Brooks: ‘Insane’ to Have ‘All-or-Nothing’ Approach and Force Schools to Reopen

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said that whether or not to reopen schools should be decided at the local level by people “who know what they’re talking about” and that while reopening schools can be done in some places, “having an all-or-nothing and forcing schools to do stuff” by floating the possibility of withholding their federal funding if they don’t reopen like President Trump has done “strikes me as insane.”

Brooks stated, “Donald Trump is out of touch. Opening the schools strikes me as the classic problem that should, A, be settled in some sort of subtle way by people who know what they’re talking about. And maybe, in some places, you can open the schools, and maybe you can’t. Politics is about competing goods. And competing goods are getting kids educated, getting parents some relief, and keeping them safe. And so, it should be possible in local areas, in New York, maybe, where the disease is not so good — or is not so high, to strike some sort of workable way to do this. But having an all-or-nothing and forcing schools to do stuff strikes me as insane.”

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