When A Con Man Checks All the Right Boxes | Erika Sanzi

Ian Roberts, the now disgraced superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools, wasn’t just a bad hire. He was the embodiment of so much that is wrong in K-12 education in America today. As my friend Inez Stepman put it on X, "It’s the conclusion of every stupid leftist idea of the last five years, in human form."

Ian Roberts. Photo: USA Today/Imagn

Roberts lied on his I-9 about being a US citizen while somehow being registered to vote in Maryland. He began going by "Doctor" a decade before finally earning a doctorate at an online institution in 2021. He even claimed George Washington University had named him "Principal of the Year" — an award the university says has never existed.

Yet the school board rushed to celebrate him as a progressive triumph. Why? Because Roberts checked the right identity boxes and fit neatly into its preferred worldview. An all-women board, eager to prove its progressive bona fides, was captivated by this charismatic conman. The board has admitted they knew, before hiring Roberts, that he lied on his resume about receiving a PhD from Morgan State University. And still, the board was full steam ahead, albeit in secret, with his hiring. 

And just over a week ago, under authority of an active 2024 deportation order, Roberts was detained while fleeing immigration authorities, abandoning a school district-issued car with a loaded handgun and $3,000 in cash.

Way to go, ladies! 

Ian Roberts. Photo: USA Today/Imagn

It will not surprise anyone to learn that under Roberts’ watch, Des Moines Public Schools adopted a strategic plan titled Cultivating Success that codified racial preferences in hiring. The district pledged that by 2030, 40 percent of all teachers and leaders would be people of color — an explicit and, ahem, illegal racial quota written into policy. The plan prioritized immutable characteristics over teacher quality and subject expertise. The message to the public, admittedly welcome by some in the community, was unmistakable: identity and ideology first, competence and quality, second.

The board’s response has been equally revealing. Its chair — a former Michelle Obama chief of staff now running for U.S. Senate — urged "radical empathy" while fundraising off the fiasco, claiming the scandal kept her from campaigning. Turning a failure of oversight into a Senate pitch feels perfectly on brand for this spectacle.

Since Roberts’ detainment by ICE and the subsequent media frenzy around how he ever got hired for the job of superintendent, his educator license has been revoked by The Iowa Board of Educational Examiners and he has resigned his position. The Department of Justice has also opened an investigation into the district’s race-based hiring practices. 

Des Moines is a case study in how identity-obsessed trends corrupt K–12 leadership. DEI dogma discourages scrutiny and treats "lived experience" as untouchable truth. Roberts’ résumé and past public statements were riddled with contradictions that search firms and school board members missed, likely because they didn’t want to know. As far as they were concerned, Ian Roberts was beyond reproach. They probably thought he was too good to be true—and hoo boy, were they right?

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Fixing this willful blindness and obvious bias in hiring requires more than revoking licenses. The Iowa Board of Educational Examiners was right to act, but families deserve transparency. That starts with releasing the names of finalists for high profile public jobs like school superintendent—the public never had a chance to opine on or vet Ian Roberts. The district’s hiring failures demand a full public investigation — shifting blame to the search firm is no substitute for accountability. 

School systems should be required to use E-Verify, and state lawmakers in Iowa must repeal affirmative-action mandates that require school districts to have affirmative action hiring plans in place. This age of "but it’s the good kind of discrimination" cannot be allowed to go on—hopefully the Department of Justice’s investigation can be a catalyst in putting a stop to these illegal but pervasive hiring practices in K-12 schools in Iowa and around the country.

School boards and others with hiring authority must return to the unglamorous but tried and true virtues that respect and safeguard students: honesty, competence, and political neutrality. And following the law. As cliché as it may sound, we need to get back to the basics of teaching and learning and eradicate the political ideologies and fads that have come to dominate too many school districts in recent years. 

The Roberts scandal is an embarrassing spectacle — and also a warning. When political tribalism and ideology blind leaders and schools prize box-checking over background checks, the result is a bad one. 

Erika Sanzi is the Senior Director of Communications at Defending Education.