It's not so much that they're cowardly, it's that they don't have budget for the lawyers to deal even with the bad lawsuits.
That, and the court of public opinion is a thing, and it's not reasonable, and it's powerful. It takes down boards of education, gets leadership wrongly fired, and so on.
We put teachers in an impossible situation — “raise the next generation with no investment from current generations” — and then get pissed off when they fail?
Our world has become a Kafka-esque nightmare.
I don't anticipate change until this fresh supply dries up and people start asking why.
Of note that Kafka-esque is predicated on an impenetrable morass of regulations and procedures.
Imho, we've overly and prematurely optimized to address negative outcomes without remembering that adding red tape also decreases the efficiency of delivering good outcomes.
It'd be nice to see a lot of professions move back towards 'we'll regularly audit to see if there are problems, then address them if they appear' postures.
Time spent in pre-compliance when there would have been no problem is simply lost efficiency.