Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns [Hardcover]

As someone who enjoyed her twelve years in the American public education system and believes that there is no higher calling than becoming a teacher (and does not work in education), I found this book to be fascinating - it challenged my long-held views about learning and teaching - and encouraging - which I was not expecting, given the current dismal state of so much of the American public education system. Yet Disrupting Class was a refreshing read and it has created a new discourse on a familiar topic: how to improve the American public education system.

Professor Christensen's theories of disruptive innovation are cogently explained for the unfamiliar and for those who need a refresher (like myself). The theories and their corresponding case studies are fascinating in and of themselves (think a cliff notes version of Christensen's previous books). The breadth of industries they cover creates a compelling argument to not only allow for but to encourage disruption in public education.

The authors' scholarship in innovation is evident; their prediction of when student-centric technologies (the disruptive innovation) will take hold is not conditional, rather, it is absolute: "by 2019, 50 percent of high school courses will be delivered online." I admired the authors for their willingness to walk the reader through the s-curves and logarithmic axes needed to reach this conclusion - to me, it was one of many instances in which the authors, an eclectic trio, bridge the often unnecessarily wide gap between the "business world" and the "education world." I was left wanting more detail about these "student-centric" technologies that would teach to Gardner's different intelligences but also appreciated that the authors kept to the bounds of their expertise and research.

America has struggled for years to improve public education from the top via government policy. Allowing for change from the bottom presents less risk and a lower cost of failure to the existing system. A solid understanding of Christensen's theories has brought great success to its adopters (and failure to those who have ignored it) in such a wide range of sectors that it seems almost irresponsible for anyone who cares about education to not read this book.

Disrupting Class doesn't have all the solutions, nor does it claim to. What this book does offer is a new framework within which to think about creating positive, lasting change on the type of scale needed to be meaningful and suggestions on how to realize this.

Read this book and learn the language of disruption and why simply buying more computers, aka "cramming" doesn't work. Be inspired by the work of companies such as Apex Learning, Florida Virtual School, and K12, and start your own dialogues about new student-centric technologies that will revolutionize the way the next generation learns.

"Disrupting Class" is a very interesting read for people interested in improving education here in the U.S. Dr. Christensen argues that the main problem with traditional schools is that they cannot provide individualized instruction that best meets each student's needs. As a home educator, I couldn't agree with him more. He sees computer-based learning as a "disruptive innovation" that will solve the problem of how to provide this type of "student-centric" learning to the masses (since not everyone can homeschool or hire a tutor for their offspring).

Dr. Christensen revisits the argument from his earlier book "The Innovator's Dilemma" that "disruptive innovations" don't initially compete directly against the current market leader's product but rather against nonconsumption. For example, in the '70's Digital had a very successful market for $200k minicomputers. Apple couldn't directly compete with DEC's minicomputers because their personal computers weren't good enough at the time to solve the problems that DEC's customers had. So Apple marketed its IIe PC as a relatively affordable toy for kids. Kids were nonconsumers so it didn't matter to them that the Apple wasn't as powerful as the existing DEC minicomputers. A few years down the road, however, improvements in PC technology rendered DEC's minicomputers obsolete.

Dr. Christensen argues that the traditional government-run education system will in the near future be "disrupted" by the innovation of computer-based learning. At first, online learning will compete against nonconsumption by offering classes in subjects where there isn't enough demand in any given school to justify offering a traditional course (such as a very advanced math one or an unusual foreign language). But eventually, He believes that the technology will improve such that computer-based learning will render the traditional model of education obsolete.

In "Disrupting Class", he postulates that demand for computer-based high school classes will follow an S-curve that will start to "flip" (significantly accelerate) in the year 2012. In the years between 2012 and 2018, Dr. Christensen projects that the share of online courses will grow from 5% to 50% of all high school courses. That timetable seems a bit ambitious to me personally, but I believe he's got the basic right idea about the growth in the demand for online classes.

The main problem I had with "Disrupting Class" is with the way it is written. It reads like a management consultant's report filled with buzzwords and jargon (not surprisingly Dr. Christensen used to work for BCG). It would've been much better had someone else gone through the authors' draft and re-written it in plain English. I found it very tiresome to have to stop constantly to figure out what exactly the authors actually meant by all their convoluted gobbledygook. Throwing buzzwords and jargon into nearly every sentence doesn't make the authors look smarter, just much less coherent!

The other thing I would've liked to have seen discussed in "Disrupting Class" is the question of whether or not it is good for children's brains for schooling to be mostly computer-based. Dr. Jane Healey wrote a very interesting book about a decade ago called "Failure to Connect" about some worrisome research findings on the negative impact of computer use on children. Has more recent research allayed or deepened those concerns? Before our society makes the shift predicted in "Disruptive Class", shouldn't we be examining this very important question?

Any prospective reader of this book should first read Hubbard's How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business (for that matter, Christensen would have written a better book if he read Hubbard, too). Christensen rightly disputes some academic measurements, but too quickly dismisses better methods.

Apart from what he could have done better on the measurement issue, he makes a passionate case for getting out of the rut education finds itself in. Some of the recommendations might strike a business person or educator as a little impractical, but I think there is an interesting opportunity in every solution he proposes. True, there is a large genre of books about the need for change in education, but few take this angle. No educator's library should be without it.

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