There’s an impatience when it comes to education reform and transformation.
In my experience, some foundations supporting reform will seemingly rethink their strategies every five years or so—well before they’ve had a chance to see whether their grantmaking is yielding dividends (see, for example, Ben Daley’s LinkedIn post about the investment into small schools for a sense of how this plays out).
As I’ve noted in recent years, the disruption we laid out in Disrupting Class didn’t unfold as we had hoped—because, to the extent we do see traditional age-based classrooms disrupted, that disruption is still occurring within the factory-model K–12 school system; in part because merely disrupting the curricular market from analog to digital content doesn’t necessarily change how learning occurs; and in part because system-wide disruption takes a long time.
Because many people took the wrong lessons from our book, system-wide disruption will arguably take even longer than it otherwise might have (and that’s assuming system-wide disruption is even possible in the US). That’s because following the prescription for disruption necessitates focusing outside the mainstream system in areas of nonconsumption (from homeschoolers to dropouts to students missing credits or not having access to a tutor and so on)—which, by definition, isn’t where the bulk of US students are today (nor were they when we wrote the book).
The approach we outlined then has at least two “drawbacks” from the perspective of those trying to change the system.
First, experts don’t feel like they are solving “the main problem.” And second, capital isn’t going to places where it can realize the quickest, biggest return because it’s not where most of the students and dollars are (a problem with current capital sources I’ve written about here).
I can’t tell you the number of conversations I’ve had with folks where I’ve said that focusing on, say, middle school math or English Language Arts is the wrong place to start if system transformation is their goal. As Clay Christensen warned in The Innovator’s Solution, one must be impatient for profit (or one could substitute the words “positive and sustainable impact”) but patient for growth.
To be fair, I get the impatience. Just look at the recent NAEP results, for example. As one of our big funders, when I was overseeing the education practice at the Christensen Institute, would often yell at me: “We don’t have time to waste. There are students who are receiving a subpar education right now!”
I agree, which is why we should pursue sustaining innovations to improve the existing system (continuous improvement) and explore potential disruptive innovations to the extent possible in the US (fueled, perhaps, by Education Savings Accounts—see here).
But we also need to understand the timelines under which we’re likely operating. Disruptive Innovation—even if possible—is not an overnight phenomenon. In many cases, it takes a long time. The rapid disruptions by the Apple iPhone of Blackberry and Nokia, or in the disk-drive industry in the 1980s, aren’t necessarily the norm.
The full disruption of sailing ships by steamships in the 1800s took roughly a century. The disruption of integrated steel mills by minimills took, depending upon how you count it, somewhere between 30 and 60 years. The disruption of cable-actuated mechanical shovels by hydraulic excavators took roughly 20 years. If we looked at RFID, transistors, automobiles, telecommunications, and more, we’d see something similar. These were shifts that took a generation.
As Scott Anthony points out in his just-published book Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations that Shaped Our Modern World, when “an innovation modularly layers into an existing infrastructure… adoption can be very fast. If an innovation requires a completely new infrastructure… it still takes decades” (this insight emerged from research that Horace Dediu did while at the Clayton Christensen Institute, which you can view here.)
The disruption of K–12 schooling—if it occurs—isn’t going to happen quickly because it requires a completely new infrastructure.
As I said on a Class Disrupted podcast about philanthropy in education, this is a big, complicated 50-state country with lots of competing interests and demands, messy and overlapping regulations, and a huge, fixed installed base.
If systemic disruption is to happen in the US, we’re likely looking at a play that will unfold over at least a couple of generations.
