Name: Don’t Listen to David Brooks
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Don’t Listen to David Brooks

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Reopening schools safely during a pandemic is complicated. Some teachers, while worried about the possibility of disease and death, are eager to get back into their buildings. Others see no reason to do so right now.What should be a discussion informed by empathy and humanity is instead reduced to demonizing and over-simplified dramatization.Many parents, too, are reluctant to expose their children to a potentially unsafe environment. State governments have issued a flurry of often-inconsistent rules as they try to balance safety, the economy, and the desires of powerful supporters.Meanwhile, school districts and communities across the nation are riven by disagreements as they attempt to navigate through a crisis in which all solutions are bad.We’re having trouble hearing the full range of what people are saying. What should be a discussion informed by empathy and humanity is instead reduced to demonizing and over-simplified dramatization, with folks angrily waving about their own personal sets of “facts.”In The Washington Post, columnist Matt Bai that teachers should behave like the public servants they are—accent on the “servants.” In The Daily Signal, we find a for treating teachers unions like Ronald Reagan treated the air traffic controllers (what, exactly, schools should do after all the teachers are fired is not outlined).But nobody has exemplified this wave of attack more than David Brooks. In an in The New York Times, Brooks starts by equating teachers’ unions to the GOP election denialists, choosing four “facts” to support his assertion that teachers should get back into schools right now.First, he asserts, “remote learning is a disaster.”Well, distance learning is nobody’s ideal learning situation.But there have been throughout the last year that for some students—including the students with special needs that Brooks is professedly worried about— has been a blessing.Brooks tries to ramp up the urgency with some bad research. He mentions about the number of days of learning that students will lose, but the “days of learning” measure is just a made-up measure to express “points scored on a single big standardized test.”In other words, whenever someone says, “Students will lose X days of learning,” what they&nbsp; really mean is “We estimate that students might go down a possible Y number of points on the big standardized test.”Brooks also cites popularized by Raj Chetty and Eric Hanushek that claims that a child’s elementary school teacher will affect that child’s lifetime earnings as an adult. Hanushek has applied that research, which has been , to the pandemic.Brooks argues that “in-person learning can be done safely with the right precautions.” Here, he cites new research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But Brooks, like many others, fails that the research involves seventeen rural Wisconsin schools—not necessarily a great template for a district like Chicago or New York.He also notes that private and some public schools have opened safely (thanks to the work of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, we have remarkably little hard data on who is doing what). But some private and charter schools . And some private schools that have opened have done so with the benefit of investments of money and resources that are not available to public schools.Meanwhile, in some public schools, ventilation issues are being addressed by administration instructions to crack open a window.Perhaps most troubling is how Brooks takes teachers unions to task for not “adjusting to new facts,” whereas in most districts the real issue is “how trustworthy is your administration?” Did it create data-based protocols, and if so, can it be trusted to follow them? Have school officials taken the necessary steps to make the building safe, or have they only done some window dressing for public consumption? Do they even have the necessary resources?Perhaps most troubling is how Brooks takes teachers unions to task for not “adjusting to new facts,” whereas in most districts the real issue is “how trustworthy is your administration?”The trust issue doesn’t matter only to teachers. While Brooks expresses concern for Black and brown students, those families have long been failed by both health care and education in the United States, making them to that schools are now safe. Some Black commenters have been pretty blunt, as in Gloria Ladson-Billings’s “Stop using Black children as an excuse to open your schools.”But Brooks is determined to play his own version of a race card: “Readers, many of us got involved in the Black Lives Matter marches last summer. I guess I would ask you, do Black lives matter to you only when they serve your political purpose? If not, shouldn’t we all be marching to get Black and brown children back safely into schools right now?”Why not march instead against the school districts that need to make the schools safe? Why not march against the politicians and elected leaders who need to get schools the resources needed to make them safe? Why not mobilize against the many people who won’t mask up or quarantine, or the leaders who insist we need to open churches and bars, even if it makes it harder to open schools safely? Why not march against the government failure to distribute vaccinations quickly?Why, in the face of a complex situation loaded with fear and uncertainty and fueled by failures on a national level, is the answer “those damned teachers just need to suck it up and get in there.”Brooks is a of public education, a fan of DeVos-style reform, and has frequently for a good charter miracle story. He once that Elizabeth Warren actually supported DeVos’s policies; just last year, he was the Kuyper Prize, an award by DeVos’s alma mater in honor of one of her political, educational, and religious heroes.When it comes to education, Brooks prefers the simple answers, and there is no answer simpler than, “We should get schools open again by making the teachers get back in those buildings.”But these are not the times for simple answers. Safety must be established and trust built, both for staff and families. tells us that white parents are far more interested in getting buildings open than Black or brown parents are, but that there is no overwhelming majority in favor of any available options.Safe solutions will vary greatly from school to school, community to community, building to building, each requiring its own difficult discussion. For writers to swoop in and declare, “it’s really simple” is neither helpful nor rooted in reality.Your article is the best I’ve read about the over simplified charge to get the kids back in schools.Brooks has been for a long time now a smug elitist , the epitome of the "ivory-tower academic" who believes he understands working-class issues from his privileged position. He is wrong, out-of-touch, and little more than an apologist for the unscrupulous rich. No one should take him seriously on any issues concerning working people, especially this one.Sign-up for our free weekly e-mail newsletter.Sign up for our free email newsletter!The Progressive Inc. publishes The Progressive magazine plus Progressive.org and Public Schools Advocate.© 2022 • The Progressive Inc. • 931 E. Main Street, Suite 10 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703 • (608) 257-4626Built with

Reopening schools safely during a pandemic is complicated. Some teachers, while worried about the possibility of disease and death, are eager to get back into their buildings. Others see no reason to do so right now.What should be a discussion informed by empathy and humanity is instead reduced to demonizing and over-simplified dramatization.Many parents, too, are reluctant to expose their children to a potentially unsafe environment. State governments have issued a flurry of often-inconsistent rules as they try to balance safety, the economy, and the desires of powerful...

Don’t Listen to David Brooks

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