not verify his credentials but still paid him $183,000 per year, plus benefits, for three years.

An Indictment of American Institutions

His career indicts not just American public schools but major Democrat policies. That’s surely why “thousands” of people showed up Saturday outside the detention center where Roberts is being held to protest applying the law to his allegedly criminal actions.

Des Moines school board Chairwoman Jackie Norris is currently running for U.S. Senate in the Democrat primary. A former chief of staff to Michelle Obama and for a nonprofit run by George W. Bush, Norris says “education” is one of her top campaign priorities.

Roberts’ story is yet another demonstration of the complete corruption and inversion of American institutions such as education and immigration. According to ICE, Roberts entered the country on a student visa in 1999. While different records give different birth years for Roberts, court records say he was born in 1970.

That means Roberts was 29 when he got the student visa. (Athletic records say he was born in 1973, and if that’s so he obtained a student visa at 26.) It’s of a piece with President Obama’s “deferred action for child arrivals” lawlessness that unilaterally suspended U.S. immigration laws for any illegal entrants who claimed to be children.

That was an invitation for half a million people to scam Americans by receiving green cards, taxpayer-subsidized benefits such as K-12 schooling, in-state college tuition, scholarships, and even pathways to citizenship, all by claiming they were underage when they were brought here with zero reliable verification that was even true. It also made it easier for these people to make babies on American soil that magically qualify them for numerous welfare programs, such as Medicaid, food stamps, and housing vouchers.

The U.S. asylum and refugee programs have also been converted into “get into the United States free” passes to millions of grifters who did and do not legally qualify. The H1B program is another scam, used to import low-wage foreigners to take American jobs.

U.S. Public Education Has Become a Giant Scam

The U.S. education system has become yet another set of giant interlocking scams, thanks yet again to Democrat corruption and Republican flaccidity. Republican-run Iowa apparently doesn’t even require a verified immigration status for hiring government employees!

Tying the two scams together, an estimated one-quarter of U.S. public school enrollment is comprised of anchor babies, consuming some $150 billion in taxpayer dollars every year solely for the K-12 tuition costs of failing to enforce U.S. immigration laws. Money is a big reason numerous massive public school systems have publicly declared they will harbor fugitive immigration criminals from U.S. law enforcement.

At even just the most fundamental instructional level, U.S. taxpayers pay an average of $17,000 per K-12 student per year while four in five twelfth-grade students score below proficient in math and reading. We have “historic lows” of student achievement amid record spending in public schools.

This national pattern holds in Des Moines. Des Moines schools spend $17,000 per student, while its students score significantly below state averages on tests, with approximately half below proficient in math and reading (and state tests have long set low bars for achievement to avoid embarrassing the system). One in seven Des Moines students is “chronically absent,” which means skips school at least 18 days per school year with zero excuse such as a doctor’s appointment or illness.

Meanwhile, Des Moines schools’ current “strategic plan,” released in January by Superintendent Roberts, lists as priority No. 1 “Cultivating Equity & Excellence Through High Quality Teaching & Learning.” It makes “equity” equal to “excellence,” but “equity” inherently destroys excellence, as it rewards and punishes people based on identity rather than merit.

Des Moines’ strategic plan says the district hired an organization called New Leaders “to lead the development of the DMPS Strategic Plan.” New Leaders specializes in hiring and promoting people based on skin color. That is not only unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment, but flatly illegal under a new Iowa law banning DEI that went into effect in July. Looks like Iowa’s attorney general needs to start enforcing this law against an obviously rogue school district run by incompetents.

Des Moines school board minutes from their March 26, 2024 meeting say Roberts “recommends that the Board approve New Leaders Organization as the vendor for the District Strategic Plan.” New Leaders says on its website several times that Roberts is an alumnus of its programs, and that he was an alumnus while a Pennsylvania superintendent.

So New Leaders credentialed Roberts, an apparent fraudster, and he essentially paid them back with a public contract. (Neither news reports, nor school board documents, nor New Leader’s tax records appear to disclose how much Des Moines paid New Leaders for “strategic plan development,” and the district acknowledged but did not respond to a query about the matter.)

Identity Politics Is the Public School Operating System

The district’s strategic plan also says “high-quality teaching” means “Teachers use evidence-based, culturally responsive instructional strategies to deliver grade level content.” In fact, the strategic plan is Marxism all the way down, relying on skin color over knowledge to hire and train teachers, discipline students, and more. Roberts’ “executive cabinet,” or top staffers, proclaim “Equity and Justice” is one of their top three “core values.”

A February report from Defending Education shows Marxist instruction and hiring practices like these are endemic in Iowa public schools. This kind of value system promotes total frauds like Roberts and thereby ensures the exact opposite of academic excellence. We can know that because U.S. public schools have been implementing cultural Marxist slop like this for 70-plus years, and getting worse the entire time. That’s not a coincidence. There’s a direct correlation between ideologically driven instruction and student stupidity.

As we all know, it’s not just Des Moines, either. Scamming kids and taxpayers with crap instruction is pervasive nationwide. Even though Iowa is technically run by Republicans, they allow Iowa schools to be run largely by educrats who share the same grifter diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) ideology that catapulted Roberts into $1 million in taxpayer sinecures on the basis of his skin color.

Here’s another case in point. The woman still running Iowa’s revamp of its entire social studies instruction, Stefanie Wager, is, like Roberts, yet another massive DEI booster. As I reported in March, “Her professional affiliations publicly proclaim that the United States’ founders and founding documents are inherently bigoted and in need of Marxist reframing.”

Wager is not only failing to deliver the America-positive education Iowa’s laws require, she influences the curriculum and tests all across the nation as an employee of the American Institutes for Research. AIR is a massive testing and curriculum contractor with woke employees that taxpayers pay hundreds of millions. AIR is also heavily funded by the federal government.

The Point of a System Is What It Produces

Iowa is completely run by Republicans, and has been for nine years. At this point, public schools graduating kids who support Black Lives Matter but can’t name one item on the Bill of Rights or even friggin’ read at grade level is Republicans’ fault, not Democrats’.

The point is, Roberts’ wild story is not a one-off. Perhaps he’s a bit more theatrical in the way he has scammed Americans, but the entire system that promoted, paid, celebrated, rewarded, and is incredibly defending this con artist is itself a massive scam machine. He’s 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.

That’s why Democrats are protesting his arrest. Because if they admitted Roberts is an unqualified scam artist, they’d be admitting the entire political infrastructure they control is designed to produce and reward scam artists like him, at the expense of Americans. Any Republicans who continue to let this happen are responsible for results like these.