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Professor Christensen is the latest in a long line of Harvard professors who have borrowed or adapted ideas from other sectors in an effort to cure what ails America’s K-12 schools. Like Jim Collins, Michael Porter, and many others, Christensen believes that his theory of disruptive innovation not only holds true across industries and across sectors, but also that its principles are equally applicable to both the for-profit and the nonprofit sectors.
At the broadest conceptual level, the problem is that it’s hard to imagine a counter-factual that such theories cannot accommodate—clearly an advantage for their explanatory capacity, but hardly the stuff of genuinely predictive theories. My reading of the convoluted history of technological innovation makes me suspicious of the ease with which actual case studies “fit” the Christensen model. It all seems a little too neat.
More specifically, his disruptive innovation theory leads him to conclude that charter schools, magnet schools, and even private service providers are insufficiently disruptive to have much impact. But this basic insight has long been known, and has been well explored in a long line of informed scholarship. In any event, we can readily agree with Christensen that philanthropists should place their limited resources into more disruptive innovations than these variations of the existing status quo—all of which, of course, are still public schools. (We lack adequate measures to know whether private schools do any better.) For that reason, it is all the more surprising that Christensen does not underscore the paucity of good data and methods for evaluating the quality of K-12 schooling, which is an area where targeted philanthropic efforts might make an important and demonstrable difference. How, what, why, and when we measure are all equally important—and sadly neglected.
Christensen pins his hopes instead on computer-based learning (CBL), although not in the manner in which schools currently use computers. Again, this point has already been trenchantly made by others, often of quite different ideologies, some time ago. Christensen believes CBL can make significant inroads by starting at the margins, where customization is necessary but not deliverable by traditional teachers because of insufficient resources. These marginal disruptions, he believes, will over time accumulate, prove their worth, drive further innovations, and ultimately supplant the current system.
There is little evidence that public education would actually respond in this manner and quite a bit of historical evidence that it would not. (On this point, I recommend the research and writing of Lawrence Cremin, Robert Hampel, Ellen Lagemann, Joel Spring, and David Tyack). Besides, Christensen's view of CBL is quite limited, especially when compared with the vision of ubiquitous, mobile, immersive, round-the-clock learning environments being pursued by the Kauffman Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Grid Institute, Federation of American Scientists, and National Science Foundation. Christensen is certainly correct on the larger point: we need highly disruptive technologies in education. But it is unclear how Christensen’s proposed solution will actually achieve what we desire.
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