For someone who has made constructive disruption the hallmark of his career, it’s no wonder that Lexington author, Michael Horn, sees some upside to COVID-19’s effects on the country’s school systems.

“I mean, look, there’s obviously been a lot of devastation that came from [the pandemic],” he said in a recent interview. “We shouldn’t sugarcoat that.” But Horn believes that serious disruption of the sort that came about when schools were suddenly shuttered and school communities turned upside down, also created opportunity.

He writes about some of those possibilities in his latest book, From Reopen to Reinvent (Re)creating School for Every Child. Unlike some of his earlier works which are more academic in nature, Reopen is a blueprint for administrators, teachers and parents, offering practical steps toward a new way of instruction that measures results in terms of mastery and not the more traditional time-on-task. It is filled with examples of schools and communities where such an approach has worked well.