Michael Horn on Mathematics

On The Education Exchange podcast, Paul E. Peterson recently had on Michael Horn to talk about how schools and districts have responded to the emergency shift to online learning. He said that they have fallen on a range from “innovative” to “rotten” – "It's an unbelievable response to this monent in time."On the rotten side, the initial confusion around guidance around "can you serve all students if you can't serve all students" – (I believe that this was a problem in Pennsylvani, but I have to look futher into it) as well as the case of Oregon, which apparently declared that schools couldn't "transfer into a full-time virtual school" – ...again, I am not sure of the effect of this. On the "innovative" side of things he mentioned spot cases, like South Carolina "bringing buses around with Wi-Fi activity so students can get online." He also mentioned that a lot of high-quality providers – such as Zearn and ST Math and Khan Academy – have made great resources free to parents and school districts. "It's very hard to generalize right now."

Around the eight-minute mark, Horn also said that districts have to be preparing for a return to "normal" in which a "wide variety of exposure to the learning" and "significant loss of learning in some cases" and "highly unequal." How do you accommodate all of that? And also, is there a world in which this online learning can continue?

The most relevant for me, as it pertains to some of the client work I'm involved in, comes around the 9:30 mark, in which Horn talks about alignment with established grade-level learning standards. In terms of exposure to content, he raises questions around coherence of curriculum. At 10:30, Paul Peterson and Horn agree that they believe the most dramatically apparent place for learning loss could be mathematics, "where you sort of have a well-define curriculum and if you're not going to learn your fractions this year, then how are you going to learn your decimals next year."

Horn agreed that "mathematics is where we'll see..."

Math is the one place I might say, hey let's invest in putting in a really strong online resource for every single student to makes sure that they are able to progress in their mathemtics. Because that's really something that could fall off the cliff if we're not careful about it."
The Education Exchange: From “Innovative” to “Rotten”—Online Learning Amid Covid-19