Free ride

Florida state law says that any student who moved to the US from a non-English speaking country is "sheltered" for the first two years. A sheltered student may not fail any class in a public school, solely because of their lack of proficiency in English. The county where I teach takes that one step further: teachers of any student who is sheltered MUST award that student a 'C' regardless of any other circumstance. Any teacher who refuses not only gets fired, but loses their state teaching license for being an anti-immigrant racist.

I have a student in one of my classes who was living in Connecticut and was not going to be able to graduate. The reason for this, is that he is lazy and misses a lot of school. To remedy this, he and his family moved to him Puerto Rico and he stayed with family for a few months. He then came to Florida, and gets a C in every class, as well as a pretty much automatic diploma. He was in my class for 70 school days, but was absent for 24 of those days. He completed exactly one assignment and failed every test and quiz. I had to add 42 percentage points to the 28 percent that he "earned" in order to get him to that C.