Floriduh Republicans Earning the Dunce Cap

In the "Yes, Florida Is This Crazy and Stupid Category," let us take a look at the latest mad idea from our state's Republican leaders: Allowing uncertified unqualified military veterans and their spouses fill in as teachers to cover the expanding void of classrooms lacking actual teachers.

I am not the only one who sees how ridiculous this is: Frank Cerabino at the Palm Beach Post is skewering the whole thing (paywalled):

It’s part of a new state law that directs the Florida Department of Education to provide teaching jobs in schools to former military members who have served a minimum of four years of service, do not have bachelor’s degrees, but have a 2.5 or higher grade point average in at least 60 college credits.

So, if you were a C+ student with the equivalent of a community college education and you’ve managed to get through a single enlistment in the military without getting a dishonorable discharge, you can bypass the certification requirements to be a new breed of Florida classroom teachers.

Seriously.

It’s hard to tell with Florida whether the aim of Gov. DeSantis and the state lawmakers is to come up with yet another way to degrade public education, or to pander shamelessly to the 1.5 million military veterans in the state...

Considering how Republicans across the board sneer at public education - and are constantly searching for ways to either privatize schools into bankruptcy, or take away actual learning in order to turn future generations into cabbages - I'm betting on the first reason. Cerabino seems to think so as well:

Don’t get me wrong. Encouraging former military members to consider a career as a teacher after they leave the service is laudable. But not if the way you do it is by degrading the teaching profession...

So forgive me, if I figure Florida’s slap-dash effort to offer teaching jobs to veterans with as little as 48 months of military service is little more than something designed to provide an applause line in an upcoming DeSantis campaign speech, and little else...

The new state law seems to acknowledge its shortcomings by requiring schools to provide chaperones to the unqualified veterans for the first two years they are teaching. The law says these assigned “teacher mentors”, must be an existing teacher at the school who is certified, has three years teaching experience, and has earned an effective or highly effective rating on the prior year’s performance evaluation.

Oh, so certification is important after all.

This cockamamie new law is another unfunded mandate on public schools that is more of a new burden on them, not a help...

One can see a long-term effect here is DeSantis and other Republicans using this as an argument years down the line that teaching shouldn't require higher education credentials at all, and basically open the schools to get filled by the most unqualified hacks in the state. Hacks who are more interested in converting young minds to their quack science, bunk history, and religious bullshit.

What's missing in all of this Republican push to fill hiring gaps among teacher ranks is the reason WHY good education requires qualified teachers. If you're teaching, (and you want to do it well) you not only have to be an expert in the subjects you're teaching you also have to be an expert in HOW to teach those subjects. Mental skill is one thing, but psychological preparation and effective temperament matters as well. You have to have the patience to teach. These are things they teach the teachers, through those Education colleges earning those Masters and Bachelors on your way to the classrooms.

Lemme ask you this: Do you think a veteran - not exactly one with battlefield experience in the first place - is going to be able to handle 30 to 35 preteens in a classroom? Do you remember what it was like when YOU were a Sixth grader, and how much of a punk you were (even if you were a straight-A student) to certain teachers you couldn't respect?

How do you think these vets are going to handle a classroom - no matter if they're kindergarteners or high school seniors - the second the kids realize those vets have no idea what they're teaching and no idea HOW they're going to teach it? If we're lucky, half of them will quit before they cross the wrong line. And given how unlucky this whole situation reeks, we're bound to get horror stories of vets - some of them coping with Post-Traumatic Stress to begin with - getting triggered and getting physical against a kid who needles them the wrong way.

Part of me dreads how this will affect our public schools across the whole state, but I particularly dread the likelihood how DeSantis and some of the school boards are going to manipulate staffing at the schools by packing certified teachers into the privileged suburban (White) districts and shipping the unprepared veteran teachers into the poorer (Black/Latino) districts. Not only creating an economic and racial divide between the haves/have-nots but now an educational divide. The poor kids that need better teachers will instead get the ones who aren't really teachers at all, just glorified babysitters. The failure to educate all our children equally will bring us back to the bad days of segregation and dashing any merit-driven chances for kids from poor communities to rise up and flourish.

DeSantis' plan isn't going to save our schools: It's going to abandon our children.

Goddamn him and his fellow Republican elites. Sacrificing the best and brightest kids before they can even learn.