For more than two years, educators inside the Los Angeles Unified School District say they exhausted every formal channel available to them. They documented concerns, filed complaints, alerted oversight bodies, and warned district leadership that sick and disabled students were being harmed, that education and labor laws were being violated, and that public funds were flowing through programs that were never lawfully structured. According to those educators, what followed was not investigation or reform, but retaliation, isolation, and silence under the authority of Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.

The experience of veteran teacher David Steenhoek illustrates how those failures unfolded over time. Steenhoek began his career at LAUSD in 2005. In 2016, after years as a resource specialist and supplemental teacher, he became a full-time Home Teacher at Carlson Home Hospital School. At that point, he discovered he had been classified as “pay to work,” a designation that resulted in docked pay when his caseload was not filled. Steenhoek maintains he never signed the documentation authorizing that status and retained a blank copy of the form. Other teachers at the school were annualized. According to Steenhoek, administrative negligence in placing students on his caseload cost him years of pay and retirement benefits, while the district continued receiving his full salary allocation and Title I funding.

By August 2023, Steenhoek was assigned only one or two students, despite a...

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