The good folks of Des Moines saw no reason not to hire Ian Roberts as their school superintendent, even though they did no due diligence on his, er, spotty background. Weapons arrests, in the country illegally, lied bigtime about his university degrees.
The lying thing is de rigueur among many school principals (you get a salary bump with a doctorate, and schools don’t seem to mind if, like Roberts, you buy it from an online vendor), but the rest of it makes for an unusually rich brew.
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Story jumps to the NYT.
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The schools are suing the recruitment firm that fucked them up.
October 3rd, 2025 at 7:33AM
“In a search of Roberts’ home in Des Moines, authorities found three other guns, including: A Sig Sauer Model P320 9-mm pistol, located under the cushion of a living room chair.” I’m imagining a lot of post-dinner party scenarios becoming rapidly…explosive.
Amazing stuff. At least two districts hired him, outsourcing their due diligence to outside firms, which evidently turned up nothing in their background checks despite being professional background checkers. What happened there?
October 3rd, 2025 at 9:11AM
I’ve covered several firms that specialize in background checks, and it seems plenty of them don’t do it very well. Tons of stories of bad actors being missed by the people to whom you’re paying big bucks. Why? I suspect it’s because it’s far faster, cleaner, and more profitable to do a quick run-through and then tell people what they want to hear: Your candidate is terrific! You can end your search and hire her!
The other thing that happened here, I think, is that this dude is in fact charismatic, smart, and engaged. He’s probably good at being an inspiring superintendent. So people liked him and still like him.
As for the Sig/chair: It’s the American version of that adorable scene in The Sound of Music where the children hide a pine cone under Maria’s dinner chair cushion. Haha!
October 3rd, 2025 at 9:16PM
Well no one is coming to his defense, so the liking seems to have waned.
Is it more profitable for the background checkers to suppress red flags? If they reveal them and tank a candidate, then doesn’t the client have to use them again to vet the replacement candidate? That suggests more profit. This really just seems like a “you had one job…” scenario. I get that immigration records are not easy to access (though citizenship is very easy to verify! I’ve had to file an i-9 form for every job I’ve ever taken!), but contacting a couple universities to verify degrees is very cheap and easy. The idea that you could make a living from a company that basically does nothing but that is itself amazing. That you can make that same living not doing this one thing, incredible.