SPROWLS AND DESANTIS END QUALIFIED IMMUNITY FOR SCHOOLS

It is hard to understand what teachers are doing all day, that Sprowls and DeSantis came up with a new scheme to have parents teach kids to read. The kids whose parents will teach them to read, are probably the kids who are already learning to read. That is why we need standardized professional teaching, which is not affected by income and home circumstances. It is literally the teachers’ only job which they are professionally trained to do, during the many hours every day when they have control over the children.

It is hard to comprehend how the new Florida student progress-monitoring scheme is necessary. And it is ridiculous to see two lawyers with multiple reading-age children, big surprise their greatest idea in history is to create a new way for parents to sue schools, and imagine they are the greatest politicians since sliced bread. Will fat lawyers come up with a new law to sue pizzerias, and imagine they are exceptional visionaries?

What about progress monitoring in the court system, when their best idea to remove distasteful activities from their children’s schools, is for direct parent-to-school lawsuits? I am sure the employment of degenerate lawyers will show excellent progress at every step. Meanwhile, actual use of the courts to obtain justice will get bogged down.

Shouldn’t politicians be able to directly supervise what is taught in schools, and just fire people who don’t do it, or lose elections? It is not a magical fix, and does not seem efficient, to have school policies decided in a random assortment of court battles. I understand schools are not like McDonalds where you can just go to Burger King. And elections cannot give parents direct recourse to limit what happens to their children. But lawsuits are a highly inefficient and unpredictable supervisory mechanism. It seems like some crank lawyer scheme, which takes an imperfect world and makes it worse.

Every few years, some politician “saves” childhood reading. The problem with the progress-monitoring scheme, is monitoring progress is literally what teachers are already supposed to be doing every day. The test at the end of the year, is not useful as a feedback system to fix individual students. It is useful to test and fix teachers that aren’t doing the one thing they are supposed to be doing.

If you don’t fire the teachers at the end of the year, you certainly won’t fire them in the middle of the year. The idea that suddenly teachers will realize a kid can’t read, and parents will then supervise the teacher to teach the kid to read, and suddenly a teacher will teach a kid to read when the parents would not otherwise have told him to, because suddenly the teacher has a new mechanism to discover a kid can’t read, makes no sense to me

Every day a teacher writes something on the board, says raise your hand, and sees which hands don’t go up. Every day a teacher goes around the room and asks each student to read a paragraph. Every day a teacher collects homework, and grades tests on the week’s lessons. The teachers that don’t do this need to be fired, and salaries need to be raised to attract teachers who respond better.

Every teacher should be able to translate a standardized test at the end of the year, into ways to evaluate students each day relative to that standard. Are there really teachers who can’t guess how well each child in the class will do on a standardized test, such that we need to tip teachers off each day, to help them figure out which kids can’t do math according to a standardized measurement?

Like you know that kid who got all the multiplication problems wrong on his pop quiz? We gave him a test, and it showed he scored a 1 out of 10 on our standardized scale. If you read the fine print, that means he cannot do multiplication. If you read the finer print, that means you need to teach him multiplication. Just in case you didn’t realize, that all the kids you were scoring 100, were getting zero at the end of the year. Our standard regular test has uncovered why this is happening. We suspect there may be a difference between your private grading system, and global grade-level standards.

The idea that there needs to be some new test, for teachers to suddenly realize which students can’t do their test or homework or class problems, is inexplicable. All that should be necessary is what is already available, for teachers to communicate to parents the current grade of the child in the class at regular intervals. I may not be a lawyer, but I have heard of something called a “report card”. Did they really add progress monitoring, or did they just get rid of the FSA?

So now teachers don’t have to grade kids, or teach kids to read, or deliver kids who can pass the FSA. Meanwhile only schools can be sued. And cops and judges and prosecutors still can’t be sued, but judges can decide what teachers teach. And parents sue schools and teach kids to read. And elected officials write laws to feed lawyers.

Nobody was rioting before the last election, over childhood reading. They were rioting over police who are insulated from any feedback of the costs of their behavior. A building even collapsed, because there is not progress monitoring of maintenance. And it may come as a surprise to lawyers, that parents with imperfect families already hate the courts. There is more demand to sue judges, police, and prosecutors, and even teachers, than school districts.

The actions of Sprowls and DeSantis seem pointy-headed, myopic, and overly self-congratulatory, not designed to improve anything or fix problems, but to win the support of lawyers, police, teachers, and the Republican mob. And also dole out cash to coastal Republican-voting suburbs to improve their beaches and line their pockets under the guise of flood infrastructure.