Follow the science: Schools can reopen safely Dennis J. Ventry Jr., Monica Gandhi and Deborah Simon-Weisberg March 3, 2021 FacebookTwitterEmail Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders have unveiled another plan to prod public schools across California to reopen. It provides $2 billion to districts that resume in-person instruction by March 31, another $4.6 billion to address learning loss, and punishes districts that fail to reopen by the deadline. The plan is bound to fail. It will fail for the same reason other plans, perks, and persuasion have misfired over the last 12 months: It provides no money and no strategy to overcome the kind of false and unscientific thinking that closed schools a year ago. And because the plan avoids mandating the number of days and hours a school must open to receive new funds, it permits the forces peddling pseudoscience to scare administrators, teachers, and parents into embracing a hybrid model (part in-person, part remote) that would be even worse than what we have now.