California Tells Bus Drivers to Play by Different Rules Than Teachers

In 2025, the California Legislature passed a law requiring the creation of a searchable misconduct database for school support staff. Bus drivers. Custodians. Teaching assistants. Before hiring any of them, schools will soon be able to check whether a candidate is under investigation or has a substantiated complaint of egregious misconduct against them.

That law explicitly does not apply to public school teachers.

Read that twice. The employees with the most direct, routine, unsupervised access to children — the ones who sit alone with students in classrooms, who conduct individual tutoring sessions, who chaperone overnight trips — have fewer transparency requirements than the person driving the bus.

That is not an opinion. It is the documented structure of California law, as reported by ProPublica and KQED.

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A second legislative attempt to close that gap collapsed this month. Democratic Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi had introduced a bill that would have created a searchable database allowing schools to see if teacher applicants had been reported to the state credentialing agency after being fired or resigning over misconduct claims. A similar Republican-authored bill by Assemblymember Tom Lackey failed earlier this year. Both were modeled directly on the support-staff database law — the one that already passed, the one that already excluded teachers.

The California Federation of Teachers, through lobbyist Tristan Brown, argued the bill's language was too broad. Specifically, Brown said including reports of "possible misconduct" — not just substantiated findings — would be unfair to teachers who were reported but not found to have committed serious misconduct. "We would support legislation that targets substantiated reports of egregious misconduct," Brown said. "The state should be able to support a system that is up to date and tracking substantiated reports of misconduct."

That is a reasonable position stated clearly. Credit it fully.

Now ask what exists in its place.

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The current system for teachers is, by the article's own description, "a patchwork with a fair number of gaps." School districts are required to report teachers fired or resigned over misconduct to the state credentialing agency. But the agency is restricted by law in what it can share while an investigation is open. That process typically takes a year. During that year, a teacher can be hired by another district with no way for the new employer to know a complaint even exists.

California's public database of credentialed educators does flag teachers who have been disciplined — a red-flag icon. But the icon carries no explanation. No reason for the sanction. No link to documentation. Only after the agency formally recommends discipline can a prospective employer request a case summary.

A 2024 law requires teacher candidates to disclose their complete job history and requires districts to ask previous employers about credible or substantiated misconduct complaints. Previous schools must then share the relevant information.

That system works only if teachers report accurately and schools maintain and disclose complete records. Both of those conditions assume good faith by the very parties with the strongest incentive to obscure the problem.

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The union's counterargument deserves honest engagement: a database that includes unsubstantiated reports could damage careers based on accusations that were investigated and dismissed. That is a real concern. False reports happen. Due process matters. The support-staff database already accounts for this — employees' names are removed if school investigations fail to substantiate claims of egregious misconduct.

Muratsuchi pulled his bill's language directly from that support-staff framework. The union's objection rests on language about "possible misconduct" that Muratsuchi included in addition to the substantiated-complaints provision. That is a legitimate drafting dispute.

But the drafting dispute collapsed the bill entirely. The union did not negotiate the language out. The bill died. The result is that the accountability mechanism that now exists for bus drivers does not exist for teachers — and the second consecutive legislative attempt to change that is now off the table.

"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 attempt.

He is not wrong about the structural outcome, even if the politics around it are messier than that framing implies.

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What the California Federation of Teachers is protecting here is not hard to name. A misconduct database shifts power from employees to employers. It makes mobility harder for teachers with complaints in their history, whether those complaints are substantiated or not. Unions exist to protect members from exactly that kind of employer leverage. That is their job. They are doing it.

The uncomfortable fact is that the institution designed to represent teachers has a structural interest in keeping misconduct information opaque — and the legislature, twice now, has declined to override it.

The support-staff database passed because support staff have weaker political representation. Teachers unions are among the most powerful lobbying forces in California Democratic politics. The legislative math is not mysterious.

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What should a reader watch next?

The support-staff database is still being refined and is due by next summer. Watch whether the implementation gives it real teeth or narrows it past usefulness. Watch whether the Association of California School Administrators, which sponsored Muratsuchi's bill, returns in the next legislative session with a more narrowly drawn version targeting only substantiated findings — the specific language the union said it would not oppose. And watch whether the union actually supports that version, or finds a new objection.

Dorothy Johnson, the administrators' lobbyist, put it plainly: "A database is needed to provide more complete, timely information so that schools can fulfill their responsibility to put trusted adults in positions that work with children."

That is the argument the legislature will hear again. Whether it lands differently depends entirely on whether the political conditions change — or whether the drafting does.