Opinion: Here go the legislators again, fouling things up

The legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom decided to mandate a later opening time for all state schools next year because of poor performance of some students in some of those schools.

These California students, despite the legislature’s generous spending on them, just don’t seem to perform as well as students in other states.

The geniuses who occupy the comfortable leather chairs in the Assembly decided that the kids were having to get up too early. So, comes a bill that would mandate that the kids stay in bed another 20 minutes and go to school later.

Somehow that will keep their little brains from sleeping while the rest of their student bodies are getting up and moving around. Turning on the TVs. Getting those earphones in place, powering up those cell phones. They will arrive in school ready to go like little Einsteins.

Presumably the schools will stay open longer, which may mean that the kids will have to go to bed later. Will they be able to keep the times straight?

What about Daylight Saving Time? Will that get in the way of the later school-opening times?

Here is something the Assembly may have been able to accomplish in this great time mix-up without causing such confusion.

The Assembly should stay home until noon every day. That way, they won’t have to waste their time on idiotic solutions to non-problems.

They could just stay home every day until it was time for lunch. Then, they could go shopping, stop in a few bars (where laws actually are made, don’t you know) or perhaps attend a few meetings with constituents, working out a bribe or two or trying to solve actual problems instead of trying to tell teachers and school administrators how to do their jobs.

These legislators are busy-bodies when it comes to schools. They are not content to let the teachers do their jobs. They have to butt in, as though they knew anything about how to teach.

Have the legislators show up late and send them home early. That will limit the damage they can do.

Legislators keep trying to reinvent the wheel. If they paid attention long enough, they would discover that schools that don’t do so well have relatively little support from the students’ parents. Schools that do better for their students have good support from parents.

From athletics to academics, good schools have good parents, and they know it.

The teachers and administrators feel obligated to do good jobs if the parents are on their sides. The Assembly should either stay home or keep its nose out of school affairs.

Or, figure out how to make neglectful parents into good ones.

That would solve a lot of problems. It would lower crime rates, lower drug use, raise grades and produce a generation of citizens who could make their country proud of them.