Dr. Ian Roberts Did Nothing Wrong

Other than all the stuff he did wrong.

As an educator, I was more intrigued than most by the revelation that the superintendent of Des Moines public schools was an illegal alien with active warrants and a string of charges and legal settlements in his wake. Dr. Ian Roberts of Guyana, EdD, had been busy these past few decades in the US, arriving just in time to surf the big diversity wave as it was cresting through the world of education. He was almost everything the managerial longhouse could dream of, black, liberal, black, an experienced teacher, a holder of a doctorate, black, committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and-in addition to all that- black. I say ‘almost’ because he was not a woman of any sort recognized by a progressive and no evidence has emerged that he had a creative sexual identity. But he definitely checked all the boxes for a long career of jamming his proboscis into the bloodstream of the American taxpayer as an urban education leader.

Which is why it is all the more amazing to me that he managed to so colossally f*** it all up to the point that he was dragged off in handcuffs by ICE after accumulating numerous completely avoidable and attention-grabbing unforced errors that any sensible edugrifter would have never fallen into no matter how stupid he/she/zir was. He was essentially handed a lifetime salary that put him in America’s economic elite, having come from a country where being above the poverty line means having a choice spot to scavenge dead crabs after hurricanes, so long as he did just a few very simple things, all of which he failed to do. Roberts’ story illustrates something profound about our public education leadership that is both obvious to anyone who encounters it and yet necessitates endless repeating. These people- generally speaking- are intensely mediocre. Roberts differed from the lot of his peers only in that his indifference to reality had legal consequences.

This is legitimately the most important thing that ever happened in Guyana.

Guyana is a wonderfully diverse place, with a culture that combines the public-spiritedness of Africa with the business ethics of India, and a commitment to freedom unrestrained by burdensome laws that might inspire one to call it the “Haiti of the Caribbean.” It’s a tropical paradise so long as you display nothing more valuable than a rubber band on your person and aren’t a woman. Nevertheless, Roberts could only dream of the streets of gold in America (the real one, not South America). It’s unclear exactly when and where he was born (Grok will still tell you he was “born and raised in Brooklyn”) but it was some time between 1970 and 1973- Hindufrican government record keeping being whimsical in that way.

I couldn’t find any pictures of the lovely capital of Guyana, Georgetown, so I just used one of Ottawa, Canada.

He originally came to the US on a tourist visa and later a student visa beginning in 1994, but does not seem to have entertained any notions of returning to his home country. Roberts’ first legal stay seems to have expired without him leaving, as he should have been out within six months but was still in the US by 1996 to rack up a drug-dealing charge (which was dismissed). His run-ins with the law and the fact that he was not legally authorized to be in the US was no barrier to him graduating from the historically (and currently) black Coppin State University in Baltimore, where they were evidently so bowled-over by his ability to run fast and very un-Baltimorean command of basic literacy that they didn’t even ask if he had papers allowing him to study there, which it seems he did not.

All great (or even good) art is inevitably right wing, despite the best efforts of commie writers.

With a BA in Criminal Justice (yes) in hand, his next step seems to have been to get the student visa he should have gotten four years earlier, which proved to be no problem despite his previous indifference to immigration law. This should have been a sign to him as to how to proceed in the future by getting his status regularized. It was 1999, the tail end of Clinton and the beginning of Bush, who shared the longstanding bipartisan consensus that no immigrant was a bad immigrant and no amount of immigrants was a bad amount, other than fewer. Perhaps he was confused by the stridency of their rhetoric; some time speaking to Republican voters might have disabused him of this earnest interpretation of hard-line calls for deportation that foundered on general elite contempt for Americans earning a living wage in the country of their ancestors.

Seriously, they hate you, or rather, “Te odian y quieren inundar tu país con extranjeros como un acto de amor.”

But there’s no sign he then understood the actual political dynamic in the US, or rather, it seems he learned the wrong lessons. In the meantime, he went on to St. John’s University in New York, where he earned an MA in Social Studies Education. I can add a bit of perspective here, having been in one of these programs myself- and at a good school besides- that education programs are everything Glenn Beck warned you about. If anything, his Boomer mind lacks the ability to process the level of woke involved. I once had a class where we debated how (not whether) we would use a lesson plan called “The People vs Columbus, et al,” which, like the Soviet show trials the authors clearly viewed as a model, involved no defense, but rather the accused admitting his capitalist evil and denouncing someone else, until it was revealed at the end that the real culprit was private property all along. If there’s an upside, it’s that most of the people who would willingly subject themselves to such dimwitted Bolshevism are either too dumb to grasp it or too indifferent to actual learning to teach it. The class I was in was equal parts earnest young (and not so young) communists and various coaches going through the motions in order to get the certificate needed to have some place air-conditioned to sit in while they reviewed playbooks. I’ve said before that social studies (I hate the term) is an absolute dumping ground in the US, and if you doubt me, audit one of these graduate-level classes.

This is from an actual publication from the American Historical Association called The Coaching History Playbook, where the leading professional association in the US for historians just throws up its hands. Still better than Paulo Freire, though.

Roberts naturally thrived in such an environment, personable and not one to ask unpleasant questions or challenge the prevailing narratives (unlike this author) of what was then called Social Justice. And, to be fair, he did have legitimate athletic achievements at the time; it turns out his competing in the Olympics representing Guyana was one of the few parts of his Walter Mitty fantasy life that was true. Had he been smarter and less conspicuously ambitious, even with all his other failings, it’s easy to imagine him spending the next thirty years as an athletic director in some anonymous school district, accumulating a harem of young teachers and office assistants while grifting ever-so-delicately from the Gatorade budget to keep the Escalade detailed. It would have been no great matter at this point to normalize his immigration status. Schools, especially in areas enriched by vibrant diversity, often simply cannot find Americans willing to risk their lives teaching, and thus have recourse to recruiting in some of the world’s more malarial places. Roberts could have gotten himself an H1B visa, and with a clean record, could have petitioned for permanent residency, eventually even citizenship.

But it seems it was at this point that he got too comfortable. He evidently just sort of assumed that the good times of lax immigration enforcement would continue indefinitely, and didn’t even bother hiding his status beyond simple lies he figured no one would interrogate. His indifference to laws was not limited to immigration. Roberts, it seems, was a bit of a redneck (apparently this is a thing in Guyana) and despite his otherwise impeccable liberal credentials he was an enthusiast for hunting and firearms generally. This would theoretically create a problem for him in that people in the country illegally aren't allowed to possess guns, but Roberts never seems to have had any difficulty acquiring them and law enforcement never troubled him much about having them, right up until the end. Perhaps there is yet some information that will surface about his political advocacy along those lines, which is appropriate since he was a registered voter in Maryland, something Democrat politicians have assured us is impossible.

Typical fascist misinformation. It’s actually Baltimore.

Roberts then made his way into the world of education, first as a substitute teacher in New York City, then in Baltimore Public Schools, where his fondness for firearms no doubt made him popular with the students, whenever they felt like showing up. His rise thereafter was swift. After teaching for only five years, he became a resident (trainee) principal, then a principal proper for two years. He clearly wanted to move up and was marked by his superiors as one to watch, and to further that end, he enrolled in a doctoral program at Morgan State University.

A note on this: school principals often pursue doctorates, but these are seldom PhDs, as their jobs preclude the heavy academic commitments and they are often, in any case, not especially suited for scholarship. Public school principals in particular are managers; their job is to return reasonably plausible happy numbers to their superintendents and avoid lawsuits and bad headlines. If they are well-educated or even intellectually curious, it is a quirk of their individual personalities and in no way a demand of the job. Anecdotally speaking, I would guess a solid plurality, if not a majority, come from the ranks of PE teachers or coaches.

You’d literally do more good for intellectual life at your school if you put a farmer in charge. Yes, this chart is old, but if anything it understates current trends.

Ian Roberts was pursuing an EdD, which is the professional degree that generally entitles principals, superintendents, and other administrators to refer to themselves as ‘doctor.’ Now one might object that these are busy people and that a PhD is not necessary for the work they do, which is true, but it’s just as true with the EdD. It literally exists to sanction administrators with the same status as actual academics. Opinions vary as to how easy an EdD is to get, but if you want to know the sort of person who completes one, chat up your local Dr. Superintendent about his reading habits. But at any rate, Roberts seemingly got bored and dropped out in 2007 before completing his dissertation.

Roberts inability to clear that pretty low bar didn’t stop him from referring to himself as ‘doctor,’ and apparently the sound of his full (invented) professional title was so hypnotic that no one bothered to check if he’d completed the required coursework, just as no one ever bothered to confirm he was in the US legally. Having gotten over with that after abandoning graduate school, Roberts decided to add to his accomplishments by creating a LinkedIn profile so full of smoke and mirrors as to demoralize even

Yuri Bezmenov

. He claimed vague associations with Harvard, Georgetown, and MIT, and various post-graduate programs in other places. Not quite a year after failing to get his EdD, Roberts was in charge of training other principals in Baltimore, then moved on to Washington DC where he became “Principal and Managing Director of School Turnaround for District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS).” Anyone turning around in a DC public school is likely spinning as a result of being hit by stray bullets, so Roberts had little sustained impact there, but the school board in similarly benighted St. Louis, Missouri was evidently impressed by Roberts being given the “Washington DC Principal of the Year Award” from George Washington University, which was all the more amazing given that the prize doesn't exist. They invited Roberts in for his first stint as a superintendent.

The headline for the article reads “Rising Graduation Rates and Falling SAT Scores for D.C. Students,” which makes exactly the sense you think it does.

His position in St. Louis was followed by one in Oakland. Along the way, he found other prospects, such as working for a charter school management company and authoring or co-authoring a string of books, all equal parts leftist boilerplate and managerial twaddlecant. A pattern is evident here. Roberts never stayed in any one place for more than a couple of years, moving on to greener pastures with every new resume box he ticked. He had no organic connection to any city or community; his jobs were all just places to demonstrate value to the next and hopefully more generous employer. One might think this was him trying to stay ahead of scrutiny, but it’s the managerial norm. One wonders why he didn’t pretend he’d worked at McKinsey.

Along those lines, his most lucrative side hustle was probably the world of consulting. Roberts came through one such firm, New Leaders, as a fellow and seems to have furthered their interests while in a position to award contracts as superintendent. He was (is) also a “Thought Partner” at a firm called Lively Paradox, the paradox apparently being that no actual original thoughts were generated. The world of education is lousy (in every sense) with such organizations, who leverage relationships with friends with checkbooks to ‘advise on diversity best practices equity resources for leveraging achievement strategies leadership… (it continues on like trying to resolve Pi).’ If you’re a teacher in a public school you’ve doubtless sat through endless hours of ‘professional development’ facilitated by such kickbacks and featherbedding from above.

Roberts eventually made his way back east, this time as Superintendent of Millcreek Township School District. Unlike his previous jobs in dismal urban failscapes, Millcreek was a predominately white district with solid test scores. He had moved from urban systems that were essentially political patronage programs for the Democrat Party into the very different world of white longhoused AWFLdom. While he was of course welcomed as the very avatar of everything they had been taught to love, the liberal women and men of the school board would prove much less casual in their scrutiny than Roberts had been used to. Notably, it was here that his situation first began to unravel.

The board was unable to confirm that he actually had the degree from Morgan State that he claimed, but no one yet put it together that this was for the very obvious reason that he never earned it. He got the job anyway and was allowed to style himself ‘doctor.’ He did go through the trouble of finding an online program that would allow him to complete the minimal required work to actually get his doctorate in Educational Leadership. Trident University International required him to conduct interviews with fifteen minorities about how hard it was to be minorities in special education, then write concerning his feelings on the subject. No one at Millcreek seems to have been put off by the fact that the man who had been claiming a doctoral degree from an established program since long before being hired in 2020 only now had one from an online school that he graduated from in 2021.

One assumes that the nice progressives who hired him approached him quietly behind the scenes and gave him a chance to correct the discrepancies in his resume. But the strange thing is, he never took the opportunity to fix the much bigger problem that he had, which is to say, that he was in the country illegally. True, he had attempted-unsuccessfully- over the years to get a green card on his own, but it’s difficult to imagine him having any problems if he had gotten any one of the districts he worked for on his side. The years between, say, 2012 to 2022 were the golden age of being a sympathetic criminal alien, and with the advent of woke and BLM, he would have done well to loudly and proudly come out of the foreigner closet and dare anyone to deport him. More practically, there were probably thousands of people who would have been willing to pull strings and get him whatever documents and statements he needed at least to get a legitimate work visa. As noted earlier, schools employ tons of foreigners, at least some of whom must have had issues like Roberts.

But he never bothered. Again, in lieu of more specific information, I have to assume that Roberts’ years in indifferent urban school districts just made him feel untouchable, which made him lazy. He also got careless. Unlike in urban districts where staffing choices are simply the spoils of office, Roberts racked up nearly a half-million dollars in legal settlements during his time at Millcreek, mostly related to sex discrimination claims filed by men whom Roberts had passed over in favor of hiring women (one can read between the lines there). The district was on the hook for the money. He was also caught with a loaded rifle in his car in an area where he wasn’t supposed to have one during hunting season, which resulted in a fine and a gun charge, which he attributed to racism. He was attracting attention he didn't need, and it was adding up.

The smart move would have been to return to the world of big city education and disappear into upper management, where he could coast anonymously into retirement with no one caring about degrees or guns or citizenship. Roberts was in his late fifties at this point and had gotten away with it for close to three decades. But he instead rolled the dice and went to Iowa, the part of the story everyone is familiar with. Much of what happened that brought him there is still controversial, with lawsuits flying around and no one keen to take any responsibility. The Des Moines School Board apparently used a placement agency (as had Millcreek) to find him, and as a cutout to circumvent anti-DEI laws in place in Iowa. There's no proof, but everyone’s willingness to overlook very obvious red flags speaks to a particular approach to hiring, one that looks for one qualification in particular:

You may not like it, but this is what peak LinkedIn resume looks like.

It’s all the more amazing because the chair of the school board that hired him was Jackie Norris, former Chief of Staff to Michele Obama, who was herself planning to run for the Senate. Did Roberts really not bother, during the latter half of Biden’s presidency, to reach out to the woman who’d hired him to leverage her extremely powerful connections on his behalf while it was still possible? It’s bizarre, much as the lack of scrutiny on the part of an aspiring Democrat politician in a red state to overlook something that had the potential to be politically devastating. It’s a perfect demonstration of the complacency of the managerial class. The walls were closing in, but because no one among them acknowledged it, it somehow wasn’t real.

The removal order came down in 2024, and by 2025, there were actually ICE agents looking for him. He was caught with an illegal handgun and $3,000 in cash after fleeing in his (state-provided) vehicle and then getting into a foot chase. Perhaps the most pathetic thing about this is that the former Olympic track athlete couldn't outrun people when it really mattered. Roberts is currently incarcerated and will no doubt be deported unless the man who tweeted out this video shows him mercy:

After his arrest, there were a lot of statements from people claiming to be shocked at Roberts, shocked that is that he’d deceived them by hiding his past. The subterfuge wasn’t especially clever though, as we’ve seen. The urban districts didn’t care if he was legal and the nice white liberals didn’t want to microagress by asking a bunch of questions that would de-center his blackness. But of course, the only thing that is even interesting about this story is that Roberts was here illegally and couldn't be bothered to do much to fix that. Had he done so, we would never have heard of him, and a man who never demonstrated any sort of commitment to academics or the life of the mind more generally would have gone from district to district, spreading progressive ideas and neoliberal managerial homogenization everywhere he went. Schools are full of such people; they set the whole agenda. They creep in and up and out. You will find them in colleges and you’ll find them in public schools. They’re gregarious, dull, and wholly committed to rooting out everything unique, excellent, or noble wherever they find it. They stifle creativity and self-mastery in the name of producing viable and fungible economic units that will serve to enrich the beneficiaries of globalism. They are anti-tradition, anti-scholarship, anti-transcendence, and ultimately anti-human. Being here illegally was the least bad thing about Roberts.

Lyle Lanley would have done better if he’d gone into education. This is of course an allusion to The Music Man, a show about Iowans being scammed by a smooth-talking outsider, which (spoiler alert) has a happy ending that doesn't involve an illegal Glock handgun.